I've been thinking... always a bad thing!

Why doesn't softball, for the older girls, have age brackets for each year? Like 15u,16,17u... instead of just the even years, 14u, 16u.18u... In showcase baseball it's the 17u teams that are the most heavily recruited. These players are most often the rising seniors during the summer and fall and are the ones that can be signed during the early signing period in November.
What got me to thinking was the thread about "Showcase Tournaments". The coach has a team that will probably be made up of mostly 15 year olds in the fall who will be classified as 16u. These girls will be freshmen in high school most likely, having never played a single game at the varsity level, nor even begun to establish the academic requirements that are crucial in the recruiting process.
Cheeze is right, go to camps, play in the best local tournaments you can and save your money for a couple of years until it's really time to "showcase" your girls.

 

Good points

You make some good points but not sure you would have enough quality teams doing girls by single age groups, my 18U team is all 14-16 year old girls with the exception of a couple signed seniors, who may have just turned 17. With colleges pushing early committments (Spysoftball list many) if the gifted players wait till junior and senior year to play the better tournaments and attend the camps, what was discussed earlier can happen, they go unrecruited or underrecruited, in other words the top choices they have, have already gotten their committments. Now I am not saying, this is a rule, just a possibility. The fees to play for most local or NC teams is not that expensive, it is the travel if you try to go to the more competitive, more nationally reconised events. These events allow local colleges to gauge NC girls against western kids which does assist in the recruiting to those schools.

 

...when our DD was aging out of 14u she went to 18u and loved it. That was 3-4 years ago. At that time 16u in our area wasn't a big selling point for tourn. directors. Many times the 1 or 2 teams 16u would just move up and play in the 18u bracket.
I'm not saying that the kids were the problem at all, I'm saying there was a lack of participating teams.
I understand that 16u participation has picked big time and thats cool.
I know of a few orgs/teams who take 16u kids, qualify for the ASA 16u nationals, (that can be done in the fall), and once they are qualified, they play 18u as much as possible.
When these teams step down in age group nationals, they rock! Also, I know now for a fact that MANY, MANY college coaches go to the 16u nationals. Great opportunity to be seen early.

 

The Games a Changing

I have had numerous conversations about the kids who are being recruited way early. The larger DI programs are kinda doing softball like the basketball coaches are. They are trying to beat everyone to the punch so to speak. This has had me scratching my head as to which age group do we need to be playing. The 16U ASA Nationals are probabaly drawing more DI attention than the 18U ASA Nationals has for the past couple of years. I have a mostly 16U team playing 18U with a couple of exceptions. I do this, as some larger showcases in the region would not let us play as a 16U team. I personally don't think that the single age division would make the recruiting process any different than it is now.

 

Wouldnt the single age group make it even harder to keep a team together as girls that are close in age but are just far enough apart to switching ages regularly. Soccer uses birth year as the delimiter '91, 92, 93, 94 and so on. Is it the volume of kids in soccer that makes it work better?

Regarding the "playing up", ie.. a 14 yo playing 18U, if colleges are recruiting younger or at least looking younger, arent they smart enough to go to 16U tournaments or are they expecting to see 14yo playing at 18U. Is having a 14 yo playing 18U good for the sport?