For those that are or have been involved with either, I was hearing CABA is sorta making a run at becoming more and more popular, any truth to this?

I've been hearing this for three years. I haven't seen it yet even though one of the regional venues is CABA.

It really doesn't matter what national label is on a tournament. The quality of the tournament will be based on the quality of the local people running the local tournament.

We played in both the CABA WS and the USSSA Elite WS this past season. It seems that CABA is still very regionalized while USSSA gets teams from all over the country. I think you are starting to hear more about CABA, but they have a lot of ground to cover to catch USSSA. I think you will see Nations Baseball close the gap quicker than anyone else. They have a lot of former USSSA directors and know how to make up a lot of that ground.

Having four sons and playing a ton of travel baseball, lately, in the past two seasons, CABA was better than USSSA

Feels like I've been here before....

I head a local not-for-profit McHenry County Youth Sports Association (MCYSA) in Crystal Lake, Illinois that ran the CABA 15U WS for 15 years. Two years ago we dropped the CABA Affiliation and went with USSSA. We changed the name to the MCYSA/USSSA Summer International Championships.

I believe RJM hit it on the head - It depends on the local people who are running the event. The letters on the trophy don't matter - it is the people on the ground doing the grunt work and actually running the event that make it good, bad, great or terrible.

USSSA has been very open to making changes in their structure to accomidate our desires and needs in Crystal Lake. They changed the already published dates of the 15U Elite in 2008 so to not conflict with our event (last weekend in July - first weekend in August), they dropped the 15U Elite in 2009 making the International Championships in Crystal Lake the top 15U event for USSSA. That's not always easy for a large organization to do (change).

In 2009 MCYSA had nine Internationals in CL for the 15U. Japan, Puerto Rico, Panama, Brazil, Russia, Canada (2 teams), the Dominican Republic and New Zealand.

For 2010, all of those countries have recommitted and we have added a second Puerto Rico, Venezuala and Australia already. We are working with Italy, the Dutch Antillis, Mexico and Nicaragua.

The International aspect and the running of the actual event is the work of the local people who are all volunteers.

I have nothing negative to say about CABA - there are some wonderful people in that organization. I will say that USSSA is really working on the older age levels (16U and 18U) in the past year or so and they are doing things to help us at MCYSA. The 14U Elite champs will be getting a paid berth to Crystal Lake in 2010 as 15U's and in the future. Our champ last year (Japan) will be getting a paid berth to the 16U in 2010.

The 15U and 11U (same time) International Championships and the 13U International Invitational (shorter event, same time) are really all we do here in CL. Any profits are put into college scholarships for our local kids and in helping out our local programs recreational up to college aged.

I've gone on way too long. Go to our website www.MCYSASports.org for more info.