I'm interested in hearing personal experiences about the cooperstown baseball program. We are talking about trying this in summer of 28. Also would love to know any tips or pointers for getting our team into this.

My understanding is we will need to sign up about a year in advance.

Thanks

Question: What is the story on including 1 umpire per team? How do you find an umpire to link up with your team?

We just paid whatever the fee was for the umpire. There are guys who go stay every summer to ump.

As far as the ASV vs. Dreams decision, most of the upper level Houston teams do ASV.

Went to ASV a few years back. It's awesome and a memory worth the cost for your son (and you) IMO

I've always heard ASV > Dreams but to each their own. Need to register early if you want ASV.

It's a lot of games. We were a roster of 10 and added 3 pitchers from our sign up team. Glad we did; lost in the round of 16 in extra innings. Had we won we had 1 useful pitcher left…it's a lot of baseball & the umpires move the games fast (like 5 warm up pitches b/n innings) most games go 6 innings.

Fields are short. Really really short. So a lot of kids hit their first HR over the fence while there - always fun to watch.

If trading pins are still a thing - get them. You'll want to do a small subset of "rare" pins for trading value. Something like 3 per player to make those rare. Can't tell u how many times I heard "this is a rare pin!" From the players. Our players spent A LOT of their downtime trading pins & playing whiffle ball.

I guess u know it's a dorm situation. It was our team + 3 coaches. Community showers (which are chaotic) for players; shower stalls coaches.

It was cold at night when we went (mid-late June)

Food wasn't very good. But edible. For fruit think massive dish of the canned fruit cocktail. Same for vegetables. It was plenty edible but a few players barely ate. For feeding 700+ people I thought it was ok. Parents seemed to bring the players food from offsite daily.

Umpires - like comment above we just did the buy out

It does take a slight degree of planning/coordination for sure. That was my job (ha ha)

Overall highly recommend. Wife & I were just talking this past weekend about how great that cooperstown trip was

If you can fundraise - all the better.

Felt everyone that ran the tournament really aimed to please. It's well done.

How good is the competition? My sons team is planning to go, but unless things change I can see them getting crushed in every single game. I know it's not all about winning, but I'm sure it's a different feeling if you don't even feel like you belong there.

Competition is mixed. Majors all the way down to AA. If your team is AA but at least competent, and everyone wants to go, then go. Make the memories.

The talent is full range - Majors to AA. I felt most teams were AA or AAA but yeah theres gonna be a few stacked teams there.

If this gives perspective my son's team played all PG AAA tournaments in Houston for 12u. They went 25-4-1. In Cooperstown they went 6-3.

I'd think if you are on low end AA team - you'd struggle some in Cooperstown. Perhaps setting realistic expectations would be helpful. But the experience (dorms, pin trading, meeting/hanging with other teams) is still worthwhile. I think it's a minimum of 5 games too (I might be wrong about that).