Saturday, February 01, 2014

2014 Jesuit Baseball Parent Orientation

For the second year in a row [2013], I went to the Jesuit Baseball parent orientation on Saturday morning. There were a number of parents there that I got to know from last year's freshman team, including the parents of Jared, Kyle, Nick, Trevor and John Louis. The DeAndas were also there. Jack played with their son AD on the Gunners and Outlaws, but he didn't make the freshman team last year. There was also one parent from a player [Kyle S] who also didn't make the freshman team that Jack played with on the Walbeck Summer team.

There was also a celebrity sighting; Dusty Baker attended the meeting. His son is a freshman at Jesuit this year. Baker's son played tournament baseball with Hard90. Jack has played against him a couple of times over the years.

The coach said that there were 33 boys going out for the freshman team, 30 for the JV team and 27 for the varsity team. There were 50 boys signed up for the freshman team last year when Jack tried out. There are 21 uniforms and the minimum number of players is usually 17 to 18. Oddly, Rod had a conversation with the JV coach where he said that his roster would comprise 16 players.

The coach noted that there wouldn't be any players moving up from JV to Varsity. He said that although the JV team was deep with pitching that the Varsity team also had a very deep pitching staff of juniors and seniors.

The coach also had a couple of other observations. He said that in all of his years only 5 or 6 boys who didn't make the freshman team ended up playing varsity. He then turned around and said the JV team is actually easier to make that the freshman team. Finally, he noted that California is one of the two most competitive states for baseball.

The last part of the meeting focused on a proposed change in the fall ball schedule. This year, fall ball started at the beginning of September and ended at the end of October. The coach said that he is considering delaying the start of fall ball until somewhere between the middle of September to the middle of October. Fall ball would become winter ball. Part of the motivation for this change is to give the kids arms a longer break. Although there was a lot of discussion and push back from some of the parents, it sounded to me like the coach was going to try this revised schedule this coming fall.

The meeting lasted just about two hours.

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