MYTHS

There are many myths where "select/travel" teams are concerned.

One of the biggest is that the players need to be on a "winning" team to be seen and have colleges gain interest in them. There is nothing farther from the truth and this was reinforced with our team over the past two weekends. We went 1 and 5 which on the surface looks terrible. The boys are playing excellent ball but just not hitting. The pitching and defense is there but the timely hitting has not come about yet. All the losses were close games, one run losses or similar, except for the final game.

The bottom line for us is attracting college coaches interest. Even with our record we have colleges talking to us about our kids which is what our goal is. Many if not most, will be up to see us again this weekend in the NE Baseball event in Worcester, MA.

I guess what I am trying to say is that you need not need to get hung up on the winning and losing in the summer. The colleges know we have talent on our roster every season but we will use two more pitchers even if the starter is going well. This is especially so early on in the season because we want to see all the kids in action and be able to determine how to better utilize them as the season wears on. Complete games are not critical to us---in a 4 day tournament we like to see our first day starter return on the 4th day. He cannot do that if we burn him out in game one. We have one young man who has two great outings, no earned runs in 11 innings. No he does not have a win but he is creating a lot of interest from colleges.

One Division I coach I talked with this weekend told me he wished more programs thought the way we did. But that is not my problem ! We do what we do with our purposes in mind---Get the Kids Seen !---

So in closing let me stress that you should look for a travel teasm that gets you exposure and has a coaching staff that works for you rather than a team that wants trophies.