Lone Staarr wrote:Texas softball at PGF... Not doing too hot!
PGF exposes every state's weakness! Texas needs to DO MORE WORK! Got a ways to go!
Texas teams actually did okay given the situation. Could they have done a little better? Sure, but there's a lot that goes into competing in Cali at an event like this. For one the competition at this year's PGF was among the best I have ever seen. Two, so much depends on your draw and this year there were a number of legit games right off the bat. Bombers Gold got Georgia Impact first game -- last year's runner up and they also brought and dressed 20+ for games, Sudden Impact got a good first game draw but had to face a tough NJ Intensity team in the second game (finished 13th last year and also dressed 20+ kids for this event). DFW Gold got FC Young first game, a team that had 25 girls dressed, some of which were not even in the FC org. All were brought in to help supplement holes in their "normal" team. Mizuno got a fairly easy draw first game and then had to face the same Georgia Impact team in their second game that bombers lost to in their first game. Blaze Bonola got two tough games back to back. First was Atlanta Vipers who they beat and second was Socal Choppers Faucett who they just lost to 2-1. Choppers went to the bracket semi and ended up losing Corona Angles (1-0) who then ended up in the champ game. Choppers had 27 dressed. Glory got a good first game and then had to face Bham Tbolts in the second game. Tbolts lost in bracket semi to Mercado who ended up winning it. Tbolts had a lot of girls dressed as well. So what's the point? The point is Texas teams tend to go out to CA with what they got and the other teams, especially the bigger ones from Socal tend to supplement their teams with talent to become deeper for the event. From what I could tell, SI, Blaze, and DFW Gold didn't supplement at all. The other thing you have to think about is the population differential. The population of the LA basin in around 18.7 million people. In Texas, you have to add together all the Metro areas of DFW (6.3), Houston (6.1), San Antonio (2.1), and Austin (1.7) just to get to 16.2 million. So just LA alone has about 15% more possible players than all of the major areas in Texas combined. If you break it down and look at it metro area vs metro area via a position mindset, then you could imply that for every legit player DFW has, LA has 3. The same holds for the Houston area. Move to San Antonio or Austin and LA has a 9 to one advantage per position. If you combined the best players from SI, Blaze, FC DFW Gold, Impact Gold, and Glory, then you probably have a team that competes very well and is on a level playing field with a lot of the teams in Cali. The talent is in Texas, but it is spread around and spread thin by geography and kids playing up too often. Very few kids play up in Socal and very few teams are not age pure teams; i.e. all '00s, '01s, etc.