re: Tournament Baseball is a scam

there's bad coaching at every single level of baseball...every one

there's a lot of 'coaches' who are nothing more than Dads who played HS ball all over youth baseball. A lot of the elite team coaches I've met are in the same boat.

I think having bad coaches from age 8-14 can be overcome pretty easily. To be honest most players are pretty terrible in HS and don't really reach any potential until college or beyond.

The reason my aunt and uncle allowed him to play on this team is the coaching he had every year was atrocious. I had to teach him how to hold the ball and the bat this year. The coach had changed him up and it was just bad. Anyway, they really like Tim and thought it was a good chance for him to be taught by a much better coach/teacher.

LSU3520...so what's your background and story?

I'm probably not even worthy to be on the same board with you according to certain posters.

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Being an outstanding player and a coach is very different to say the least.

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This is very true. When you look at what I did as a player, all you see is a career .250 hitter who played high school ball and was locked into playing second base because he had a weak arm. Nothing special at all. Very average.

What you can't see are the hundreds of hours spent researching fundamentals, strategy, mechanics, psychology and motivation that makes me a coach. There's a lot more to coaching baseball than your experience playing the game. If you want to be a coach, you have to be a student first. And your teachers are your peers, your players, your parents and your own mistakes. Your first step is realizing that you don't know everything.

Sometimes... not all the time... but sometimes, a player who enjoyed great success in baseball makes the mistake of believing he knows it all... and that's not exactly the best foundation upon which to build a coach.

SpqrTiger,

I like everything that you have posted. It is good to know that there are still others that realize youth baseball is not a win at all costs war. How do I sign someone up at your program?

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I can tell you that there is a difference in the freshman and sophmores on his team between the rec player and travel players. Not in talent necessarily, but in knowledge of the game and experience.

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this big advantage in knowledge and experience is pretty useless at such a young age OTHER than beating kids of similar age

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I have coached youth baseball in Baton Rouge for many years, and I can tell you definitively that tournament baseball and "travel teams" are not the only way to have a good, rewarding experience playing baseball. I'm not going to sit here and list the evils of tournament baseball. It works for some people, so good for them. What I'm going to do instead is remind people that there actually ARE other ways of playing baseball, with a more traditional model, at a lot less cost in time and money for parents.

My team is not a tournament team. We are a league team. We play at Cypress Mounds, and we couldn't care less what tournament is held on any given weekend or who wins what trumped-up "state championship" that's being played every month. We play for one reason only - because we love baseball.

We don't play 50 games a year. We play 25. One league season. That's it. Every kid walks away in early summer knowing that he's played his fill of baseball in the spring, and can enjoy the rest of his summer. In the fall, they can play or watch all the football they want. Baseball doesn't get in the way of anything until January, when we start full team practice.

It doesn't cost $2,000 a year to play for my team. It costs $250. Just enough to cover the Cypress Mounds league fee and supplement uniform costs. We re-use our uniforms every year.

We don't have win-at-all-costs or professional coaches. We just focus on having fun, learning the game and being competitive with our peers. And you know what? We still beat plenty of tournament teams.

We aren't affiliated with a school or a church or any sort of organization. No two kids on my team go to the same school. I have white kids and black kids, rich kids and poor kids, big kids and little kids on the roster.

We don't tell our players that they will be playing college ball one day. We focus on the here and now. Why? Because I know that the average Little League baseball player faces 1 in 100 odds of playing college ball, and right now 100% of them are playing Little League ball. My goal is to teach my players enough technique, skill and team knowledge to be a viable candidate for a high school team. I want to create the best environment for playing baseball for these kids RIGHT NOW, because I know it is highly likely that this will be the only baseball they will ever play, and I want it to be good for them.

There are still plenty of coaches like me who would prefer to focuse on league play, and only want to play other teams like us. Unfortunately, teams like us get rarer and rarer as the kids get older (we are an 11 year old team). All coaches like me need is more support from parents, who need to wake up and understand that this arms escalation in youth baseball is entirely self-created. You don't have to get caught up in keeping up with the Joneses. Many coaches don't even want to get involved with tournament play. They only do it because they believe that's what their parents want, and that's what they need to do to keep their players on their team.

Coaches like me are out there, and they're being out-gunned by teams with 15 youth superstars... because parents FLOCK to those teams. Stop flocking to them!

Ask yourself why you want your kid to play baseball. Is it because you want him to get a college scholarship to play baseball? Is it because you want him to play high school baseball? Would he answer that question the same way you would? Then maybe you should seek out professional coaching and tournament environments.

But I suspect that MOST kids just want playing time and want to have fun. If thay's what your kid is saying, then you need to come see me and coaches like me, and stop abandoning teams like us for the green grass of tournament ball. Because there's a reason why teams like mine are rare these days. And it has NOTHING to do with our will ... or ability... to coach.

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/end thread

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What age group do you coach?

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Unfortunately, teams like us get rarer and rarer as the kids get older (we are an 11 year old team).

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travel teams are a huge waste of time until you are in high school

too many kids peak, crap out, or burn out from those travel teams