North Carolina is the center of the travel baseball universe and the travel baseball organizations are all top tier. At least according to the players, coaches and parents that play here.
It began during the early domination of the Donnie Broome (Founder of Top Gun Sports) led AAU powerhouses in the late 1990s. Those teams spawned many professional and Division I baseball players and traveled the country year after year against the best teams from each state.
Today, there are over 16,000 teams in North Carolina that consider themselves ‘travel’ baseball teams.
With so much competition, it’s hard for parents to identify which youth travel baseball programs might be best not only for their athlete but for their families as well.
The Best NC Travel Ball Tournament Organizations
You can’t really talk about travel baseball in North Carolina without first considering the tournament organizations.
Top Gun Sports, USA
Currently, the top dog is Top Gun Sports, USA. Top Gun has over 55% of the market share (over 7,000 registered baseball teams) in the state. This provides a level of play for a wide range of ages and skill levels.
This, of course, has pros and cons in travel baseball circles.
Top Gun’s travel baseball program provides three divisions of play, creatively named D1, D2, and D3.
The top 20% of teams play in D1, the middle 50% in D2 and the lower 30% in D3.
The random nature of the pool play allows this travel baseball program to almost always guarantee you play against similar caliber teams on championship Sundays. Even so, there are a lot of lopsided games on Saturdays to sort the teams.
The winner of each bracket wins a similar award, wither it be rings, chains or belts. This allows teams at all levels to play, win and celebrate on Sunday.
In addition, they host a wide range of national events in and around North Carolina. Currently, their main events are the Summer (Myrtle Beach, SC and surrounding areas) and Winter (Rocky Mount, NC) World Series. This is on top of their Tournament of Champions events throughout the state. And now for 2020 they have announced Cooperstown Dreams Qualifier tournament held in Charlotte, NC.
United States Specialty Sports Association (USSSA)
USSSA (United States Specialty Sports Association) hosts the second-largest travel baseball program in NC.
In 2019, they had just over 2,600 registered teams.
While smaller, there are many tournament coaches and parents that prefer that aspect of USSSA. Why? Because it seems they’ve built a reputation that the teams are stronger.
And this is, to an extent true.
Many teams play in several different organizations throughout the year. However, it seems that the teams that show up in USSSA are primarily the teams that are DI and high DII from Top Gun.
Whether this is intentional or not, this reputation alone that keeps a lot of the less competitive travel ball teams away from USSSA baseball tournaments in North Carolina.
That being said, there are 4 divisions of play for USSSA.
- Major: this is the top 10 to 15% of the teams in North Carolina.
- AAA: The next 25 to 30% of teams.
- AA: This is 25-30% of teams after that.
- A: Bottom 25-30% of teams in the state.
For the most part, they follow a similar format as Top Gun. There is pool play on Saturday, followed by a single-elimination tournament on Sunday.
They too pool teams based on division when possible. And, because of the significantly smaller universe of teams to draw from, this is usually the upper-tier teams that compete in this travel baseball program.
They too have many national events. However, the biggest even in North Carolina seems to be their Annual ‘Beast of the East’ tournament. This tournament is broken down by division and draws a large number of high-level teams.
It begins pool play on Friday night, and then single elimination bracket play on Saturday evening. The winning team can play as many as 4 games on Sunday. This makes it not only a battle of attrition but also does raise some possible player safety concerns.
