As we noted earlier today in our preview article spotlighting this week’s events in Kansas City at the Top Gun Invitational, the CONNECT Camp – KC featured top softball prospects in the Classes of 2026 through 2030 who got a camping experience like no other.

Attendees of the one-day event held today at the Mid-America and Mid-America West Sports Complexes in Shawnee, Kansas, scheduled individual workout sessions with college coaches on staffs including the National Champion Texas Longhorns – Head Coach Mike White was there – and nearly two dozen others including (in no particular order):

• UCLA
• Duke
• North Carolina
• LSU
• Tennessee
• Oklahoma State
• Kentucky
• Louisville
• Notre Dame
• Michigan
• Northwestern
• Indiana
• Nebraska
• Purdue
• Utah
• Georgia Tech
• Central Florida
• Missouri
• Maryland
• Ohio State

Under sunny summer skies, the first of the three CONNECT camps this summer—the others will be in Chicago on July 9^th and in Duncan, S.C. on August 9^th & 10^th—was a hit with the college coaches and the campers.

“This camp has plenty of good equipment,” said one top college coach.

“When camps are run poorly, it’s usually because they don’t have proper tools. That might sound small, but it’s not. I’ve been to camps with great branding but only two buckets of balls so having the right gear matters. You can see why kids are genuinely interested in this event when things are run right.”

According to Nate Eaton, the co-founder of Diamond Direction which runs the camps, the logistics are not just a secondary thought.

“We’ve got over 200 Bownets and more than 10,000 softballs out here today alone,” he said.

Ed Hatch, the event’s other co-founder, explained that he drove a 20-foot truck with all the supplies and equipment for over three days coming into Kansas City from the East Coast.

He remembers that what started out as a way to raise funds for his own team morphed into one of the most popular series of softball camps in the country.

“We didn’t expect it to grow into this,” Hatch recalls, “but the need was there, and we stayed focused on doing it right.”

On Wednesday, the camp experience included athlete workouts with anywhere from five to 16 participants in sessions with the D1 coaches they chose to meet with.

Also, performance metrics were captured in real time and shared on the Top Gun leaderboard along with two different Q&A sessions which allowed athletes to ask questions of a panel of coaches.

In one, for example, Head Coach Kenny Gajewski of Oklahoma State and Assistant Coaches Amanda Chidester with Michigan and Carly Drohan of Northwestern responded to camper-provided questions like “What advice would you give to athletes?” and “What do you think about players being on social media?”

Building champions on and off the field 🥎🏆

Our second coaching panel dove into the athletic expectations at the next level‼️ pic.twitter.com/WwnCwibN1a

— Diamond Direction (@DDSBandEvents) June 11, 2025

We’ll share the coaches’ answers in the future as well as some interviews we did with “happy campers!”

For now, here are some of the images captured during today’s successful CONNECT Camp in Kansas City courtesy of Gabby Baylog, a talented CONNECT Camp photographer):

— Shannon Eads/Line Drive Softball