I have been running a progressive league for for several years and multiple seasons now. Over the last while I have been finding it harder and harder to replace leaving owners. I feel that I am not the only one having this problem.

WIS, in general, seems to be losing more owners than it is gaining and leagues that require a level of commitment, like Progressives, are becoming difficult to fill (although I did also have to discontinue a long standing theme league for the same reasons). Even offering free teams did not help. The only way to keep my Prog going was to retract from 24 teams to 20. Now, maybe I was just recruiting at the wrong time, some of the big tourney's suck up a lot of players, or maybe it was the wrong time of year, as I believe WIS participation fluctuates with the seasons. But it seemed to me to be indicative of an ongoing malaise.

Anyway... ideally I would like to eventually expand my Prog again.

So, my question is... are we still in the doldrums? Has anyone noticed a pick up in new ownership, or has it gotten even worse?

The last couple of years it has definitely gotten harder to fill Leagues, even Theme Leagues, but especially progressives or multi-season leagues.
Everyone has their likes and dislikes. I won't play Open Leagues but play both Theme Leagues and Progressives. Some Progressives aren't normal Progressives but multi-season leagues that have unique rules. I run 2 multi-season leagues that aren't normal progressives and it can be difficult to replace owners in both of those leagues. Sometimes I have to pick up that team for a season or two or another owner in the league will do it as well.

If you scour the Open Leagues, you will find a lot of Owner names that are not the usual names found in Theme Leagues or Progressives. New owners coming onto the site play the open leagues and are hesitant to take the next step to Theme leagues or Progressives. I did the same thing. I started with open leagues and then gradually moved on to play the other types of leagues. I think new owners are not willing to make a long-term commitment to a league,much less this site until they have played open leagues for a while. We need to find a way to entice these newer owners to try the other types of leagues.

I play in 8 progressives and commish one of them (91 seasons). One thing we did when we couldn't recruit a new owner was to have a current owner take a second team. Placed one team in the AL and one in the NL. We don't allow the teams to trade with each other. Honestly hasn't caused any problems. In fact, I recently had an owner who had left for health reasons request to return. I asked the 3 owners with 2 teams if they wanted to give up one of their teams and they all declined.

It’s a bear. I’m in 3 progressives.

16 team- only season 4 so we still have 15 original owners, we had the spot fill quickly last month but I think I just got licky

20 teams- I just joined, they’ve been playing for 20+ seasons, I took a free to enter it, 5 guys have 2 teams

24 team- season 30 or so, 7 of us have 3 teams

Thank you for the responses.

IMHO, although Open Leagues are a good place to start, they are also full of sharks who have the SIM pretty well figured out. The lack of updates really drills in very specific ways to win and some owners use that take advantage of new owners in OL's. Which discourages new owners from sticking around long enough to try other kinds of leagues.

This might well be the bottleneck that keeps WIS from expanding.