I'm not positive, but I don't think it's legal to change a league's by-laws in the middle of a season. Especially since changes require 2/3 of the captains to agree. Seems like you have many teams, for whom a change to this vacancy rule is not beneficial.

When scoring is difficult, that 213 (out of a possible 220) can be pretty valuable. From the sound of your situation, this is what is happening. That vacancy is causing more than 50% of those teams to win a lot of points.

Some of those teams could join together and produce 4 full teams or at least 3 with only 2 needing vacancy scores.

Some rule changes you might consider for next year:
1. Make the vacancy score less inviting. One of my leagues used a 120 score plus the handicap.
2. Only allow teams to use a vacancy for xx number of weeks. If there's more than one vacancy team, they must merge in some fashion. Or some similar rule.

There are legitimate reasons to need a sub, like mine below. But it has to made unattractive in the long run.

My team had to use a vacancy score last year because one of my teammates died on Thanksgiving. It took us 8 weeks to find a sub who wanted to pay and bowl. Then he was injured for 2 more months and we had to use a sub. We had to pay for the sub and this whole mess cost us a lot of money. We would have been better off dissolving the team and just subbing ourselves..

Some of those teams could join together and produce 4 full teams or at least 3 with only 2 needing vacancy scores.

charlest,that was one of the first things I suggested to him,and he stated that none of those teams want to do that.Short of having my team quit,(or threaten to quit the league) do you or any others have an idea on how to handle this situation. Your giving a distinct advantage to the teams having a vacant bowler.

As for the prizelist it would be based on 14 full teams. The teams with the vacancies would then have any monies owed deducted from their winnings, at the end of the season if they didn't fill in the missing.

It shouldn't effect the prize money for the other teams.

what about the rule about being two weeks behind on lineage and forfitting points?  would this not apply here??

what about the rule about being two weeks behind on lineage and forfitting points?  would this not apply here??

I don't think so. Vacancy means there's no roster entry. You don't pay the lineage fee and the prize fee. This allows the league not to owe the house the fee for those 3 games. When you use a substitute, you owe lineage and prize find fees: the league fees for that position. Substitute means you have a person in that roster position and you are bowling for him/her.  Then the team owes. In this case there are only 2 team members in a 3 person league. When those 2 people pay, the team is paid up to date.

cannot do much this year. But when we where having trouble with vacancy we change the way vacancy score was used. What we did was used 150 to set the hdcp for the vacancy then minus 10 pin from 150. they would used 140 but got the hdcp for 150.

If you want a optional vacancy score. The big men's league here use's a  0 vacancy score with handicap

Example:
Vacancy score = 0
Hdcp is 198

Hdcp is 90% of 220
220 - 0 = 220 X 90% = 198 hdcp