2022 grad posted:Interesting how perspectives can differ. Last year my son was a freshman on the bubble during varsity tryouts. My wife and I were hoping he wouldnt make it be placed onto the JV team. JV team has a great coach and he would get more playing time. Last day of tryouts he got sent down to JV, coach told him to kick ass and come back stronger next year. He ended the season with the best BA, best ERA, and tons of confidence. It couldnt have turned out any better and he has had a fire under his butt all summer, weightlifting 3 time a week and hitting in the cages 5 days a week. Adversity often brings the best out of people.
I was going to offer my son's freshman experience, but I see 2022 grad already wrote about it! Seriously, this was almost identical to what happened with my son. The one difference being the coaching on my son's JV team was not very good. The coach was truly a high character guy and all of the boys loved playing for him, but he's the V football coach. He just didn't have much background in or knowledge of baseball. Is it better to have good coaching? Sure it is - we can all agree on that. But there is a silver lining in every situation if you look for it. My son has played on a pretty high level travel team, where he was a middle of the pack contributor. On this team he was a top player, and as a top player he was looked to by his teammates and by the coach to be a leader on the field, and he embraced that role. He became much more vocal in discussing situational scenarios with the defense and setting a positive tone. He was the player who said shake it off and get the next one when errors were made. He's had fantastic coaching before and it's been instrumental to his development. But he never learned as much about being a leader of a team as he did this year. IMO, that's just as important to his success as knowing his cutoff assignments. Oh, and those bubble players that went up to V - they didn't play much. All I'm saying is if you look at it from all angles I think your son is in a pretty good spot.