League Founding

Around 2009, a father and son kicked around an idea - why not try out this online fantasy football deal that's become so popular? Dad had been playing in pick 'em pools for years and knew fantasy football as an activity taken on by stats nerds who pored over newspaper box scores, but with a son acutely aware of the rise of digitalization and Web 2.0, and both seeing the rapidly growing popularity of online fantasy sports, they jumped in together as co-owners and spent a season managing a team between them, finding it both a great bonding experience as a shared activity as well as a rewarding one after decent success. Shortly thereafter, they both decided to strike out on their own with separate teams. Son Will began organizing casual leagues between friends, hopping in to public leagues across various platforms, and exploring a wide variety of custom rulesets. After a few seasons playing out in the wild, dad Kirk reached out to Ray, who was running the questionably legal pick 'em pool he'd participated in for years, only to find out that Ray also ran a small fantasy football league on the side - a group known as the Nerve Center.

Kirk relished the competition present in the Nerve Center - everyone knew at least someone else in the league, there was plenty of trash talk, and every week, the commish Ray would send out a recap of the games with plenty of his own commentary like a hacky, homer color analyst on a local radio station. There was, of course, money involved - not enough to hurt if you lost it, but enough to make you feel like you had invested something in your success. Meanwhile, Will continued to explore the dark corners of fantasy sports - playing in 16-team leagues, 2QB and superflex leagues before those terms became common parlance, IDP leagues, and branching off into fantasy hockey and fantasy NASCAR.

Several years down the line, Kirk and Will cooked up another hair-brained sports idea...their local sports-talk radio station was borderline unlistenable most of the time, and they knew they could do better. 5 or so years before the big podcasting boom, they were a little early to the game, but all the same they set about to create a sports podcast with two goals - make something better than what WFAN broadcast at 3PM on a Thursday, and make it relevant to them. While that experiment ultimately fizzled out, it showed them that sports were still fun and were nothing more than what you made from them, and that it was possible to carve out your own niche and to take pride in creating something you cared about. 

Around the same time, as Kirk was entering his 4th season as an owner in Nerve Center, the league began to lose some steam, and with Dad's permission, Will was recruited as an owner to his first money league to help keep the numbers up. The following season, Kirk was asked to step in as commish, with Ray remaining on only as an owner and to send out the weekly emails discussing the league news. Ray steadily and quickly became less involved through no fault of his own due to personal matters, while Kirk wasn't given complete authority as commish to run the league to its full extent, and by the end of the season, the league collectively decided to disband, as it had no clear leader or direction. Kirk and Will started to kick around the same old idea as before - they knew they could do just as good or better, so why not give it a try for themselves?

Thus, the groundwork was laid for what would become the NHL. Kirk would organize the league, handle the money, and recruit players, while Will would serve as nothing more than tech support, for lack of a better term - getting all the web stuff up and running, and making sure everyone was in the loop on communications. The league would value hard work and determination, but would also carry over some of the same ethos from Nerve Center - trash talk would be highly encouraged, active owner participation would be required, and gentle mockery of failure would be both commonplace and public. The weekly recaps would continue, as well, as it's something that they felt made the league stand out. As the planning went on, however, something started to happen - Kirk and Will wanted to put their own kitschy spin on things in addition to just running a custom set of rules, so why not "brand" the league under a tongue-in-cheek theme and mock the sports journalism world that takes itself all too seriously? After some workshopping (some evidence of which can be seen down below), several themes were planned and rejected before the general idea was eventually established.

The National Holley League would not be a democracy, but instead ruled with an iron fist by the co-commissioners. While everyone would have a personal connection with at least one other league member, the more people in the league that knew each other personally, the better. Failure would now be mocked to a higher degree, and the whole operation, while being run behind the scenes as tightly as possible, would be passed off as a duct-tape-and-ziptied hodgepodge of seat-of-the-pants decisions. Neither wanted to be held responsible for making unpopular decisions, so a scapegoat was created in the form of an unseen but often heard-from leader who was ostensibly the one "true" commissioner, with Kirk and Will as his lackeys merely enforcing the edicts from the "league office". This lead to two things - the appointment of the fictional Roger Stern-Bettman as the "commissioner" of the league; and establishing feature creep as a foundational quality of the organization. The theming was key, as well, so after much debate, a rural Canadian mockumentary presentation was settled on - a vague blend of Trailer Park Boys meets the National Hockey League circa 1980. Thusly, the divisions were given odd names related to people instead of locations, and the league was styled after the golden era of pro hockey as a jumping-off point.

Perhaps foolishly, Kirk and Will poured most of their focus onto the weekly recaps as opposed to actually making the league run smoothly, and much like scapegoating their administrative decisions onto a fictional commissioner, the character of Atom Shuffler (who you can read more about here) was invented both as a take on Adam Schefter, and as a further tool to reinforce the character of the league. With the creation of the league's awards program to recognize superlatives and provide additional non-monetary incentives to the owners to either perform well for recognition, or poorly for notoriety, the general basis of the league had taken shape and began to grow over time. 

Today, the National Holley League continues to strive to meet or exceed the goals initially set out in its infancy - poke fun at the established sports media cadre, provide a fun outlet for friends and family to exercise their competitive muscles for pocket money and bragging rights, give Kirk and Will a pretend world to live out their dictator fantasies from time to time, and serve as a creative outlet that continues to slowly eat away at everyone's free time until it becomes the most important hobby in the participants' lives.

Historical Documentation