Where Your $65 Weekly Team Fee Goes

Money questions in a pool league tend to get answered late, in a parking lot, by whoever happens to know. This post answers the big one up front. A team pays a standard weekly fee of $65 per scheduled match, and exactly $40 of every $65 goes to the Player Prize Fund.

The fee in plain terms

The $65 is a team fee, not a per-person charge, and it comes due for each scheduled match. Teams pay in cash or digitally through their Division Rep. Nobody pays an annual membership fee to play in a USAPL division. Annual dues apply only in BCAPL and BCA/USAPL dual-sanctioned divisions, which is a different animal. If five players split a $65 fee evenly, that's $13 each a night, though teams sort out their own split.

Timing matters a little. When a team pays on the night of play and the Division Rep gets the money to the league operator within 24 hours, the team earns 100 bonus points. Points can also be bought back at $30 per 100, and that money goes entirely to the division prize fund or the franchise MVP fund.

One more practical note from the league's own prize-fund graphic: Venmo, Zelle and CashApp started charging transaction fees in July. Handing cash to your Division Rep is the simplest way to skip them.

Where the $40 goes

That $40 goes into the Player Prize Fund, which is held in the National Escrow Account. The bylaws describe prize funds as held in escrow, transparent and guaranteed. The other $25 of each fee isn't part of the prize fund.

The league publishes projected prize funds division by division, under a line that says players deserve to know where their money goes. Division 01-26 at Breakers Sky Lounge was projected at $23,960. Division 02-26 at Street Lights was projected at $8,005. Those are projections, and they depend on how many teams a division has and how many weeks they pay in.

Escrow, in general, means money set aside for a stated purpose and held apart from day-to-day spending. That's the idea behind the National Escrow Account here: the prize fund portion is not supposed to be mixed in with the cost of running a division. If you're a captain or a curious player, ask your Division Rep how your division's fund is tracking. The league publishes the graphics so the question has an answer.

A quick bit of arithmetic

Here's a made-up division to show how the $40 adds up. Ten teams paying $40 each week puts $400 a week into the fund, and over a 15-week session that's $6,000. Those numbers are an example, not a promise about any real division. Divisions run from 4 to 16 teams, so the real figure for yours depends on its size.

What the fund pays for

The bylaws say it plainly: the goal is to sponsor as many local teams and players as possible to the USAPL National Championship in Las Vegas, and the prize funds generated by the divisions pay for it.

The sponsorship caps are published. A sponsored national team can receive up to $6,825, made up of $6,000 for travel, $625 for entry and $200 for trophies, with travel figured at $750 per player. Do the division and $6,000 covers a full roster of eight at $750 each. A sponsored singles player can receive $925: $750 for travel, $150 for entry and $25 for a trophy.

Division Reps, who collect fees and keep a division running, earn $750 toward Nationals travel and play free once they've served at least two consecutive sessions in a year.

The other charges, so none of them surprise you

• Match score review: $40 per match, requested within two weeks.
• Match protest: $50 per match.
• Fargo review: $20 per player or $100 per team.
• Team playoff fee: one week of dues, $65, flat.
• Bonus point buy-back: $30 per 100 points.

Forfeits are scored rather than billed. A forfeited individual set counts as 125 to 0, or 200 to 0 in playoffs. If anything on this page is unclear for your own division, ask your Division Rep before the season starts, not after a protest.

The prize funds and Nationals page covers the sponsorship side in more detail, and a question about your own division's fund can go to info@dmvpool.com.