Summer Baseball

Your son should play for his HS summer team. If the coach is OK with it, and your son likes baseball alot, he should also check out local travel teams. Generally, he probably played ball in the local Pard District. They may have programs for him as well.

Kind of a hard question to answer.

High schools run summer programs and they play mostly Mon thru Thurs. (At least that is how it worked at ours). We rarely played on the weekends.

Most of the travel teams play only Fri thru Sun so there is your opportunity to play more games/get more at bats/etc. and generally refine your game more if you can get on one of those teams.

Seeing that your son is only a freshman you really don't need to worry about the exposure of playing in front of college recruiters this summer IMO. Just play and get better. As he gets older you probably are not going to get much exposure from the high school summer league games; I did not see anyone at any of our games this past summer. Not saying I have never seen them there but it appears to me to be less & less every year. This is where some of the contention comes from on this sight because many of the high school coaches don't like it when their players go off and play on these teams but not all coaches are against it either. Some will support it. You will have to find out what your high school coach's philosophy is on that & then deal with it as you see fit.

We have dealt with that issue at our school for 5 years (two boys). Each school/coach is going to be different so it is unfair to generalize about them all. My advise is to communicate with the coach and hopefully you can reach a decision that is best for your kid. Good luck, hope this helped.

I agree w/NC.

As far as exposure, he has to gain exposure from the coaches 1st, being that he is only in 9th grade. The more time spent to get better in front of them & to establish himself both in the game and practices, he'll have that chance to play more often at the higher HS levels. Then, after he establishes himself on varsity & he gets into the Summer between his Soph into Junior and especially the Junior into Senior year, he can become more active in showcases and travel ball to get that exposure from colleges.

So it sounds like he's gotta take care of first things first - make the HS team then see what happens from there. He has not played park district ball since he was 9, he played travel but the team does not exist past age 14.

Thanks for the info!

Down here in the sw suburbs, there is a JV Summer League that has 24 high school teams in it. The league operates on a T,W,R schedule and plays about 5 weeks of baseball. This type of developmental league gives the freshman a chance to continue playing for the HS during the week and also be able to compete on their travel ball teams.

I have 15y.o. freshmen who just made his high school team only 18 out of 40 some, I can say without his summer team coach I would have been alot less sure of his chances (though he does throw around 80mph which helps alot). His summer team coach has worked with him all year --speed training--batting instruction--Pitching with Pitching coach from summer team--team practices--strength and agility training 3x wkly, this after a fall ball schedule. This had him shining in high school tryouts 3days 1hr 45min. to show what you got--u better be prepared before tryouts or you won't be playing--My son worked hard and so did most of the kids who made it. My advice to anyone trying out is --YOU BETTER WORK HARD BEFORE TRYOUTS BECAUSE THERE ARE KIDS WHO ARE--that is what I tell my son,