Event Preview: 13th Annual Kansas City Fall Showcase Presented by Perfect Game Softball… Same Quality Tourney with New Enhancements

This weekend in Overland Park and Shawnee, Kansas, the 13^th annual Kansas City Fall Showcase will host 120 teams from 10 states such as California, Illinois and Texas while more than 50 college coaches will be in attendance to scout the action.

The 16U and 18U teams will compete at the Blue Valley Sports Complex (Overland Park) while the 14U’s will battle at the Mid-America West Sports Complex (Shawnee).

The Showcase has been the one coaches have “always known and trusted,” but this is the first year it will be enhanced by the Perfect Game Softball brand including the production of the first PG Softball Scouting Combine running today at Blue Valley where 150 athletes are being tested.

They’ll be taken through defensive workouts, speed & agility workouts, pitching metrics through Rapsodo with trained technicians and exit velo using DiamondKinetics.

This is the first of what will be up to a dozen player combines before the end of the year, says Marketing Manager Alexa DiSpirito of Perfect Game Midwest.

“We’ll ​launch combines firstly focused on the organizations, where we’ll run all the club players from an organization through. This will allow for us to begin to grow the PG Softball ecosystem of player profiles and metrics.”

The showcase tournament will begin Friday evening with exhibition contests followed by the kickoff of pool play tomorrow (Saturday).

All the showcase games will be scored by trained staff members through DiamondKast, the tool used by Perfect Game to manage the game results and stats as well as stat leaders, MVPs and All-Tournament Teams.

Participants and spectators at the Showcase will have a free all-access event pass to follow the weekend’s action.

The leaderboards and results from today’s combine will also be available for public view by the end of the day.

Perfect Game Scouting will also be in play (pun intended) by trained evaluators through the Combine and Showcase tournament which will include complete social media coverage, athlete evaluations, event write-ups, game recaps, and more.

Click on this link to see a baseball example of what the softball players will have eventually in terms of look and content in a player profile.

The Showcase (combine), which Perfect Game has done successfully for years in baseball, tests similar measurables including player speed, agility, pitching and hitting (evaluated by DiamondKinetics and PG Tech).

PG Tech involves a partnership between Perfect Game and K Motion; the PG Tech cage will be on hand to gather data for the hitting of every player in the combine.

“This is best in class of several technology companies all rolled into one cage,” says DiSpirito, “It’s revolutionary for our sport. This data will eventually roll into the player lockers and will showcase a magnitude of comprehensive assessments.” “This event is a pilot for softball and will help create a development program for each individual athlete.”

Here is a video giving more insights into the technology:

“All in all, this entire day with the combine and weekend with the tournament is about the athletes and the comprehensive data-driven technology,” concludes DiSpirito. “I can’t wait to see the outcome. This is really exciting stuff.”