RANKINGS
EVENTS
I COMMITTED
COLLEGE
ABOUT
Brentt Eads of Extra Inning Softball has been compiling and ranking the top 100 high school/club players in each grad class since 2013 when he first did the Hot 100 for the Class of 2014. Since he began publishing his lists, he’s done nine grad years and updated most of them as many as three times for nearly 20 total lists.
And whereas the rankings lists were originally just 100 prospects deep, he’s now going as deep as 500 players in each class.
After all these years and updates (nearly 20 total), here’s what he thinks are the common factors that help a player be the top-rated prospect in her class…
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Today is a big today for us at Extra Inning Softball as we finish the two-week process of announcing the top players in the Elite 100 for the 2022 class.
Overall, though these standout fastpitch players are just eighth graders, 40 on the list are already committed and to your top Power 5 programs—like Oklahoma, Florida, UCLA, Oregon, LSU, Auburn, Georgia, etc.—as well as others on the rise like Louisiana-Lafayette and Georgia Southern.
So what does that tell you? That the eighth grade class is heavily recruited… and heavily talented!
It’s an infielder dominated class, I believe, which is interesting as we’ve had other classes dominated by pitchers or catchers.
And as we look at the players who’ve been No. 1 in the past, you see a lot of similarities. More on that in a minute…
First, let’s look at the list of players who’ve been on the top of their class when they came out as I ranked them at the time (between 2013 and today), first while at Student Sports before posting for Full Count Softball, then FloSoftball and now Extra Inning Softball.
(Note that when there were different players for updated lists, the first ones listed are the more recently ranked.)