Competition Level............

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ask mandan, if you can't beat em....

 

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ask mandan, if you can't beat em....

...what!!!????

 

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on the bad side of this, while you are working hard to get to the next level, your stud kid is always looking to get ahead to the team that pummels you in pool play 10-1 (and that coach noticed her going 3-3 as well and met the family in the parking lot after just to say hi)

and handed them a business card...lol...at age 10u

 

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Glad to see all this great input on the topic. We have had this same concern weighing on us all winter. Our girls are a young 13U moving up, but we want to challenge them. We're confident in their play, but we're also looking at things like it's a two year season. We want to progressively push their limits without crushing any confidence they might have coming into their first 14U season... building toward a much more competitive 2012.

 

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but i hope i'm not stepping out of bounds on this one, but i think the Hawks have done a good job getting their names out there. i mean, it's not just their iowa lookin unis that have you wonderin if they are a legit org. They are everywhere now, and even cobata had a clinic with them didn't he? sounds like a club to look at and emulate if one org is trying to position themselves into a winning org.

sometimes the top orgs end up having too many dads, er, cooks in the kettle, their are so many colors and last names and mascots, how can every one of them be elite?

 

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but i think the Hawks have done a good job getting their names out there. i mean, it's not just their iowa lookin unis that have you wonderin if they are a legit org. They are everywhere now, and even cobata had a clinic with them didn't he? sounds like a club to look at and emulate if one org is trying to position themselves into a winning org.

We are still trying to find the proper approach. We have 6 teams currently that can and will compete with the top teams in the state .. our other teams will play a solid 'B' schedule and work to improve.

Our vision is this ... take 10u/12u players and give them (and their coaches) the training and instruction from Carrier, Kobata, Hartwig, Weaver and other well know softball instructors and they will improve dramatically. Many, if not most, teams / orgs that don't play at the 'A' level pretty much shutdown from Nov-Feb and resume once the weather improves .. we felt like all of our teams should practice indoors at least once a week for 2 hours all winter and play indoor during Jan-Mar .. the ones that progress during the winter the most are the 'B' teams in fact.. those kids don't look like the same hitters come spring after a winter of working out.


Next season we plan on separating our 'elite' (I don't know what we will call them - probably 'Gold' teams) in terms of their commitment, fees, indoor workout times (4-6 hours / week), schedule strength and demographic, etc. from our other local/regional teams. They need to be identified and stand on their own in our opinion.


They will have their own tryouts, pay higher fees (play in more costly showcase only tourneys, train more, and have higher expectations on them to perform) but we will still push our other teams to train and develop all year as we do now .. as you said Statman, the name / product is starting to show - I have talked to 3 parents this week alone from outside a 2 hour distance window that would like their kid to come tryout for my team this weekend ... but we have a long way to go still.


I offered up a concept to several of the leading orgs in Ohio last fall - create an Ohio Showcase tourney with each org bringing their teams to the tourney and the on field workouts - basically a fall 3 day exposure event held by the top orgs in Ohio (yes, I know that will cause some issues selecting those orgs) and promote OHIO softball for all the girls sake. I was surprised that most of them wanted to do their own thing and not work together on it. I am talking to an Atlanta 'elite' org that wants to model some of what we do and we learn/model on what they do - we will probably create a 'sister' org type of deal where we travel there to play one year and they come up to OH the next season to play. Only by reaching out can we avoid the mistakes other orgs have made and leverage what each other is doing right.

Black and Gold...

 

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ask mandan, if you can't beat em....

That is too funny, Statman. :lmao::lmao: