On Wednesday, MyFantasyLeague.com announced the acquisition of fantasy football league-management site HomeGrownSports.com, a move that MFL owner Mike Hall said is part of a plan to add about 500 leagues to his site’s universe this year.

It was the latest in a series of purchases over the past couple of years that has sought to grow the customer base amid what Hall sees as a shrinking market of hosts.

“We’ve seen a lot of consolidation in the league management space, and we anticipate even more in the near future, so we hope to continue to be an active part of that,” he told FSB.com. “We’ve been actively pursuing other fantasy football league management companies for acquisition over the past couple of years. We’ll continue to seek out other smaller league management companies where possible.”

Home Grown Sports lived for 12 years, and Hall expects that about 90 percent of its existing leagues will be transitioned to the MFL platform. This conversion rate would be in line with what followed the 2008 acquisition of StatsWorld, which joined deals with MyFantasyFootball.com and RotoWire to deliver 1,500 leagues to MFL that year.

“It definitely adds to our customer base, which is admittedly our main goal with these acquisitions,” Hall said. “But we also feel strongly that we are filling a void for these customers that were otherwise going to have to find their own replacement service.”

Hall said his company had been working with Home Grown since March to transition the leagues. Visitors to the HomeGrownSports.com domain are now redirected to a MyFantasyLeague page with an open letter from Home Grown owner John Garber. In it, he explains that converted users will be able to renew their leagues in 2010 for $45 — the same price as their old site, $25 less than MFL’s earliest rate and half the price of the latest annual signup level. After 2010, leagues will presumably move to the regular MyFantasyLeague rates.

The biggest benefit for users who make the switch figures to be the transfer of full league history, an aspect that would generate some concern for folks who have been with a particular site for many years. Hall said this tends to be a key part of each acquisition and transition.

“Some customers have been with HomeGrownSports.com for 10 years, and we were able to keep their historical records for all of those past seasons since our system allows customers to track their complete league history all the way back to 1990,” he said

No financial terms have been released from what Hall said was a private transaction.

It might not be the ultimate measure of who can offer you the best fantasy advice, but with so many “experts” floating around the industry these days, it’s always interesting to see how they (or we) fare in direct competition. Share your “expert” league/contest results with us, and we just might pass them along to our readership.

These items (and others) can also be found on the FSB News page.

– What did your last victory in an “expert” league (or home league, for that matter) get you? Pride? Some online publicity? A little money? Well, Sara Holladay — better known as the FF Librarian — will be heading to the Super Bowl next month thanks to her win in the Buffalo Wild Wings Bloggers League.

– Jeff Thitoff of 411Fantasy.com has put the wraps on another season of the Experts Contest that be brought from his days with The Columbus Dispatch. The 2009 title went to Thitoff’s 411Fantasy colleague and fellow Dispatch veteran Adam Conn. Although you’ll find my name tied for second in the Week 17 rankings, you’ll have to scroll down farther in the full season edition to find me at 12th. (That’s no place to boast about, but I will at least say that I know of some prominent competitors who finished lower.) A lesser man might call shenanigans on a contest won by one of the hosts. Fortunately, I’m above that.

– The fantasy football draft that opened last June’s Fantasy Sports Trade Association summer conference filled three leagues, which were won by Fantazzle’s Ryan Parr, a RotoWorld team represented by Rick Wolf and lawyer Glenn Colton and Team RapidDraft, piloted by Yours Truly (with draft help from former colleague Caitlin Morrall). The most surprising note, however, has to be that none of the three championship squads sported Tennessee’s Chris Johnson.

As always, send all of your news, job postings, stories and profile ideas to FantasySportsBusiness@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter (FSBcom).

The Fantasy Sports Trade Association announced Thursday that MyFantasyLeague.com has signed on as lead sponsor for the summer conference.

The past couple of conferences have carried sponsors such as RotoExperts.com, SportsDataHub and Fantasy Sports Ventures — all relatively new to the industry at the time. The potential benefits to sponshorship are pretty readily apparent for a new site: Basically, you get the opportunity to announce yourself to a group of decision makers from fantasy companies of various sizes.

When a company has been around since 1994, however, and took home two industry awards from the FSTA’s most recent get-together, the motivation to sponsor might not be quite so apparent.

MyFantasyLeague.com owner Mike Hall sees no shortage of value in the sponsorship, though, as he told FSB.com this weekend.

“When it comes to marketing, we realize that it’s difficult for us to compete with the big media companies (CBS, ESPN, Yahoo, etc.) that provide league management. Sponsoring an industry conference like this hopefully gives us more credibility with others in the industry.

“We also plan to highlight some of our unique features and offerings in the league management space, such as our open developer’s API that allows third parties to interact with our leagues. As a case in point, that’s how we hooked up with Tony Holm from FantasySharks.com, who is now on our team. He wrote the Lineup Coach feature using our API to combine data from FantasySharks.com with custom data from each individual league on MyFantasyLeague.com, and our customers liked the results so much that we integrated the concept directly into our product. We’d love to make more of those types of connections and partnerships in the future, both to improve our product and to allow third parties to develop tools and applications around our leagues.

“Last but not least, we also want to support the FSTA and their efforts to support and grow the fantasy sports industry. We’ve enjoyed attending the conferences throughout the years, and we realize that sponsorships are needed to help make sure the conferences continue to be successful in the future.”

The FSTA conference will take place June 17-19 in Chicago.

(We also have the highlights from the recently announced conference agenda.)

Two brand new fantasy entities were among the four outfits to claim two Fantasy Sports Trade Association awards at this week’s winter business conference, joined by a pair of leaders in fantasy technology.

MyFantasyLeague.com pulled off a big win in the commissioner tool category, knocking off CBS for the first time in the seven-year history of the awards. The fantasy football league-hosting site added top honors in the print ad category to take home two trophies a year after getting shut out.

Mock Draft Central, on the other hand, matched its victory total of two from a year ago with a clean sweep of the draft tool categories. MDC repeated in the draft-style tool category and also won for best draft assistance tool. Those two might seem redundant, but the difference is pretty simple.

“The draft assistance tool is to help out individual players,” FSTA manager Justin Cleveland tells FSB.com. “The draft-style tool is meant for league managers to make the draft better and easier for everyone.”

The first-timers who claimed two titles were LeagueSafe.com and FLW Fantasy Fishing.

LeagueSafe.com is the brainchild of Fanball co-founder Paul Charchian and collects league fees in place of commissioners. That model won it the prizes for best innovation and specialty product/service.

The FLW game stormed onto the scene, gave away the first million-dollar fantasy prize and garnered plenty of attention in a sport that generally doesn’t. That helped win it the award for unique contest, while the ceremony at which FLW Outdoors announced its champion won best live event.

For all of the FSTA winners and finalists, click here.