High school sb

[Rick M]

It's not just an issue of school population size. My DD's HS has 2300+ students, which should be enough to supply plenty of talent. However, there are 6 experienced TB players who should be at the school, but have opted to go elsewhere. 3 of my DD's TB teammates go to private schools. 3 other players transferred to other schools in the league specifically to play with better softball programs. In more than a decade, my DD's school has not had a winning record even once.

Our school happens to be on the receiving end. Of the 25 TB players combined over Varsity & JV, nine are from outside the district’s geographic border. It makes for a strong program, but there are definitely disgruntled parents whose kids have played softball for years and then find themselves on the bench because talent from other towns keeps them out of the lineup.


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[LEsoftballdad]

A HS coach is at the mercy of how many good pitchers he/she has attending their school (unless they can recruit of course) and if they have a decent catcher. That will at least give them a chance of not being run-ruled every game. Doesn't matter if they have been coaching at the school for 100 years or 100 hours. Despite how good they are, they cannot turn water into wine..

I agree 100%, Pattar. I will test this theory today. My girls play at a local school today that hired a former 20-year D2 coach this winter. He's a really good coach who almost got a local D1 job last summer before being beaten out by an alumnus of the school. We have much worse coaches, but our pitching is head and shoulders above theirs. Will he make a difference? Possibly. It should be fun to watch.

 

[CoachJD]

One extreme example I saw on another message board is a private school in Chicago. Roster has 8 Beverly Bandits on it. They walk off the bus knowing it's likely a win.

And stuff like that happens because those schools literally pay families to go there (through supposed academic/need-based scholarships), but the IHSA really isn't capable of/interested in policing such things. The worst part is when good, but not Beverly Bandits good, players are lured into going to those schools and then don't even make Freshman/JV teams. These aren't the kids getting scholarships, just ones who are solid TB players who would be four-year varsity starters at most schools.

Or you get things like I just experienced in a different sport: People affiliated with schools try to get contact info of parents of students at other schools, then they get them to come to their camps, where it's even easier to recruit them (in Illinois, all athletic recruiting is against the rules) away from their current school.

 

[Eric F]

Our school happens to be on the receiving end. Of the 25 TB players combined over Varsity & JV, nine are from outside the district’s geographic border. It makes for a strong program, but there are definitely disgruntled parents whose kids have played softball for years and then find themselves on the bench because talent from other towns keeps them out of the lineup.


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I can understand that frustration, but a winning tradition will temper some bad attitudes.

 

[radness]

Some people have said (not in this thread) that having a long-term coach is a good way to build a strong program. I have seen too many counter-examples to agree with this.

A long-term coach with a program is often times people have to fit in with the program and people have more choices now.

As to the
the fluctuating h.s. coaches one or two years per high school...
may be influenced pending if the coach is also a travel ball coach who either attracts or deters who wants to play for them???
AKA: their reputation precedes them?!

 

[CoachJD]

So I get softball tweets that randomly come up under the Softball topic and one I saw yesterday was a player in TX who had a 4 HR game. So I ended up looking up her HS and found it in GC to see what the game looked like. The score was 22-0 and I guess it was called after 3 innings - her team also had 11 walks. This same team had several other blow outs. I know people have said that HS SB is just not the same level as TB but in my experience we have some really good HS teams out there. Teams rarely get blown out in our county or class. We will have teams get run ruled but I don't think I've seen anything like that score. We have players on top TB teams that we play against so it's always been fairly competitive.

Is it a state thing? Just curious why the big difference? Do a lot of TB girls not play HS? We play in the fall so it's weird to me seeing HS's playing now because this is our TB season. We have girls that play with teams out of state where they actually won't even get to play any tournaments until other girls are finished so I would think some girls want to play TB so they don't play HS?

Talent level is all over the place.

The first team we played this year won their first three games 18-7, 25-0, 23-1. We beat them 11-5, and we were missing our starting catcher and our best pitcher (who probably would've played SS that game if she was there). We then lost the next day 12-9 because we committed 10 errors. We won our third game 20-2.

School size doesn't always even matter. We're a small school (around 260 students in the HS). The team we beat 20-2 has 1200+ students. The school that beat us is a private school that's slightly smaller than we are.

There are very few travel players on most of the public school teams we face.

 

[marriard]

During the regular season, South Florida went to a system of 3 tiers which teams can move up and down in over a 2 year period using their record & rating via Maxpreps

So top tiers can't play lowest tiers anymore and the majority of their game have to be against other teams within their tier. It has 1000% reduced the number of 20-0 games (at least until playoffs when they go back to a Class/School Size system)

 

[Nimrod]

During the regular season, South Florida went to a system of 3 tiers which teams can move up and down in over a 2 year period using their record & rating via Maxpreps

So top tiers can't play lowest tiers anymore and the majority of their game have to be against other teams within their tier. It has 1000% reduced the number of 20-0 games (at least until playoffs when they go back to a Class/School Size system)

That's interesting. I would think that's tougher for softball because a team with the right pitcher can be great for a 2-year period, then collapse. But it's still a good idea for all sports, IMO. It's an attempt to rectify these mismatches that aren't 'educational' for anyone, and schools sports are supposed to teach us something. A local baseball coach was telling me that 3 teams in his conference are so bad that they schedule their home-and-away games against his team as double-headers at one site so they can get them over ASAP - Scores are like 16-1, 20-2 - both 3-inning run-rule games.

 

[KrisHur]

Talent level is all over the place where I am. On Monday DD's team run-ruled their opponents, on Wed they were run-ruled.

 

[flash277]

In general in 2022, in the sports of baseball and softball, how good a school is going to be is highly correlated with the average income of the households which make up the school more so than school size. Basically it has become what Lacrosse was when/where I was growing up (we only saw Lacrosse players when our baseball/basketball teams would travel up to Boston to play private schools) with the difference being the poorer schools just didn't bother to play Lacrosse.

DD's HS team just today beat a team like this 22-0, 5 inning mercy rule. The scored could of been double that but coach had players step off for last 6 outs. The school they played is low income where those kids can't afford travel (more than half the team didn't have their own bats or helmets). They got one hit and the pitcher was real bad, we only got 11 hits since the pitcher couldn't throw strikes, 24 walks and 4 HBP. It's like that around here, the lower income schools have bad or no softball. Even a low income HS with 4500 students can't field a competitive team, while DD s school with 700 students puts out competitive teams in just about every sport because it's a high income district.