Nations Baseball

Interesting. I heard a top program recently state they did not want to play USSSA anymore. Not sure why....although I think it has to do with roster limitations.

The quality of a program is more a result of the local organization running the tournaments than the nationally recognized brand name on the packaging. Locally, one promoter has changed from AAU to USSSA. Another changed from USSSA to CABA. It's still the same product at both locations. We have a wood bat program without a national affiliation. It's all good ball. That's all that matters.

When local organizations switch affiliation it's usually due to financial and/or administrative issues that are mostly invisible to the teams. Does it really matter as long as there is quality ball to be played?

We've seen several parks locally switch from USSSA to CABA for monetary reasons. They are in the business of profiting from their tournaments; and which ever association affords them better results, they tend to migrate in that direction.

Our organization has evaluated Nations Baseball and considers it to be more of a money making operation than one that will benefit players. In fact USSSA is cheaper and has more tournaments than Nations. What we found was that Nations was pretty underhanded when it came to entering the Columbus market. We asked ourselves why some one would leave an already established program instead of making improvements. We came to the realization that it came down to money. In our case we were unhappy with the local league not USSSA. The local league and the cronies getting rich off kids was the one switching to Nations. It was a perfect time to shuck the problem and put the kids first again. USSSA offers insurance and a way for teams to communicate. Why pay for more when all that matters is a baseball diamond and kids to play? Nations is nonsense. Anyone can see through the veil if you look hard enough. "warningtrack" is right on track.

Took a quick look around their site, one interesting aspect is their "Grade" system. Makes sense if it can in fact be implemented.

Don't know anything about Nations, but as a travel team, we played tournaments with a whole bunch of different sanctioning bodies. We played USSSA, Triple Crown, BPA, CABA among others. The problem we had with USSSA was roster restrictions.

We had a situation where we played a tournament early in the spring. We did not have our roster set (in our minds) as some kids were still playing school ball and had not given us an answer yet (we were a 14 yr. old team). Anyway, we played in this tournament, lost in the 1st round of bracket, came in something like 5th place. Top two teams were to be given a World Series berth. When you earn a berth, I think you are allowed 3 roster changes. Well, apparently three teams who finished ahead of us had already secured a berth, so they gave one to us. Never even told us. Coach was making some changes later in the year and got locked out due to the roster restrictions. They would not work with us at all. We even told them they could take back the berth and we would re earn it again. NOPE. We were stuck and basically couldn't play any more USSSA tournaments.

If you are anticipating any roster changes during the year, be careful about entering an early USSSA tournament. You may fall into a berth and a roster lock out without actually "earning" a berth.

On the other hand, USSSA is the only organization that I know of that keeps track of their tournaments, schedules, assigns a point system and ranks teams. That is pretty cool. Only drawback is the roster restriction especially early in the year before you are all set.

USSSA is a solid affiliation. Their Elite 24 is one of the most sought after berths in the country, by all age groups. They have been around quite awile and have a solid history of hosting quality tournaments.

From looking at the Nations site, I have come to the conclusion that the Tx state director, (no names mentioned) was a control freak. After some ill advised moves that he made this past summer. Changes were coming "in USSSA Texas anyway". Someone got wind of this and broke out of the corral "went mustang". "So to speak".

I'm in total agreement with shortstop27's assessment of the affiliation and their leadership.

Old School- We've been to the Elite 24 three straight years with five teams. I wanted to give it one more try last summer but I won't do it anymore. The combination of the inept USSSA guys (not just inept but dishonest regarding ineligible teams at the elite) and the greed of "the Disney experience" exponentially made for a horrible experience. Combine that with the constant rain delays and you have a horrible tournament.