St. Louis 13U AA Competitive Travel Baseball Team Tryouts

We are a high AA team that seeks to compete at a hybrid level during the 13U season. Our intentions are to play in several competitive AA tournaments as well as enter 1 or 2 AAA tournaments this coming season. At the end of the day we are seeking a volume of competitive play that not only challenges our boys, but helps to develop and hone their skills as they are approaching high school level ball. Our total game goal is between 40 and 50 games, which includes both fall and spring seasons.

Our coaches are volunteers. We have built ourselves on the fact that youth sports does not need to financially burden a family. This is about the boys love for the game. Money should not be a barrier. That being said our team fee simply covers what we do to help the boys build their skillset. The cost will cover winter training in the cages, equipment updates for the upcoming season (i.e., baseballs, heavies, bases, etc.), and our tournament team fees. Historically our fees have been less than $600. Additional cost would revolve around local league fees and any uniform needs.

Yes we have and intend to continue to play both spring and fall ball. We view both seasons as competitive opportunities, but handle them slightly differently. In spring we're playing to our strengths in almost every situation to give our team the best opportunity to compete with our opponents. That doesn't mean we only play the "best" players, but rather leverage our players strengths to maximize our result. Players move around, but they land in the spots they have proven themselves. While in fall ball our goal is to build and develop our weaknesses within our team. We move the players around more to get reps at the hard things. Fall is highly developmental for our club and we try to push the boys to dig deep to work on the little things that will make them a more complete player.

Yes! Every winter we get to work and we really push glove and footwork fundamentals, cage work, pitching mechanics, as well as strength and conditioning for the boys. Making sure our boys are strong, well balanced, and move like athletes is essential in their development and helps them find the success they want on the field at an individual and team level.

Great! We want and encourage all of our players to play multiple sports. We live in the age of early specialization and it is hurting our boys faster than ever. We are seeing more and more overuse injuries across youth sports and this is completely unnecessary. The perspective that playing multiple sports is going to cause a player to fall behind is simply wrong. Playing multiple sports exposes a player to multiple movement patterns to not only keep them healthy, but also allows our boys to apply different movement patterns on the field to move more athletically.

However in saying all of that we also have the expectation that during baseball season baseball is the priority because that is the sport in season and if we are going to move forward and progress we need full commitment.