Sponsors League - Wednesday nights at 6:30pm at Moonah during the 1980's and early to mid 90's was my all-time favourite.
Fantastic league back in those days, the level of competition was absolutely amazing.
It started in 1963 and really caught on during the late 1970's to have 24 x 5-person teams by then, it still had 22 x 5 as late as 1992, but slowly started dropping in number after that but still had around 16 or 17 teams as late as 1997/98, it was still the biggest league in the State at that stage.
Had a magnificent atmosphere, big crowds watching and all the city's best players played in it which really spurred me on to join when I was about 14 or something.
The League started to become blighted through politics and petty bickering in the late 90's and that kinda got a lot of players offside and when the players started wanting more money for prizefunds during the late 90's there was an exodus of players to Centre League, at the end of 1999 AMF management decided to drop the 5-man team format back to 4's in order to get the later league on earlier to free up the lanes for cosmic bowling.
And that pretty much killed it. It just wasn't the same anymore.
It was only about a month or so later that more than half the league had left to either join Centre League or had quit altogether and a meeting was held to discuss whether to fold it or keep going.
It still exists today but isn't a patch on what it was as other leagues' have grown bigger and with stronger competition.
Only Centre League during the early to mid 2000's rivalled what Sponsors used to be like, but ironically that also went downhill in the end through politics.
I count myself lucky that I was able to play in it during its strongest period and being the first righty in 39 years to shoot 300 in it (the only other one at the time was by lefty Paul Lucock) was something I'll always look back on happily.
Great days
