My son is going through this as we speak. He has great bat speed and exit velocity as it is with the bbcor and wood. But of course if we bought him a brand new drop 5 for the 1.15 alloy rather than the .5 of bbcor the exit velo would increase even with same barrel speed. And I suppose there would be an uptick in barrel speed as well due to lighter bat. Then he has teammates still swinging drop 8 to drop 10! One of our best hitters swings drop 8 or 9. And as others have indicated it DOES affect how volunteer non baseball people coaches view kids. While a trained eye may see things differently they just see the speed of the ball off the bat. Not everything comes down to the future either. Many of us do think about that but I always ask myself 'what if this is the last year my son is a good baseball player?' Maybe hitting 15 home runs as a 14yo instead of 3 may be the highlight of his life. Maybe he will go to 15u and not be able to hit at all against the matured pitchers throwing 85+. Are we looking so much to the future that we forget to let our kid have his moment in the sun now? By golly I think I just talked myself into getting him a new bat. I must be very persuasive!