[tcannizzo]

The complaint about college players is legit.

College softball is a professional level sport. Most players are shocked when they get there. The regimen is NOTHING like high school, NOTHING like travel ball.

These players are up at 5:30am for conditioning, and practice in the AM before classes at 9. After classes at 4pm, which are scheduled around softball, they spend another 5 hours on practices, training and more conditioning, etc. They get back to their rooms at 1030pm to do their homework, then they get up at 530am the next day and do it again. They are are spending the entire school year with 6 to 8 hours EVERY DAY working on softball.

Using the 14-u analogy with high school is absurd. College players are are not "students" they are "employees". Paid to play. Coaches get paid to win, not just games, but NCAA Regionals, Super Regionals and the WCWS.

True, many players at Gold Nats are committed, signed, etc. But then why do so many college coaches attend Gold Nats? They are there to see players. They want to see them on a level playing field; not against the hired guns that come back that are head and shoulders above the AMATEUR players. After all, it is the Amateur Softball Association.

And why does ASA charge them $100 for the book?

There are coaches bring in the hired guns so that they can WIN a Nationals for the purpose of recruiting players in subsequent seasons. Why? Because ASA has declared them as eligible.

Some argue that by keeping the college players as eligible allows college coaches to see these players actually play against college players. The flaw in this thinking is that the college players are evenly distributed across all the teams, and that all players are equally challenged. Bull hockey!

College coaches want to see these players in their own element and how these players stack up against the rest of the field, not against college players.

To use the "straw man" that ASA exists ONLY to be the NGB, and that college recruiting is not a concern of the ASA, is a weak excuse to ignore significant issues that detract from the integrity of the JO program.

To say that this current effort is simply another "likely to fail" effort like the others that make up the alphabet soup, is excessively arrogant and turning a deaf ear to what the elite players are working for, even at 10-U.

To say that these coaches are "whining" clearly demonstrates the unwillingness of the ASA to listen to its registered members. Like the CEO's of many failed companies who said, "To hell with what the customers are saying, they don't know anything about what they REALLY want in a product. They'll be back, heh, heh." I worked for a company like that once and yes the customers did come back and they said, "All right, where do I sign this damned thing?" It worked for a while, but one day, POOF they were gone.