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Member
""""however travel ball playing your best 9"""
Then you should only have 9 players.
This is exactly right. If you only play your best nine in each and every bracket game, you will lose the 10th and 11th players. Especially at the 11U through 14U ages, we concentrate on developing the players and you don't necessarily do that by only giving them pool play innings. We believe that the most important goal is to produce the best possible 16U team, which is when recruiting reaches its peak. We've been questioned about this strategy because we have had our fair share of losses, but at least for Ted and me there are enough trophies cluttering up the garage and it is important for the team as a whole to get better so that during 16U play we can best market all our girls who wish to play in college. I would agree that at the end of 14U play you should make more of a move to playing the best 9 in bracket play, but again I think you are being naive if you think you can keep your team intact without playing all the girls for at least a portion of bracket play games. And as Klump and others have pointed out, sometimes it makes strategic sense to give a few of your "best nine" a rest. Finally, to reiterate the point made by many others, some of your best athletes play the most aggressive games, which can translate into injuries. If you haven't tried to develop more than one player at each and every position, the level of team play could fall off markedly when one or two players go down with injuries for a week or two.