Oct 28, 2024 By Chris Dugan 3 min read

The Frontier League released its schedule for 2025 – its first season with 18 teams and four divisions – on Monday along with a revised playoff format.

There will be four divisions and two conferences with each of the 18 teams playing a 96-game schedule. The Wild Things will play in the Midwest Conference and the four-team Central Division, along with Florence, Evansville and Lake Erie. The other teams in the Western Conference will be Gateway, Joliet, Schaumburg, Windy City and Mississippi Mud Monsters, one of the league’s two new teams.

The regular season will begin Thursday, May 8 with five games and run through Aug. 31. The Wild Things’ season opener will be Friday, May 9 at Windy City.

Washington will play its home opener Tuesday, May 13 against the Ottawa Titans. The Wild Things will play nine of their first 12 games on the road as the schedule is backloaded with home games. Washington will play 16 home contests in August compared to 12 home games in both June and July.

The schedule includes a few quirks for the Wild Things. They will play home games June 24 and 25 against Lake Erie and then play the final game of the three-game series in Avon, Ohio. That will be the first stop on a 10-game road trip that will take the Wild Things to Schaumburg, Gateway and Mississippi.

Washington also will play a Friday night home game Aug. 1 against Lake Erie followed by the final two games of the series in Avon, Ohio.

The Wild Things will play four series against teams from the Atlantic Conference. Washington will host Ottawa and New Jersey (July 29-31) and make its lone trip to Canada to play Trios-Rivieres (Aug. 12-14) and defending league champion Quebec (Aug. 15-17). The Wild Things will play at the Atlantic Conference’s Sussex County Miners (July 18-20) in the first series after the all-star break.

Washington will not play Atlantic Conference members New York, Tri-City and New England.

Mississippi and the Down East Bird Dogs (Kinston, N.C.) – the league’s two new teams – each will play at Wild Things Park but not until the final two home series of the year. Mississippi will be in Washington for a weekend series Aug. 22-24, and the following weekend Down East concludes the regular season against the Wild Things.

Because the league is switching to four divisions, the playoff format has been altered. Eight teams will qualify for the postseason in 2025, two more than this past season. Each division champion will receive an automatic spot in the playoffs. In each conference, there will be two wild cards, which will be the two best remaining records. The wild cards can be from the same division.

The division winners and wild-card teams will play best-of-3 series in the opening round of the playoffs. Byes have been eliminated. The conference finals will be best-of-5 and the league championship series will remain a best-of-5 series.