Overall, I'd say opening night came across very well. I know it was chaos in the preceedingweeks and even hours, this was not at all evident to me, other than very minor issues. The biggest, and most confusing, was the idea that our tickets were to be scanned at the ticket window, rather than the gate. I'm sure I'm not the only one who didn't stop at the ticket window, since I already had a ticket, then wondered why no one wanted to scan the ticket at the gate. (Paul said this will change to scanning at the gate at some future time.) The minor ones were the VIP seats had hand-written numbers which will probably wash away during the season, and the game itself started a little late. So credit goes to Paul and all those who helped, including my friend Amanda who works at the school - they did a great job getting everything ready for opening night.

As you know, the Glory are playing at Westfield HS this season. The school had already upgraded their seating since they were hosting the States this year. The Glory had even more seating put in for their season.

There are 4 separate grandstands. The VIP seating, with fold-down seats, sit between home and first or third. These are raised enough to see over the above-ground dugouts, and they are behind the dugouts, maybe 20 feet back from the fence along the baselines. Height-wise, they are above the fence line, so foul balls can enter the area. But because of the location along the line, more than half of the seats have sightlines through the backstop.

The General Admission grandstands are on the outfield side of each dugout, but still not too far from home plate. There are also right up against the fence, and lower to the ground, so they are much closer to the field. I would go so far as to say that a good chunk of the the first few rows of general admission are better seats than many of the VIP seats. I may try to sit there at some point to test this theory.

At GMU, both VIP and GA were all the same grandstand. With 4 different ones, significantly spread out, the atmosphere is completely different. At least on opening night, there was also much less player interaction. I can recall only one instance of this, and that was in the home GA seats. The dugout exit is right next to the GA entrance, while it's a good distance from there to the VIP entrance, so I'm not sure this can change anyway.

During the between-inning on-field fan activities, it was very tough to even see what was going on from my seats. Also, we have zero view of the players in the home dugout, so we couldn't tell if any dancing was occurring during the songs they danced to last year. The first few rows of GA can see right into our dugout. We had a great view of the opponent dugout on the other side of the field, but this was worthless as no other teams are nearly as entertaining as our ladies.

Because of the spread out seating, it is tough to get a feel for attendance, but opening night seemed definitely less than last year's opener. The box score shows attendance in the 600's, while I think we had around 900 last year. I also noticed many fewer kids at the game, and this was especially true in our section. I saw very few teams in uniforms, and there was no team that took the field with the Glory during the anthem either.

All these things combined, the atmosphere was very different than last year. It felt more like a normal baseball or softball game, much less intimate than we had at GMU. This is based solely on opening night, and change always takes some getting used to, so we'll see how things go during the season. Plus, this is temporary anyway, since we'll be back at GMU next season.