I coached two club teams (had sons on both teams, daddy ball alert) from 2013-2022. These were high level AAA/Majors teams. We had a couple of generous benefactors who paid the team fees, so all parents had to do was pay for their kids uniform ($150 or so) which we had to do as parents and kids expected multiple give outs on extra hats and stuff when even the uniforms were covered for a time.

We started throwing pen/etc after Thanksgiving, as our first tournaments were usually in January. We essentially hit year round, although most of our kids were multisport athletes who balanced their time between activities. We usually did 1 tourney in Jan, 1 in Feb, 2-3 in march/April/May/June and one big one in July, We were usually done at the end of July. We also played in the local rec league, usually 2 years up, and usually dominated that league filled with relatively lesser skilled/lesser interested rec kids.

Some years we played close to 100 games, but usually more like 70-80 I'd guess. For us, it was imperative that every kid could pitch, your kiddo that couldn't pitch wasn't making our teams. Tryouts were by invite only. Had lots of phone calls at the end of every season from parents trying to find their kid a spot. We lost a few over the years, and had a few turn down offers to play, but generally had 80-90% of the same kids year in and year out.

We played all across the SW (Vegas, Phoenix, Denver, Albuquerque, El Paso, Texas). Played in special tourneys as far as Omaha and Puerto Rico.

In retrospect, I wish I had done more to improve the local rec league. Kind of hard because I was never in an administrative position to do that, although I've been pretty close with those that were. I think we definitely played too many games (although no arm injuries ever). It's hard to scale things back when you're winning, kids/parents/coaches always want to keep it going.

My oldest son's team was probably the stronger of the two. They were probably less skilled, but had a bunch of wrestlers who were really mentally tough. My younger son's team was very skilled, but could 9not always though) fold under pressure. The interesting thing was that my older son's team only had two kids playing by their senior year in high school (my son was 1st team all state in our state's largest classification). Basically a bunch of talented kids who played a ton of baseball eventually burned out or found other things they'd like to do.

So basically, we played a ton of baseball at a high youth level. I think it's a mixed bag, with a lot of fun memories but maybe some missed opportunities at doing other cool things.