Elite Team Plans in B, C, D & Rec Tournament

[RetiredCoach]

What were the scores? There are lots of teams that state the goal of getting their players D1 scholarships. That doesn't necessarily mean much.

Fortunately, for this tournament there was a five run max per inning. The score ended up like 15-0. Their shortstop was the best that I have ever seen--truly amazing. Their pitcher was, really, no better than ours. In fact, our pitcher claimed that if she had their team play defense for her they wouldn't have scored ANY runs, which was probably pretty close to the truth.

What made it worse was that this was a new team without set positions. Our bunt defense was virtually non-existent and they took maximum advantage of it. This elite team clearly showed us our weaknesses and, maybe, we could thank them for that. However, we already knew this from playing the other legitimate "B" teams in the tournament.

 

[bucket pinata]

My DDs play on a "elite" Teams and about once a year we sign up for the usssa tourney which around here is equivalent to B,C,rec because we love to play and need to work on things. we always play up one age group at least. the teams we play never see our aces for more than an inning or two and we play different positions and try defensive shifts etc. We respect the other teams even cheer good plays and make sure they don't feel picked on. I understand the athletes themselves don't match up ability wise but I would hope the coaches take notes on things like base running, leading off, Team synergy, What team speed looks like and how to think one play ahead, and when the plays are actually over, and how to take advantage of snoozing defenses.. I'm pretty sure the teams we play are going to be better, smarter ,faster, more opportunistic after we play them and will be using what they learned when they play like competition. On trophy hunting maybe a mid level A team signing up to play B in a tourney that has an A division that case could be made but the true elite teams generally could care less about trophy's, Its all about state ,regionals nationals and its not about the trophy's there either.

 

[NVfishing]

We played an A team this weekend. Their 10th tourney and our first. We lost. We played the same group of girls two years ago and beat them. The difference this time is we lost 80% of our original players to other teams and their team hit better. My DD pitched very well and had both stands scream when she struck one of their better hitters out with a perfect change.

 

[Jojo]

but the true elite teams generally could care less about trophy's, Its all about state ,regionals nationals and its not about the trophy's there either.

By 16u if you're still hunting trophies you aren't doing your players any favors.
You need to be playing competition, if you can't find a a competitive tournament, stick to the round robin tournaments to work out kinks.
By 18u my DD's team did solely round robins to get games in, and if we played in a tournament where we went into a Sunday evening we just handed our place down to another team so we could go home, we didn't need trophies to boost our egos. We needed to know we could play good ball.