FORT MYERS, Fla. – Every player holding down a spot on the Top Tier Hoffmann official roster that is at this week’s Perfect Game 18u BCS National Championship, walked across a stage somewhere in the Chicago area within the last couple of weeks and collected his high school diploma.

Graduation is a great achievement and something to be celebrated. A lot of kids will pack that diploma away and slip away for a couple of months of R&R before heading off to college or proudly jumping into the nation's workforce.

The guys wearing the Top Tier uniforms this week are enjoying life to its fullest, only maybe a little bit differently than some of their fellow Class of 2018 grads. They are with their teammates and coaches and, most importantly, they are with their families, living it up on the Southwest Florida Gulf Coast while playing the game they have loved their entire lives. It’s a perfect baseball vacation.

“It’s a wonderful group of families and just a real good group of people,” top-500 2018 catcher and U. of Minnesota signee Chase Stanke told PG Sunday morning from the historic Terry Park Complex near downtown. “To be able to come out and play good baseball in the morning and have the afternoons and the nighttime to just kind of relax and enjoy being with each other, it’s pretty special.”

A handful of the players on the Top Tier Hoffmann roster have been together since they were 9 years old and almost all of them came together as 14-year-olds when they jumped from the youth program to the high school program.

They all come from the Chicago suburbs in Illinois and northwest Indiana, and the organization made sure these Midwestern kids got involved with Perfect Game national tournaments once they got into that 14u age group. Thirteen of the rostered players will move on to play college baseball in the fall, most at the Division-I level like Stanke at Minnesota.

“We figured this was a good place to come for the sake of family vacations and also to get these guys ready for college in a couple of months,” head coach Glen Hoffmann told PG on Sunday. “If we can get a beach tournament someplace and play some good baseball too, we always do that.”

Baseball and the beach are synonymous in Lee County, Fla., and while the PG 18u BCS National Championship serves as a family vacation, it is also a working vacation. This is a very good team Hoffman is putting on the field, one that won its first three pool-play games as it readies for a second set of three games later in the week. The unique tournament format can be found by clicking here.

Stanke, from Sugar Grove, Ill., is one of five players on the Top Tier roster ranked as a top-500 national prospect from the class of 2018. The others are catcher/first baseman Ryan Hampe from Orland Park, Ill. (Illinois-Chicago signee); right-hander/corner-infielder Andrew Hoffmann from Plainfield, Ill. (Oakland); right-hander Jake Rosing from Richmond, Ill. (Louisville) and infielder/both-handed pitcher Andrew Wilhite from Byron, Ill. (Minnesota).

“It’s just a real good mix of kids,” Stanke said. “We don’t have any issues with each other; we all get along well. We all look forward to playing ball, and it’s pretty cool when everybody can get along both on and off the field the way that we do.”

And yes, there are two future Golden Gophers in the group. Both Stanke and Wilhite enjoyed watching the Gophers win a Big Ten Conference championship, host an NCAA Regional and advance to a Super Regional this season.

“It was awesome. They had a real good year, one of the best years ever,” Wilhite told PG Sunday. “It’s really exciting and I’m really excited about being able to play at Minnesota.”

What Minnesota has to offer on the academic side of the ledger was also a big reason Stanke and Wilhite decided to become Golden Gophers. Both were excellent students at Marmion Academy in Aurora, Ill., and Stillman Valley (Ill.) High School, respectively, before receiving their diplomas.

“Chase and I are both very big into academics and making sure that we got a challenge academically,” Wilhite said. “So, yes, that was a big part of it, too.”

Glen Hoffmann began coaching a lot of these players when they were real young, and that, of course, includes his son Andrew Hoffmann. He kept the team intact when he moved it into the McCook, Ill.-based Top Tier program, and he made that move knowing it would provide the kids who were serious about playing college baseball the best opportunity to realize that dream.

Top Tier teams attend the most high-profile PG tournaments where the players will see the best competition out there and the scouts and college recruiters will, in turn, get to see them.

“It’s still totally a learning experience for them,” Hoffmann said. “When your 18-years-old you’re a young man but the whole next phase, when they all get off on-campus, they’re going to be dealing with all different types of people, whether it’s professors or coaches (or whomever).”

The PG 18u BCS National Championship truly represents a melting pot of diverse cultures all brought together under baseball’s welcoming umbrella. While the majority of the 16 teams in the field have their base of operations in Florida cities, there is also Top Tier from Illinois and Nelson Baseball School from Georgia.

More distinctly, there are three PRBAHS teams here from Puerto Rico and Academy Baseball Canada from the French-Canadian province of Quebec. On Sunday morning it was business as usual hearing English, Spanish and French being spoken on any of the four fields at Terry Park.

“We’ve always been based in Illinois but we travel outside of that area, and most of the time we are coming south,” Hoffmann said. “Perfect Game is huge because it gives us the ability to get into the big markets where people come to you.

“There aren’t many Canadian teams or Puerto Rican teams coming to Illinois, so we travel down to these places, and it’s great,” he added. “We see them in the condo we’re staying in, we see them in the hotels and at the fields, and it’s very interesting.”

It’s even more than interesting for a “big picture” young man like Wilhite: “Being around all the different cultures, it creates a good experience (that translates) into real life,” he said. “There are plenty of people from different backgrounds that you’re going to have to meet with and talk to and eventually have a career with, so it’s really cool to have that experience.”

So, back to this working vacation deal. Just the fact that Stanke has been playing together with this same core of guys for at least the last four years was more than enough reason for him to make the trip south. He wanted to get out and face some high-end competition in an effort to stay in shape and tuned-up for when he arrives in Minneapolis in a couple of months.

Having the opportunity to be around the guys and spend a week with them … is something that I think is pretty special for one last time,” he said. “Just the mix of that the good competition and being able to do something to keep you in rhythm for college is something you can’t pass up.”

Wilhite, who pitched three one-hit, shutout innings with five strikeouts and no walks against PRBAHS 11 Sunday throwing left-handed, used the same words to describe his feelings on the matter: “This was something you just can’t pass up. Obviously, you have the beautiful weather and the great competition, and getting together and having fun with a good group of people.”

Far too often, it seems, parents get criticized for making the travel ball experience a living hell for both the team’s coaches and for their own children. Hoffmann feels totally the opposite way about this group of parents.

“It’s great to have great kids but it’s also great to have great families so you can do things like this,” he said. “They support their kids, they travel with them, they all come out to watch these games; they support everybody and not just their own kids.”

Top prospects like Stanke and Wilhite - everyone on the roster, actually - are appreciative of the support they get from their families and the support they’ve gotten from the Top Tier organization. Wilhite specifically spoke of how TT helped him with the whole college recruiting process and how his association with the program gave him the opportunity to make friends with like-minded young men who, too, will go on and play college baseball.

At the end of the week, the players, coaches and families associated with the Top Tier Hoffman baseball team will end their summer baseball vacation on Florida’s Southwest Gulf Coast and return to their homes in the Chicago suburbs.

Based on their level of play over their first three games here Saturday and Sunday – an 8-0 win over the SWFL Canes, 9-5 over the Orioles Scout Team and 8-0 over PRBAHS 11 (Puerto Rico) – they might be carrying a PG 18u BCS National Championship Trophy with them. But that’s not the most important thing Hoffmann wants his players to take away from this week.

“It’s the experience of the whole cultural thing, playing on great baseball fields, playing in great tournaments with great competition … and that’s just going to make them that much better in a couple of months,” he said. “When they get on campus they’ve got to compete against 22-23-year-old men as compared to 18-year-old young men, so this will give them a good competitive advantage going into that.”

Life at the next level awaits …