The All-Star Season

First and foremost, All-Star Teams are Seasonal in nature. Teams are formed in mid to late April, practices start in May (After the Rec Season), and the All-Star Tournament Season runs late May through June, sometimes spilling into early July, but not always. All-Star teams are chosen prior to completion of the regular season and Town Championship Tournament. No all-star activities can interfere with any regular season activities including the Town Championship Tournament.

Every year, representatives from the area baseball associations meet to create an all-star tournament schedule so that tournaments being hosted by the various associations do not conflict. Once this schedule is finalized, the FMYSA VP of Recreational Baseball will send out an email to all-star coaches with the dates of the various tournaments. If you did not get this email you can request the information from the VP of Recreational Baseball at [email protected].

Tournaments will normally begin the last week in May and typically go through the end of June.

The tournaments that are normally held in this area are typically:

Colleyville
Grapevine
Flower Mound & Coppell
Highland Village/Corinth/Trophy Club/Roanoke combined
Southlake

It is best not to wait too late to register & pay for these tournaments. When the division fills up they will not accept additional registrations and if you wait too long you could miss the opportunity to play in that tournament. (PAYMENT MEANS CONFIRMATION, REGISTRATION MEANS VERY LITTLE, if you want to secure your spot register and PAY.)

To register for these tournaments, you will need to find the hosting association's registration page. In this area, google is your friend. Most times, you can find information about the all-star tournaments from the association's main web site. For your reference, as of the time of this writing, area association's pages can be found at:

Last year all associations used one Registration Platform, and it made life a lot easier for the coaches!

FMYSA:

https://fmysa.com/ click the tournaments tab and click on the All-Star menu item.

Highland Village:

http://hvabsa.com 

Grapevine (GBSA):

http://www.gbsa.org/: Select the All-Star tournament tab

Coppell:

https://coppellbaseball.org/index.php/recreation/tournaments: Tournament schedule
http://tournaments.coppellbaseball.org/: Tournament registration

Colleyville:

http://www.colleyvillebaseball.org/tournaments_home: Tournament info and registration.

Tips for All-Star Tournament Play

In All-Star tournament play, seeding doesn't mean much other than the #1 seed may get a first round bye depending on the number of teams in the bracket. It is not uncommon for coaches to keep their ace pitchers out of the game until bracket play. Most times the #1 seed does not win the tournament and unless there is a first round bye, most times there is no benefit in expending your best pitchers to try to get a higher seed. Sometimes, the higher the seed the better the schedule in bracket play (e.g. the lowest seed may get the 9am slot on Sunday). There can be a bit of gamesmanship going on to get the seed with the bracket schedule you would like. Many times a coach would like to get weaker players game time on the mound or in the infield in these pool games and reserve their best batting lineups and defensive positions for bracket play. This is a great way to ensure all players get good playing time while still maximizing your chances to win in bracket play.

Make sure you closely read the rules for each tournament. All tournaments will have some different rules based on the priorities of the association or to try to make an individual tournament unique.

It is a good idea to decide in which tournaments you will play very early and get parents to pay for the entire season. Otherwise, you must pay for them when you register and if you don't get payment from parents you could find yourself involuntarily funding scholarships to play.