We don't have middle school baseball in our district so travel is a big thing here. My player will be in 8th grade next year and wants to maximize his chance of getting on the team in 9th grade. He has the JV coach as a teacher this year (in the subject he struggles with the most 😔) but he's shown that he works hard. He's on a travel team but not one of the popular ones (over half of the current team is made up of players from one program). What can he/we do to maximize his chances/visibility... besides working hard (he's already doing that).
He sees videos on approaching college coaches with recruitment emails and asked if that's a thing for high school, because how else are they going to see him play. The team also has unofficial fall workouts that I don't think are sanctioned by the school, the kids just run it themselves and he asked if he could ask to participate even if he wasn't eligible to play that spring. I don't even know any of the answers to this. It's a large school in a pretty competitive county where things can be pretty political.