Just looking for some guidance from the wealth of knowledge this place contains. My now 16U son is looking for a good fit for his 17U summer season. Some background is needed here. He played Rec ball with his less baseball inclined twin through 13U when his twin pursued football exclusively. We were late in the game for investigating his 14U team, but accepted an offer with a middling team w/a great coach. We decided to tryout for a few higher level teams for his 15U season and were offered a spot with what we thought would be a highly competitive (had the name Rawlings Showcase in their title), but turned out to be middling at best with VERY poor coaching. My son's season actually shutdown early due to a lingering shoulder injury (turned out to be a SLAP tear, he's 7 mos post-op now and doing GREAT!). Due to the shoulder injury and my son's future being up in the air, we could not tryout for any 16U teams. Fortunately his 14U coach referred us to a friend of his who was starting a new 16U team and we accepted a spot. The coach is an incredible guy and accepted my son knowing he may be very limited, but would have my son coaching 1st base if nothing else. As I mentioned, my son's recovery has gone VERY well, he has been a DH/EH all season and two weeks ago got some time at first base. He will likely play OF his last two tournaments of the season which is his love. We have already been offered a position with next year's team, but in all honesty this team is not playing in the tournaments my son wants to be competing in, so we are looking at options with tryouts coming up very quickly. My son's stats are: 6'2", 185# with a lot more strength and filling out yet to go. His stats measured almost 1.5 years ago were: 60 time - 7.4, EV - 84, Position Vel - 79 At this point, my son if finished with pitching and focusing solely on the OF as positon player. He was a pretty solid pitcher, which I know gave him some solid value for a summer team.
Some of my questions are: Since we are going blindly into the coming tryouts, how can we have any clue if the team we are looking at even has a need for an outfielder? I'd like to not waste time or money trying out for a team that isn't looking for an outfielder. Also, how should we communicate to the coaches at the tryout that my son is 7-8 months post op and that his throwing velocity will likely improve quite a bit before next summer.
My son's goal is to play in college, so finding a 17U team that can help him be seen is important to us. Thanks in advance for any guidance provided. Just in case, we are in the Indianapolis area if anyone has teams they would recommend we look into.