History
The British League Division Three had been created in 1994 as a replacement for the second-half junior leagues that were scrapped when British League matches were extended to eighteen heats. The league was renamed the British Academy League in 1995, but many of the teams that took part experienced severe financial problems. In order to reduce costs, the league was re-launched as the Conference league in 1996 and was an entirely amateur competition. The revamped competition proved to be successful, with several new teams joining and some tracks attracting crowds on par with the Premier League.
The league expanded to thirteen teams in 1997 and was renamed again to the British Amateur League. However, the 1997 season exposed a number of problems; some teams wished to include more established riders but others felt the focus should be on youth development. It was therefore decided by the BSPA that Elite League and Premier League teams could operate second teams in a separate youth competition known as the British Development League. The remaining teams formed a third division that had less restrictions on the use of riders and reverted the competition name to the Conference League.
Read more about this topic: Conference League
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!
There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.”
—Edmond De Goncourt (1822–1896)