FORT MYERS, Fla. – Each one of the 72 teams that began play at this year’s 15u Perfect Game BCS National Championship on Friday came into the tournament expecting to succeed. Without those high expectations, the players, their coaches and their families might as well have just stayed at home.

But there seems to be more of an edge to the expectations Orlando-based FTB Tucci Select 2020 shoulders, and for good reason. This is a 15u team loaded with highly regarded and highly ranked prospects from the high school graduating class of 2020, guys who are not only accustomed to winning but also feel like they left a little unfinished business on the Southwest Florida Gulf Coast a year ago.

It was just last June when most of these same players suited up for FTB Select 2020 and reached the final-four at the 2016 14u PG BCS Finals; a loss in the semifinals left the team with a 7-2-0 record and two wins short of what was its goal of capturing a PG national championship. Over the next seven days, this year’s Select 2020’s will be given an opportunity to take things a step farther.

“Last year we made it to the final-four and kind of ran out of steam a little bit, so they were definitely looking forward to coming back and trying to finish what we started,” head coach David Holbrook said Friday morning before his team played its pool-play opener at the CenturyLink Sports Complex. “This is definitely an event they’ve been looking forward to.”

The core members of this FTB Tucci Select 2020 roster has been playing together since they were 12- and 13-year-olds, and almost all of them are in their second year playing together. They’re all Floridians, with most of them living in cities and towns in the Central Florida area around Orlando.

These are talented players who spent this past spring – their freshman seasons – playing with the varsity unit at their respective high school programs.

It is a team led by a couple of elite 15-year-olds in A.J. Shaver and Connor Morgan (Morgan was born on Oct. 7, 2001 and Shaver on Oct. 8, 2001) who are ranked the Nos. 38 and 39 top national prospects in the class of 2020, respectively. Both were valuable members of that 2016 14u squad, and both are back here in 2017 looking to tie up some loose ends.

“We want to come out here and finish better than we did last year. We expect to make it back to the final-four and then get even farther than that this time,” Shaver said Friday morning.

“We’ve been working hard so far to get to where we’re at,” Morgan added. “We started a little bit slow at the beginning of the (summer) but now we’re starting to win some games. Hopefully we can come out here and do pretty good again this year.”

Shaver and Morgan are not the only FTB Tucci Select 2020s that have already caught the eyes of Perfect Game’s scouting department. First baseman/left-hander T.J. Curd (No. 68, a Florida commit), middle-infielder/right-hander Grayson Moore (No. 70), catcher/middle-infielder Bennett Lee (No. 79) and left-hander/outfielder Joshua Allen (No. 136) have all found spots in the top-150 of PG’s national prospect rankings.

Shaver, Morgan, Moore and Allen were all named to the all-tournament team at last year’s 14u PG BCS Finals, as were their teammates Jackson Grabsky, McGuire Holbrook and Jacob Starling.

“They’re buddies, they’re friends, they play together as a team, but the talent level is still really, really high; they’re really advanced guys,” Holbrook said of the roster in its entirety. “They push each other and they motivate each other to do well … and when they come out here they’re really motivated to be better than their buddies.”

Shaver is an athletic 6-foot-1, 190-pound, five-tool prospect from Clermont who has already been named to three PG all-tournament teams – he was the Most Valuable Player at the 2016 14u Memorial Day Classic at LakePoint – and was included on the Top Prospect List at the 2017 PG Junior National Showcase; he’ll be a sophomore at South Lake High School in the fall.

“(A.J.) is really the athlete of the bunch; he can do back-flips in the bullpen and just has that athletic feel to him,” Holbrook said.

Morgan is listed at a solid 6-foot-1, 200-pounds, and he’s been included on nine PG all-tournament teams in just under two years. He calls Brooksville, Fla., home and will begin his sophomore year at Hernando High School in a couple of months.

“Connor Morgan is a big, strong kid, who has that elite-level power; just a real strong guy,” Holbrook said.

Both prospects bat, play the field and pitch and for the Select 2020 at this tournament, and Holbrook said it’s likely that Morgan will continue to be a two-way guy if he finds his way to the college game. “They’re both big, strong kids with advanced size, advanced athleticism and advanced power,” he said.

The Select 2020’s won their opener Friday morning by a 6-0 count over the Woodstock, Ga.-based Georgia Power. They scored all six of their runs in the bottom of the first inning on the strength of two singles, three walks and two errors; they totaled only three hits in the game.

Morgan singled, drove in a run and scored a run while Shaver walked and scored. The story of the game may very well have been the performance turned-in by Justin Clark, a 6-foot-4, 210-pound, unranked 2020 right-hander who threw five innings of two-hit, shutout ball, striking out seven and walking three; his fastball sat consistently at 83-85 mph.

It only takes a few minutes being around these guys to realize that no matter who you’re talking to or overhearing, there is no other dugout they’d rather be in.

“This is my favorite team that I play with; I love all the kids, everybody on the team,” Shaver said. “We’ve played with each other since we were (younger) so we all know each other and we’re all really tight with each other already.

“We can all kind of feed off each other,” he continued. “If one (player) is doing good, we’ll all start working as a team and we’ll all just start playing better overall.”

Like every other team here at the 15u PG BCS, this will be the only PG tournament FTB Tucci Select 2020 participates in that uses BBCOR metal bats. The next stop for the team will be the 15u PG WWBA National championship at PG Park South-LakePoint in Emerson, Ga., and Holbrook feels like this tournament provides great preparation for that wood bat event.

“This is our only aluminum bat tournament of the summer, so for the kids I think it’s a little bit of a reprieve to get to swing the aluminums for a week,” he said. “All the teams we’ll face deep in other tournaments are here, so you hope you get to face those teams here to get ready to go to Atlanta.

“And I know the second tournament in Atlanta, there’s no fat – (PG) totally trimmed the fat out of that one – and right off the bat you’re going to play elite teams.” Holbrook was referring to the 20-team 15u PG World Series slated for July 25-29 at PG Park South-LakePoint.

For his part, a top competitor like Morgan simply enjoys getting out and mixing it up with other top guys from across the country, and it doesn’t matter if the tournament is played in Florida or Georgia or anywhere else, or if the bats are made of wood or aluminum or titanium, for that matter.

While most of the teams here are based in Florida and Georgia, they’ve also arrived from states like New York, Connecticut, Maryland, Texas and several others; there is also a team from Puerto Rico. So, class is in session when it comes to learning from these players from outside of Florida.

“There can be different mindsets going into a game,” Morgan said. “Sometimes when face teams from, like, Puerto Rico or where ever, they’ll go small-ball, where we’re out here just hitting and doing our thing; it’s always something different.

“But there’s never really any stress (with this team),” he continued. “We can go out here and have fun and still get the job done, so it’s all good. … It’s pretty easy to get yourself up and get going with these guys, and we’re just hoping to make some memories out here.”

FTB Tucci Select 2020 is one of five teams the FTB organization has in the 15u PG BCS National Championship field. Holbrook explained the people at the top of the program try to enter as many teams as they possibly can into any given Perfect Game event because they can rest assured the event will be well-run and the competition will top-tier.

He also knows that his Select 2020 team is the most prominent of that group-of-five, and that they came here with that whole “unfinished business” thing as their calling card. In closing, it’s time to bring in the “e-word” again.

“These guys come in with big expectations,” Holbrook said. “They expect to get deep into this tournament, and if they don’t they would certainly consider that a bad week. They expect to be right at the end, whether it’s in the final-four in the (championship game) and winning it all. That’s what FTB expects out of this group and you’ve got to live up to that.”