Who's Getting Early Looks? 2030s Drawing Interest

College coaches have a lot on their plates right now when it comes to recruiting. They are finalizing their signing classes for 2026, making offers to 2027 prospects, and starting to get an idea for who they might want in the classes of 2028 and 2029. But although the class of 2030 is still in eighth grade, several players have already turned heads to the point where coaches have been forced to take a look.   Below, Prep Softball highlights five class of 2030 prospects who are already drawing interest from college softball coaches.    Brynlee Yates has future superstar written all over her, with the ability to bunt, slap and hit for power. At the prestigious Scenic City tournament over the summer, she batted .545 with a .688 on-base percentage, and she also gave up just five hits in seven innings pitched with seven strikeouts while reaching 60 miles per hour on her fastball. Her arsenal also includes a curveball, changeup and rise ball. Yates has a sharp eye at the plate, recognizing pitches immediately out of pitchers' hands and working the count in her favor. If she sees the same pitch in a similar location twice in an at-bat, she almost never misses it twice, often splitting the gaps for extra bases. Her outfield defense is outstanding as well, as she consistently takes hits away.     Madelyn Hall helped lead her team to a berth in the Alliance Fastpitch Championship Series in Indiana next summer, batting .556 with a .778 slugging percentage in the qualifying tournament. She is an excellent bad-ball hitter, lunging for pitches off the plate outside and still lining them sharply into the opposite-field gap for extra bases. Hall uses the whole field with great bat control and is a rock-solid defender behind the plate, sliding into the fence to catch foul pop-ups and firing bullets to second base to catch would-be base stealers. She slugged .737 as her team won the Triple Crown Sports Ronald McDonald Championship in October, scoring eight runs in as many games, and she can fill in at any outfield spot when she's not catching.     A USA Softball All-American and a 4.0-GPA student, Emma Kerr has it all going for her. She tracks down fly balls with the best of them in the outfield and also plays second base, and she hit an inside-the-park grand slam in June, racing all the way around the bases as the outfielders struggled to get the ball back in. That came a month after her first over-the-fence homer, which she hit while guest playing in a 14U tournament before officially moving up to that level. Kerr can also use an inside-out swing to collect opposite-field hits, and she racks up the travel miles, playing for an Iowa-based travel team despite living in north central Indiana. She has reached a top exit velocity of 68 miles per hour, with her longest hit landing 193 feet from home plate.     Sophie Dannenbring is a true two-way player who did not let a recent ankle injury slow her down. She returned in mid-October and was back in top form right away, hitting a laser beam over the fence in left-center field for a go-ahead home run. Few players in her class combine exit velocity and launch angle like Dannenbring, who hits the ball on the nose but manages to get enough air under it for her hits to carry beyond the wall. Dannenbring is from Sioux City, Iowa but played a national schedule over the summer, hitting six homers in her last five 12U tournaments before moving up to 14U for the fall. She was part of the USA Softball High Performance Program in 2024 and 2025, and can both pitch and play shortstop.     Taylor Kruse had a spectacular summer, striking out 210 batters in 145 1/3 innings pitched. She was more up and down in the fall after transitioning to a 43-foot distance between the rubber and home plate while facing several older teams, but she was still effective with her drop ball, changeup, curveball and rise ball. Kruse picked up her 1,000th strikeout in October, doing so in 538 innings of work. Coming from Buffalo, which consistently produces top-end softball talent despite its climate, Kruse works with Sydney Berzon, who also grew up in Buffalo and transferred from LSU to Oklahoma this year. Kruse is tough on both righties and lefties, and her off-speed rise leads batters to swing awkwardly, as they realize a moment too late that the pitch is not in the strike zone.

College coaches have a lot on their plates right now when it comes to recruiting. They are finalizing their signing classes for 2026, making offers to 2027 prospects, and starting to get an idea for who they might want in the classes of 2028 and 2029. But although the class of 2030 is still in eighth grade, several players have already turned heads to the point where coaches have been forced to take a look.