Should DD change team?

Beeg, first, any comment I make here I would make if you were a dad or mom, green blue ... old or young, on the internet or to your face.

You dd is 8 turning 9. Are you positive she can walk up and play 12U when she is 9 turning 10? Be careful of those private instructors that tell you your dd is all that and a box of chocolate. A lot of them do so to keep your business. This 10U team that you are thinking about playing for that will move up next year will have tryouts next fall. What are you going to do when they find pitchers then? Remember, they will be able to have 2nd year 12U players tryout then. You mentioned that your dd is small. While that should not always matter, have you seen the difference between 9 year olds and 2nd year 12u girls?

Good luck with your choice.

If she really wants to be a pitcher then she has to pitch, even a 10u travel team shouldn't be walking home runs constantly. That said, be careful of moving up next year. 12U is quite a difference, the girls are huge and throw hard. Plus if she is a pitcher and that small, I might worry how she does with a 12inch ball. Maybe have her coach get used to it next spring. Good luck! Finally I wouldn't let your daughter choose at that age unless it's a total coin flip.

Beeg said:

Thanks and no thanks for your comment. It provides no value. I am on many different forums, and I post as the mom or dad depending on the forum. I wonder whether you'd say the same thing if I started by saying I am the dad.

Now I know what women have to go through being judged this way. Since this is a softball forum, I figure you have a daughter. I wonder how you feel if someone make this type of comments to her when she becomes a mother.

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TRUTH. Daddy coaches cause enough drama for everyone.

My DD is a 10U pitcher. She's good. I know I'm biased, but that much is true enough regardless. She's also tall for her age. I wouldn't put her in 12U early. The bigger ball and 5 extra feet is a big difference. If you're looking for circle and/or playing time, putting her on a team where she'll be younger and smaller than all the other girls is probably not the way to go. The advice I got here in the fall when I was with a coach who hoarded pitchers was to find a team where DD would be the #1 or #2. I followed that advice, and now I share it because it was 100% right. And ideally, find a team where head coach's DD does not pitch. There are certainly exceptions to that but it's really hard to gauge in advance.

My 2005 dd joined a 2004 team for their last year of 10u and then played her first 12u game a week after turning 10 in the fall. Ideally, we would have found a 2005 team but by the time we figured things out she had earned her place on the team and really likes the kids. In the summer it really hit us that the team would go 12u for the fall. She used a 12" ball, and 40', in practice a lot as her pitching coach was more used to older girls and was her way of overloading the kid. Still, there is a lot of angst going from throwing the 11" from 35' to throwing the big, fat 12" to kids that are ALL 1-2 years older, especially with just one year of pitching under her belt. DD is pretty average in size at 5' and 100 lean pounds, but years of gymnastics have definitely given her the physique of a, uh, gymnast.

If you go to the older team just be aware that they, as others have mentioned, will go 12u in the fall and what that means to a 10 year old pitcher. Or, she has to find a new team in the fall.

If you can make it through that first season of 12u your kid would have a huge leg up on the incoming pitchers her age, assuming she got the innings. DD has around 160 12u innings pitched from last fall and this year. This fall the 2003 teams went away, replaced by 2005's. It's like Christmas.

Beeg said:

Thanks again for everyone's replies. I am surprised by some of your comments. Just to clarify what my concerns are:

1) With 6 pitchers on the team, DD gets 5-7 minutes of pitching time every other game, meaning every other week. Even in the spring if the coach plays her a bit more, with 6 pitchers on the team, she may get an inning or 2 each game. (Knowing him, he will still rotate all the pitchers.) When I posted original, all we wanted was to see whether 6 pitchers is normal since this is the first time we experience 10U. With the 2nd team only having 3 pitchers, DD will get more pitching time. That would be the only reason we are considering the switch.

2) Since the coach lets struggling pitcher stay in the inning, it takes 30-40 minutes to finish an inning. I wanted to see if that's normal.

We have now experienced a few more games, and all the teams we've played against (about 8 now) have only 2 or 3 pitchers. Most will take out struggling pitchers.

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We have now played about 9 spring league games at 10u. We play triple-headers every Saturday. To date, we have pitched 8 different girls. In the spring league we have a 5 run limit per inning and the coach has yet to pull a girl in the middle of the inning. Some of our girls have given up 5 runs without getting any outs. The most any girl will pitch in a game is 2 innings. Our #1 and #2 pitcher have pitched 2 innings in two different games on the same day but the other pitchers have only pitched 1 or 2 innings in one game. The coaches goal at this stage is to see what he has, what he doesn't have and who needs work so when tournament season comes he knows who he can go to for circle time. Winning spring games isn't the coaches intention. The cream rises to the top, but at 10u, every kid wants to be a pitcher.