KITCHENER — After an abysmal 1-15 start to their season, one of the oldest teams in the Intercounty Baseball League is calling it quits and looking for a new owner.

The Guelph Royals, which co-founded the IBL in 1919 along with the Kitchener Panthers and two other teams, have been battling poor attendance, vanishing sponsors and an exodus of players while owner Jim Rooney tries to sell the team.

This week, those pressures became too much, and the club announced it was taking a "leave of absence" for the rest of the season. With debts piling up, there was a risk the not-for-profit franchise wouldn't be able to pay its bills or even be able to field a team.

"It's probably one of the most difficult decisions I've ever made," Rooney said.

"Obviously we're not reaching any goals. The on-field performance has not been what we hoped for, and that affects recruiting. People want to play for winners, they don't want to play for teams that aren't doing well."

Rooney, who started looking for a buyer after two heart surgeries last year, says his own health demanded he step away from the Royals, a team he's owned for eight years.

"The stress is not helping, and I have to be accountable to my family," he said.

League commissioner John Kastner said he was "disappointed and disheartened" by the decision, but hopeful the Royals will return to the IBL in 2018 under new ownership.

"It's wildly disruptive for the league, but I'm convinced it's the right thing to do," he said. "The situation was not going to get markedly better. I think there was the potential for it to get worse, and a situation where people showed up at the park, and you had forfeits."

Kastner and the other league's seven remaining owners now need to figure out how to rearrange the IBL playoff structure, standings and disbursement of Royals players who might want to play elsewhere.

The move leaves the Panthers as the only remaining founding team of the IBL.

"I'm not glad the franchise went down, but I'm happy for Jim that he got this weight off his shoulders. I knew this has been weighing on him heavily," said Bill Pegg, the Panthers president. "No team is worth jeopardizing your health for."

Pegg said he hopes the Royals can come back, and renew what was once a fierce rivalry for two clubs just a short drive apart on Highway 7. Guelph is a "good baseball town," with a picturesque stadium and should be able to support a team, he said.

The Royals were done in because they couldn't compete against the top teams in the league and their imported players, Rooney said. Things only got worse on Monday, when Guelph's best pitcher, Matt Vucovich, left for a pro contract in another league.

"There's no competitive balance in the IBL. The top-level teams, their imports are dominant, and it affects the game," Rooney said.

"It's a serious issue the league needs to address, and it's not fair to players or fans or sponsors … If you can't compete at the level you need to, it's not fun for anybody."

Rooney, who said the Royals' annual budget of around $50,000 is about a quarter of some of the league's top teams, suggests limiting the number of imports, instituting a draft or affiliations with elite development teams to help the IBL's bottom-dwelling teams.

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It's been a difficult few years for the Royals, who took a one-year hiatus from the league in 2011. Last year, they finished 7-29. The year before that, they were 4-32.

Rooney says he wants to see the Royals stay in Guelph. He turned down an offer to sell the team six years ago that would have moved it, and is hopeful a new ownership group, or even a corporate saviour looking for a charitable venture, will step forward.

"It's now the challenge to the people in the city to say, if you want this original member of the IBL to be part of the next century, here's your chance," Rooney said. "The ball is in your court."