So to play at the Alliance Championship series you have to earn a bid via winning a qualifier. The open tourney held in TN was for teams that did not earn a bid, the national open series. The teams in Indiana all earned a bid for the national championship series.

At the National championship series they separate each team into a ‘region’ aka a pool. The region plays off in a double elim tourney format until you get a seeding, in this case 1-6. The top seeds go to Tier 1, 3 & 4 to tier 2, and 5 & 6 to tier three. Then it breaks into 3 separate double elimination tournaments. That is considered ‘super-regionals’ and then elite 8 and on to the best of 3 championship series.

Some of this was a rebellion again the meaningless pool play games in PGF with the blind draw. There are pros and cons to each. Alliance is modeled after college softball playoffs.

As far as the leagues, there are 9 total. Basically each head honcho runs a league for their area of the country. So the Midwest is predominately Heart of America Fastpitch League. You can play within your league or go to tournaments in other leagues/regions. You earn points based on how you do in your league, similar to college RPI. They use your ranking to determine seeding for tournaments. But that’s primarily in place for teams playing almost exclusively alliance as you can’t get too many points if you’re not playing many sanctioned tourneys. And those 9 member leagues form the ‘Alliance’.

I find it to be unnecessarily convoluted at times. But it does emphasize all your games counting. Which is good for competitiveness, and bad for keeping a large roster happy. Alliance has strong national level teams playing, but it’s hard to find alliance in Illinois as it’s a PGF stronghold. IPF and IMG both play alliance. But it means you’re traveling to Indianapolis, St. Louis, or Kansas City for Alliance tourneys.