I found it very helpful to read through older reports from others on this board after various events, so thought I'd summarize our experience at the AZ Jr Fall Classic this weekend in case it is helpful to someone else in the future. Sorry in advance for the long post!
I will preface by saying that son reached out to all of the schools on his list a few days in advance to let them know what team he was playing with and what his schedule was and, while we only heard back from two schools (one to say there were not attending the event this year), we were happy to see that many of them did show up to see a game (of course, it is entirely possible that they were there to see someone else, but at least they were there!).
Academic Tryout--My son attended the tryout on Thursday morning. I didn't count up all the names on the tryout list, but there were quite a few. My son is an infielder and they split them up into two infielder groups that arrived at different times. I'd guess each group had about 50 kids. They then split that group up into smaller groups that went through the various rotations together. The first rotation was a laser-timed 60, followed by fielding and then hitting. I had read on this board that it was hard to get a good 60 time at this event given the surface where they run it. Surprisingly, my son ran his fastest 60 yet! He has been working on speed with his track coach since the last time he was timed, so he was glad to see his work is paying off. The fielding part of the tryout was a bit odd and took us by surprise in that the kids had to choose to tryout at either 1st or shortstop, regardless of their position. My son plays infield corners, but prefers 3rd, so he chose shortstop over 1st base. He was doing great, and then for his last drill he got a slow roller that took a weird bounce off the mound and he bobbled it, though quickly recovered and made a good throw. I guess one piece of advice I would offer is if your infielder plays anything other than 1st, have them practice fielding from the shortstop position before this event. My son would have been better prepared had we known this in advance. He had a great hitting tryout--hit one over the fence, one halfway up the fence and the rest were all hit hard. Unfortunately, he did not get selected for the game. In retrospect, it may have been better for him to have chosen 1st base for the fielding portion. There were fewer kids at that position and I think his hitting would have given him an edge. We did go watch a few innings of the game that evening and, as expected, there were lots of scouts there and playing in the big stadium would have been a highlight for sure. Aside from the pitchers, my impression was that there were fewer scouts watching the tryouts themselves than I had expected. They were milling around for sure, but I didn't see a big group of them for the fielding or hitting portions like there was for the pitchers.
Games--As others have reported, for this event, the games are run strictly on 2 hour schedules (however many innings you can get in)--usually 5 batters per half inning (though sometimes we did 3 outs or 5 batters, whichever came first). We had two games on Friday, one on Sat and one on Sun. Son ended up with 7 at bats in 4 games. We had 2-3 scouts coming and going for our games on Fri, lots of them watching most of our game on Sat and a good number on Sun. I think a lot depends on location of your games--the ones played on one of the fields in the 4 field "clover" seemed to get more scout attention than the ones at the two fields that were off on their own a bit. Son did pretty well yesterday, but only had 2 at bats and didn't get a full piece of either. Only 2 at bats today also, but he hit a bomb to the fence and several of the schools he's been contacting were there watching, so that was good!
If I was writing this summary after just the academic tryout or even after the first games on Fri, I would have said the trip was not what I was expecting in terms of exposure/scout presence but by the end of the weekend, I think it was a worthwhile event. I still agree with many people on here who noted that the pitchers tend to get the most attention, but I am happy with the exposure we got in the end, the event is very well run and the weather was fantastic!
There were 148 kids that tried out as a pitcher and they picked 22 pitchers.. It was a lot of pitchers! 