This season we put 156 athletes through tryouts, scored by fifteen coaches on the same rubric. When it was over, we pulled the numbers: anonymized age-group averages, nothing tied to a single kid. Most of it confirmed what any coach would guess. Older players hit the ball harder and throw harder. One number didn't.
Two twelve-year-olds, forty-six miles an hour apart
At 12U, the hardest ball hit off the tee registered 81 mph of exit velocity. The softest, from a player the same age at the same tryout, was in the mid-30s. That's not a mis-entry, and it isn't two different sports. It's two kids who will stand in the same batting order.
Put a number on the range. Exit velocity inside our 12U group spanned about 46 mph, top to bottom. Now compare that to how much the average moves as kids grow up. The gap between the average 10U (53 mph) and the average 14U (73 mph), four full years of development, was 20 mph.
The spread inside a single age group was more than double the climb across four years of them.
The averages do climb, cleanly
None of that means age is meaningless. Line the age groups up and exit velocity marches exactly the way you'd hope:
| Age group | Athletes | Avg exit velo |
|---|---|---|
| 10U | 15 | 52.7 mph |
| 11U | 14 | 62.8 mph |
| 12U | 24 | 61.2 mph |
| 13U | 20 | 67.4 mph |
| 14U | 19 | 72.7 mph |
| 15U | 9 | 75.4 mph |
| 16U | 5 | 81.4 mph |
Arm strength tells the same story. Infield throwing velocity and fastball velocity both climb about three to four miles an hour a year through the middle of the age range, then jump as the older kids hit their growth:
| Age group | INF throw velo | Fastball velo |
|---|---|---|
| 10U | 48.1 mph | 46.7 mph |
| 11U | 48.8 mph | 47.7 mph |
| 12U | 53.5 mph | 49.7 mph |
| 13U | 59.6 mph | 55.1 mph |
| 14U | 62.4 mph | 59.1 mph |
| 15U | n/a | 71.2 mph |
The tool that didn't grow up
Not everything climbs, and that's the part that surprised us. Home-to-first times were essentially flat, right around 4.3 seconds at every age from 11U through 15U.
Some of that is the field growing up with the kids. Bases sit farther apart as players age up, so a faster older athlete covers more ground in about the same time. But even allowing for that, the pattern held. The tools that separate players by age are the ones you measure in miles per hour, in the bat and the arm. Raw foot speed is spread far more evenly across the ages than you'd think.
Before anyone quotes these at a tryout
A few things to be clear about, because numbers like these get pulled out of context:
- This is one club's tryout, not a national standard. It's a picture of one program in one season, not a bar your kid is supposed to clear.
- Samples thin out at the top (five athletes at 16U, a couple at 17U). The older averages point in a direction, not a verdict.
- Every figure here is an anonymized aggregate. No names, no individual results. Player data doesn't outlive the season on our end. Only numbers like these do.
What the spread is telling you
You stop treating a birth year as an evaluation. Age tells you where to set the bar. It doesn't tell you who clears it. The player walking into a 12U tryout could be the 81-mph outlier or the 35-mph one. The only honest way to find out is to measure him the same way you measured everyone else, and write it down so the decision holds up when someone asks about it three days later.
This data is a byproduct. We didn't set out to run a benchmark study. We set out to make tryout cuts we could stand behind. The numbers are just what falls out the back when a full staff scores every athlete the same way, for a whole season.