My son is continuing all of his practice regiments currently because he wants to be the best he can and his goal is to be the best on the field every time he goes out. He is very competitive and has proven himself to be competitive in mind and actually play over and over again. Even when I was helping coach his 9-13 travel teams I did not advocate for him to have un earned daddy ball playing time. There were years that he was the smallest player, not the worst just the smallest player and his hitting and his consistency in the field moved him up in the lineup without any of my influence as a coach. My influence was with my son working on his swing and working on his defense his hustle and everything else. My son has seen the brick walls and has climbed them. I hope he continues but he is becoming tired of it. I think he his projected to be D3 partly because he is 5'9" and not likely to get any taller. Big guys with bad batting averages are going to get more looks because they can hit the ball further that one time somebody important was watching. They are more projectable. The coaches are looking for big guys they can coach to be better. Coaches are not going to be able to teach my son how to be 6'2" 200 lbs. My son is currently throwing 86 from the outfield with great accuracy he has a exit velo of 85 (wood bat on a tee) and runs a 7.02 (laser) 60. I have read your guys comments and thank you for the words of advice and the quotes you share. I see truth in a lot of them. Sometimes things are just different. Some will say his bad coach is preparing him for a bad boss and maybe it is. I however don't put up with bad bosses. I am very good at my job, there are few of me, and I am wanted by several companies. I will move on if the company is not heading in the direction I want to go ( I do not job hop I have stayed at least 6 yrs everywhere). I have respect for myself I have had to demand respect form many bosses. I always respect the boss and they should give it back. If they don't, I call them out on it. That's my real world. This baseball world my son can't do that, and I can't do that. It might hurt a coaches ego or feelings. Maybe someone here can relate to this scenario. Coach tells a bunch of 14year olds you guys know nothing about baseball, when I was 14 I was so dumb and I knew nothing about baseball until I had a good coach teach me the right way to play. Then he went on to coach them all the things my son and I would say most of the others already knew. My point is just because you were dumb at 14 does not mean everyone else is. I went to the bank looking for a loan at 20 yrs old. Before running my credit the loan officer told me no because I was the same age as his son and his son would not be able to get a loan at that bank. I went to school with his son and just because he is a loser should have no affect on me. I asked him to run my credit, he begrudgingly did. He came back with a big smile on his face and said we can do business. Maybe sometimes we don't need to climb these walls but knock them down. If you are correct then bosses, bankers and dare I say teachers and coaches need to be corrected. My son longs for the day when he will be judged for the content of his character, work ethic, and playing ability rather than the number of years he has been around the sun. HS tryouts on MLK 2020. We will see what happens. For those of you that think I should sit down and have a heart to heart with my son and take blame for what I have done. I did have a sit down talk about it before he said he didn't want to play in college. I critique everything and everyone, it's me. I don't share them with everyone, and I have had success with helping others and myself in doing so. (Last seasons playoffs I scouted the other team for fun and came up with a strategy to win. We were a higher seed but I could tell right away this team had more talent that our team was going to need to over come. Their top 3 pitchers were good, but predictable. They had 3 hitters that you have to get out and I studied them to see what was the best pitching strategy to achieve this. I shared my strategy with my son. I hoped he would find it useful and share it with others. The coaches did their own scouting and strategy and shared it with the team. It was much different than what I had. We were run ruled twice. My son got one at bat only in the second game after it was clear we were getting run ruled and the Ace pitcher was throwing a no hitter shutout. My son used the information I gave him about how predictable this pitcher was and my son hit a line drive over the short stop.) I did apologized if I was hard on him his teammates or coaches. He told me I was correct in my judgments an rarely wrong at reading people and their abilities. He told me I was the most fair minded coach he ever had. I was not however his favorite. lol. He continues to ask me to take him to the field for extra work with hitting and fielding and we both have a really fun time. I continue to encourage him to battle and play hard because his past experiences has proven that when he works hard he comes out on top. We never thought it would take 3 years but he has 2 more to get it done.