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Sport | Baseball |
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Founded | 1994 |
Divisions | Great Lakes Division, Great Plains Division |
No. of teams | 26 |
Countries | United States, Canada |
Continent | North America |
Most recent champion(s) | Kalamazoo Growlers (2) (2024) |
Most titles | Rochester Honkers (5) |
Level on pyramid | Summer Collegiate |
Official website | northwoodsleague |
The Northwoods League is a collegiate summer baseball wooden bat league. All players in the league must have NCAA eligibility remaining in order to participate. The league is amateur, and players are not paid, so as to maintain their college eligibility. Graduated senior pitchers are also eligible to play in the Northwoods League. Each team may have four of these players at a time.
Teams play 70 games scheduled from Memorial Day to the 2nd Saturday in August, while the playoffs take place the week after, starting on that Sunday and ending usually on Friday. The season itself is broken into two halves, with the winners of each half in each of the four sub-divisions playing against each other to determine a sub-divisional champion in a best-of-three series. The sub-divisional champions then meet in a winner-take-all game to determine a divisional champion. The divisional champions then meet in a winner-take-all game for the league championship.
In 2020, some teams cancelled their season due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For those teams that did play, instead of playing within their usual divisions, they played in hub regions, with some creating "temporary teams".
In 2023, the Northwoods League announced plans to create a new softball league. The softball league will initially consist of four teams, based in Madison (Madison Night Mares) and La Crosse, Wisconsin (La Crosse Steam); Mankato, Minnesota (Mankato Habeneros); and Minot, North Dakota (Minot Honeybees).[1]