The Jr. Toppers went undefeated to win the USSSA major State for a second year in a row. Great team play won it for the Toppers. THey will now travel to MAryland for the World Series.

Congatulations Topper's!! Have a safe trip and good luck in the World Series!!

We'll see you there.

Jeff - Have you seen the pools? A bit dissapointing considering it's a WS.

USSSA uses a points system and pool seeding matrix that almost guarantees that the pools will make no sense. I don't know why they don't just pull the pools out of the proverbial hat.

It's not the seeding as much as the pool play itself. There are 15 teams entered. The tourney website at one point stated that if the entries are multiples of 5, there will be 5-team pools (4 pool games). Makes sense. But instead of having 3 pools of 5 teams, they made it 5 pools of 3 teams. So now we only get 2 pool games before being seeded for the Championship bracket. It may be a blessing in disguise in terms of pitching but who knows.

Wouldn't be too bad if the championship round were converted from single- to double-elimination to make up for it. Or at least, expanded to allow more teams to get to those rounds. As long as you don't end up going there to play only 2 games.

BTW, don't be too surprised if the whole format changes another time or two before you ever hit the field! Been there, done that ....

Yes, I believe there will be some teams that will not pitch top 3 the first day during pool play. They will save pitching until the double elimination. If you lose one game in double elim., you can't win the world series, you can win the consolation. I would like to have seen more pool play games. It will be 4 and out for several teams. Long distance for not many games. Pitching will be vital. We play back to back on Monday morning starting at 8 AM. Hope we are on early. What team are you with?

Midlo was right.....It looks like they've changed the bracket last night to be a true double elim tourney. My son plays for the Hammerheads.

Do you know anything about any of these teams? We played the Extreme and were up until we pulled the starter and they came back and beat us 8-5. That is the only team we have played. The North Gwinnett bulldogs should be tough according to who they have played and how tough they played some of the big dogs.

Besides the NG Bulldogs, I think Upper Deck Cougars will be tough. They were in Elite 24 last year and imagine had their sights set on it again this year? That's our 1st game Monday at 8:00 am! To be honest I would think the top 8 or 9 teams would all be very solid and rest a shot in the dark. Just because they don't have any points or only a few doesn't mean they stink. I'm sure they feel they can compete or they wouldn't attend. Anything can happen and since at this age, they can be excellent one day and sloppy the next, who knows what will happen.

The 0 points scare me. I put together a local team two years ago for the AA World Series here and if mine and one other had been there all week, we would have smoked the field. That's what scares me about the 0 points for local teams especially. Points also don't mean a thing because a lot of teams are not playing USSSA and like us we don't have that many major teams around to get points.

It looks like your bracket is the best/toughest. Not a "weak" team of the 3. I'm guessing the Prospects are pretty solid. We played another IN team a couple weeks back who is supposedly the best IN team but I think they said the Prospects were pretty good. But it's all relative....what we think is good may be average to what you're used to.

Good luck Toppers......for the 1st game anyway.