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My experience as an NSA umpire was...unusual.
All I had to do was pay the $35 annual dues, buy a shirt and hat and- bada bing, bada boom!- I was in. No meetings, zero training and I'm working my first NSA tournament.
Several of the "senior" partners I worked with seemed to make up their own mechanics that didn't follow any sort of standard. I mean, they were nice guys and all, but you wouldn't know who might be covering what from one game to the next.
I work my first couple of pool games and the TD and UIC stop by the field to watch "the new guy". They must have liked what they saw, because I got invited back the next day and even got put on the 16U championship game. Didn't have any problems with that and got positive feedback from the assigner.
I'm figuring that I might stick with NSA awhile, at least for those rare weekends where ASA doesn't have anything going on around here. But even after the positive feedback, the guy that scheduled their umpires called me back exactly one time the entire summer!
I worked a couple of games for them the next year, with the same good results and feedback, and that was all that was offered to me- a couple of games. It hardly seemed worth the effort to maintain my registration and I decided to focus on ASA after that.
Starting out my first year with ASA, I was asked to work tournaments every weekend from mid-May through mid-August, with the exception of one tourney that had a really small number of teams/games and one weekend that ASA didn't have anything scheduled in my area (I went and worked independent men's fastpitch tournaments for a buddy of mine those weekends).
NSA did seem to gaining a foothold in girl's fastpitch in Ohio, until a couple of fiascos at big tournaments involving rainy weekends, team refunds, poor field maintenance and national qualifying spots being determined by coin flips. These resulted in a lot of ticked off customers and a bit of an exodus away from NSA the following year.
Locally, they have a huge presense in slow pitch. Back a few years ago they came in and underbid ASA by a few bucks to sanction and run all of he city sponsored slow pitch leagues, covering, about 2500 total games each summer and fall.
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