quote:If your not playing much make sure your in a situation where you are in the summer.
I think Coach May said to find a travel team where you can get playing time.
The travel team I ran through 14u played at a fairly high, but not the highest level of competition by any means and we tried to keep the number of players such that everyone got plenty of playing time. Sometimes that resulted in scrambling to find enough players for a given tournament and having to play some kids out of position but that was preferable to having players sit any more than necessary.
We tried to get the best players we could but the one time we got a player (who left the pay to play team he was on after some parents took it over to get out of paying) who belonged at a higher level of competition than we were playing at we said we'd be happy to have him play with us and although he would have helped us be more competitive in the open tournaments we suggested that he would have no problem finding a stronger team than ours to play on. They found a stronger team for him and it worked for him and it worked for the kids we had quite a few of whom are playing in college now. The kid who we "turned down" was a first rounder in the most recent draft. We did end up picking up another kid who wasn't quite as talented from that pay to play team and ended up beating them in the semi's of our last tournament.
There are a lot of levels of travel teams and if a player wanted to sit on a high level team rather than play against a bit weaker competition that's their choice but not one I'd recommend.
Probably the most interesting thing was one parent who was absolutely honest with us that their kid was going to play on another team because they had a professional ballplayer coaching it and figured he'd get better competition. The parent said he hoped his son could still play with us when we needed him but understood that the regulars would get priority for playing time. Another parent in the exact same situation tried to hide what was happening from us so that her son would be the starter whenever he "deigned" to play with us. Why was it the exact same situation? Because it was only one player and the dad was telling us straight while the mom was lying to us about why the kid wasn't playing with us in some tournaments.