I actually play in the BCAPL, and I too am curious about this one day sanctioning. We have about 110 people in our in-house league and there are several that cant get sanctioned each year because of the 8 week rule, but would love to go to the tourneys. [...]
Sounds to me like your in-house league should become BCAPL sanctioned. You collect $15 from each player at the beginning of the year and pass it on to the national office. You almost certainly don't have to change anything about your format or dues or anything else. Problem solved.
We have 50 in-house teams at Fargo Billiards in three divisions. Every team/every player is BCAPL sanctioned. It's part of first night dues. Been doing it like this for five years. Nobody complains and the number of teams has grown every year for five years.
I don't understand what is going on in Wisconsin, but I know there has been stuff going on the last couple years. If, as I suspect, it is a local organization cropping up that says hey don't sanction nationally--join with us instead--we'll keep more money locally-- then I say say that organization is picking the low-lying fruit when it comes to supporting pool.
That argument sounds attractive, but it's divisive. It is bad for pool. We, as people who care about pool, need to go in the other direction; we need to encourage more people, more in-house leagues, more local organizations to sanction nationally. Yes, I see that if we had a weak or unscrupulous or mismanaged national organization, then things would be more complicated. But we don't
CSI/BCAPL is a well managed forward-thinking organization that has been at the wave crest of almost everything good that's happened in pool in the last decade. There is every reason to believe that if this organization had more resources, pool would be the winner.
So yes there is goofiness I don't understand going on in Wisconsin right now. I hope this all gets worked out. The LAST thing we need is to become more insular, to narrow our thinking to our region, our individual leagues, ourselves.