@PABaseball posted:To this point - and going back to mine. I think if you're standing out on the 16u travel scene you're probably already a contributor to your HS team.
As you mentioned, 16u travel is harder than HS varsity (most of the time). If you're regularly going up against upper 80 arms or throwing to bats who can handle high 80s velocity, you would probably work the lesser talent in HS ball.
Odds are if a talented 16u travel player isn't playing varsity there is an older player/returning starter ahead of him or he's was not as physically mature as he needed to be when roster decisions were made. Or they just attend a HS baseball power.
Four of these players were in quality, large classification programs where a freshman was very unlikely to make varsity. The fifth, my son played for a rookie varsity coach in a large classification program. He didn’t believe in having freshman on varsity. He had been an assistant at a loaded program where it just didn’t happen.
All five players had chewed up JV ball as freshmen. They were varsity starters and all conference soph year. So, the projecting these 17u programs did recruiting them from 16u ball after their freshman year as fifteen year olds was accurate.