I'm a lurker, but had to post because I'm curious if anyone's advice would change under the following circumstances:
PBR has an event near by in a few weeks specifically for underclassmen that recent *accidental* developments have caused us to consider taking our 2020 son to (at the urging of "others") that we otherwise wouldn't have considered just yet.
In a nutshell, the situation is this:
For reasons I'm not going to debate and discuss here, my son has never played "travel" ball-he's watched plenty of tourney games over the years and has subbed for teams, but he has never tried out to be a part of that scene full time.
He has been a dominant pitcher and position player over the years in every venue he has competed in ("all star", "all state" type of stuff, subbing for travel teams, or even when playing with and against older kids. (For the record, I know most of you would tell me that kind of thing "doesn't count" in terms of how he really measures up against "real" competition-for the sake of pointless argument, let's just say I'll concede)
He is unlikely to play on his HS freshman team this year...sounds like he will be going straight to JV...at "least".
Even though he turned 15yo 2 weeks ago , we had never put him on a radar gun. Yeah, you read that right. It's not that we didn't know that others do this to their 5yos, it's that we just didn't believe in using a gun. Not worth detailing why (or debating ) the reasons we believed that here and now, other than to say that as far as we were concerned, mechanics were our main focus....and in our minds, his success suggested that he must've been throwing "fast enough" over the years anyway.
A few days before last weekend we heard about a local DIII school having a camp on Sunday and figured it would be a good place to get his feet wet (already had intentions of sending him to camps of colleges of interest going forward) if they'd let him attend even though he was class of 2020. The night before camp the coach said he could come, so he went. He "went last" in all of the stations (because he was a freshman "filler"/not an imminent prospect obviously), including pitching. In other words, he fielded a ton and took 5445566754 cuts before they ever put him on the mound. He looked to us like he did okay , but as I'm sure you can tell... we don't know much.
The coach took him aside after the camp, but we didn't think much of it. However, by the next afternoon, that coach had called his HS coach about him-apparently besides mechanics and secondary and location etc. that impressed him, he also threw 78-80mph...again, after going thru the other stations of which coach indicated wasn't ideal .
This whole situation has created a bit of a whirlwind for the simple fact that news of this "velocity" and "1-camp-1-call" travelled to the ears of people who thought he should've been playing here or there or doing whatever else he wasn't doing per correct "recipe" over the years, so they have come out of the woodwork to basically say, "told ya so"-that he was "too good" to not play travel ball etc. Funny thing is that I feel like maybe I'm the one that should be saying "told ya so" to them, but whatever, I digress. Anyway, in all of the "advice" we've gotten since, the PBR event stuck out as one thing that maybe he should consider doing as a first step into the most typically "approved of" prep path. Ya know, a "get him on the map" type of thing....
Now, before I hear how "average" his velocity is compared to highly touted others, let me just put it out there that I get it-I read their bios, too.�� I think the point of why this velocity is so "projectable" (as I understand it) is that he's a "limby" 5'9" 142lb YOUNG freshman (we forgot to redshirt our kindergartener) who has more days of puberty left to go than he's put in, who has never played an out of HS baseball yet, AND who has an arm with far fewer hard miles or bad habits on it than a lot of kids. That being said, despite that velocity perhaps being considered "average" by some of you ("nothing to show"), I'm curious if y'all feel that a PBR event specifically for underclassmen would be a good match for a kid whose been quietly doing his thing in the shadows until this point, even if you have cautioned against early showcasing for others? Obviously our personal choices thus far indicate that we have ZERO problem staying in these shadows even longer, but we knew we wouldn't stay here forever...so is earlier better than later in my son's case?