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Reply to "Middle School Baseball"

In central VA, some counties have middle school teams, others don't.

Those that do run grades 6-8 but you hardly ever see a 6th grader on a team. They play high school dimensions and rules. The games are generally pretty sloppy and high scoring.

In the counties that don't have MS teams, travel teams will play weekends in the spring as well as a summer schedule and fall weekends. IMHO this is a much better training ground, for a lot of reasons. One is that players can gravitate to teams with other players and opponents of their own ability level, so that they can develop at their own pace. This is pretty important given the significant differences in speed of development from one boy to another.

The other thing is that while there are always travel ball horror stories and "daddy ball", the fact is that there are many travel coaches who are much more knowledgeable than the MS coaches, and by seeking out the better coaches you can get a better learning experience than you could by just taking whatever guy the school threw at you.

In our county, there are no MS teams and also no freshman teams, but 8th graders can try out for the HS JV team (8th-10th graders eligible). Because most of the best 10th graders, and even a few top 9th graders, make the varsity squads, 8th graders can and often do compete quite well at the JV level. My son's class had 5 8th graders make the JV team and 3 of them worked into the starting lineup by the 4th game of the year. In fact they hit 3-4-5 in the order, and we went 11-2 from the time we made that lineup change through the end of the season!

I guess it's always fun to wear the school colors, but in hindsight I'm glad we didn't have a MS team. Travel ball leading into the HS JV team worked out much better for us than the MS teams did for the kids in the next county over.
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