how important is High School Ball?

[sittingonabucket]

you guys are great. glad to see in California it's not much different than Texas. We always kind of think you guys in California must have your act together better than us.

She's a heck of a basketball player. I'm trying to get her to go that direction.


we're 18-1 this year, she's the star hitter and pitcher. as a freshman, you can imagine the stress she goes through with the upper classmen. Before anyone thinks we are good, we play the worse inner city teams you've ever seen. If I were honest on the errors, they could easily hit 25 or 30 a game. it's that bad.

I mean, we only have one loss and Maxpreps has us ranked about 190 in Texas, which is probably generous. that's how bad our competition is.

The jealousy is over the top. She has learned good leadership skills, but it's a grind. Plus I get worried about her body. as soon as the season is over, we start club.

and shouldn't you just be making friends in high school and having fun?

I guess my biggest concern is if we do this for 4 years AND club ball, she may burn out and not want to play at all. It's not the playing, it's just all the garbage around it. For instance, in our loan loss, she struck out 9 girls in one inning (9). that's 6 dropped thirds (oh, and our statistician doesn't understand a 3rd drop strike is a strikeout, she classifies it as a walk). That really doesn't bother her until the coach starts yelling at her to quit throwing it so hard. He doesn't understand she's not good enough to slow her pitch down and still hit her spots. He also forced her to apologize to the opposing team, in public, when the other team had a girl on first, she hit a triple, and both the first baseman and second baseman stood on the bags. She obviously pushed them off on her way by to third. At 6'1" and 185. parents started calling her a bully. They don't understand the rule of obstruction. Fortunately, the opposing coach came to her rescue and told our coach my daughter was in the right and his girls were in the wrong. He was very nice.

we keep every games stats in Maxpreps. we input them every night after the game. In variably, within 2 days, there is an anonymous complaint the stats aren't right and we are padding the numbers. Happens every week.

I have never seen anything this crazy.

it'll be over in 2 weeks. even though we will be 22-1 when the season is over, I suspect we'll loose the first playoff game. take 3 weeks off, then we have our first travel team tournament scheduled.

[FatSBDaddy]

The best player on our HS team is verbal'ed to an elite Div-1 school (based upon her play on an elite travel team.) She's decided to skip playing for HS this year to focus on grades. Her future D-1 university coaches have blessed her decision - they see no real benefit, in terms of softball skills, in playing HS ball. That should tell you everything. If the kid wants to do it based on school spirit, companionship of classmates, etc, then fine and good. If she prefers a brief rest from softball, or wants to shore up grades, SAT, etc., then it won't impact her recruiting at all. Only HS-enthusiastic parents and HS coaches care - not the colleges.

[sittingonabucket]

thank you FatSBDaddy.

that's kind of where I'm at. we'll get through this season and see where we are at the end of club season physically.

When I grew up in Texas in the 70's, there was actually a UIL rule where club players of a sport could not play on their High School Team. High School Teams were reserved for rec players only. That changed in the 80's.

I believe there was a certain amount of sanity to that rule.