The magic number is 18 to play and to have 20+ to practice with the parents of the extra players being notified their children will not be going to games unless absence or injury demand it. No one does it like this.
91MD literally has a practice team (and I'm almost certain, but can't quite guarantee, that MadLax does as well). It works like this, your kid makes 91, gets the famous schwag bag, and quickly gets wrapped up in his new identity as a 91 player (which is good marketing honestly). Many parents go ahead and pay the full $1900 fees for the year. After the first practice (there are only a few each fall), coach sends out an email saying that he's got his eye on next spring and summer's competition and gosh, it just looks like some of the kids won't play, and need to be relegated to the 91 Practice Team for a few months so little Johnny can Hit The Wall.
And surprisingly very few of those parents flip out and pull their kid (one 2028 did, this past spring, and parents were pretty public about it).
To be fair to ML, 91 and others with this "practice team" nonsense, at least they are fairly transparent about it. I think it's a whole lot better than just showing up to a tournament and "Oh look there's 6 new middies, I guess my kid isn't playing this weekend?"
My sons have been on multiple 91 MD teams. it's never been that way. There's no such thing as a only practice team. Certainly, starters get more playing time and perhaps those parents were not happy with playing time.
They had a 2028 kid join prior to HoCo 2021, and prior to the first summer tournament he was told that he was being switched to the practice team for the summer. Parents blew up over it. I'm not saying they were right to do so, I'm just saying that it did happen.
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