cabbagedad posted:We encourage our players to play. If they can play with a good TB org, great. Babe Ruth, great. Our summer program, great. Just play. Generally, the better the competition, the better for the player and the HS team. I think that is the general logic we all agree on here. There is a balance, though. We are able to field a summer team pretty much every year but there are several schools in our area trying to provide (and pressured to provide) this option and trying to set up schedules with other schools in advance only to find out later that too many players will not be available. Then the program for that summer has to be dropped. This leaves other players and other schools who are scheduled to play them SOL. And, it is a very short window.
So, what I'm saying is that the reason some of these coaches are requiring participation may be because they need reasonable commitment to provide a summer program and to fulfill schedule obligations so that they can perpetuate that program for many of their players who don't have TB options for a variety of reasons.
I really see both sides of this equation too. Just last night, our HS coach had to make the difficult to decision to drop from having two summer teams (a JV level and a varsity level) to a single team because a bunch of kids decided at the last minute not to play. The summer season starts next week.
I'm sure our coach would love to opt out of fielding a summer team all together, but that leaves about 18 kids with no where to play. These are not the type of kids who will play TB (either they/their parents aren't interested/cant afford it or they aren't at a high enough playing level to make a competitive team), but it's bad for the HS program for them to not play all summer. That left our coach scrambling last night to find a team for 5 of our varsity level players because he'll only be running a JV level team.
Luckily, not playing summer ball with the HS doesn't affect playing time. A coach would have to be pretty short sighted to bench a kid capable of playing a rigorous TB schedule because they chose to play at a higher level.