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Posted on 4/10/26 at 9:24 pm to High C
Travel ball has all these kids and I am talking high school thinking they will be playing at LSU. Well maybe not the kid maybe it’s the dad thinking that. So consequently the kids want to play only one sport. It is called Specialization. Years ago you had 2 and 3 sport athletes who enjoyed playing everything also you didn’t have the injuries you had today because of over use. It is the same thing for travel basketball. Any coach will tell you one sport helps the other, but not the father who thinks junior is the next Mike Trout. Listen to the podcast with Steve Kerr, Dave Roberts, and Pete Carrol the pros want kids that have played more than one sport. There is always time to specialize. Will we ever have another Bo Jackson, Deion Sanders,Dave Winfield, Jim Brown.
Posted on 4/10/26 at 10:12 pm to High C
Damn, i have 2 daughters and I thought volleyball was bad.
Baseball travel leagues seem like a whole other level of obsession.
Baseball travel leagues seem like a whole other level of obsession.
Posted on 4/10/26 at 11:53 pm to blueboxer1119
quote:
non athletes
quote:
Baseball
quote:
non athletic
Baseball is hardly even a sport.
Posted on 4/11/26 at 12:11 am to High C
I played for the "Sheriff's Department" Little League team in Vidalia, LA.
In Pony League (summer after 9th grade) in Kosciusko, MS I played for "Ivey's Plumbing". There was no travel ball in the small towns I lived in during that time (the 60's and 70's).
In Pony League (summer after 9th grade) in Kosciusko, MS I played for "Ivey's Plumbing". There was no travel ball in the small towns I lived in during that time (the 60's and 70's).
Posted on 4/11/26 at 1:03 am to SlowFlowPro
Great video. 777 will be here shortly to tell you that Junior needs the reps year round against elite competition to make varsity at his 6A HS in North Texas.
Around the 15:00 mark, he makes a good point. If you have to spend money on top shelf equipment, lessons, nutritional supplements, and pay-to-play leagues in the Fall, maybe your kid isn’t cut out to be a D1 or pro athlete. I’d wager that phenoms like Bryce Harper weren’t good because they finished HS early and played with college talent while high school aged, they did that because they were good. Ditto for IMG Academy. You go there because you are elite, you aren’t elite because you chose IMG.
Parents have also taken the fun out of sports. Without fun, your $50K to make Brackstynn a star will go to waste when he’s burned out at 21. Or better yet, it will go to waste anyway when José from the Dominican Republic flashes a glove like you’ve never seen and Miguel from Venezuela parlayed a broomstick as an bat into 40+ home run potential.
Private equity deserves blame, but so do unrealistic parents who buy into the idea that this is the only way.
Around the 15:00 mark, he makes a good point. If you have to spend money on top shelf equipment, lessons, nutritional supplements, and pay-to-play leagues in the Fall, maybe your kid isn’t cut out to be a D1 or pro athlete. I’d wager that phenoms like Bryce Harper weren’t good because they finished HS early and played with college talent while high school aged, they did that because they were good. Ditto for IMG Academy. You go there because you are elite, you aren’t elite because you chose IMG.
Parents have also taken the fun out of sports. Without fun, your $50K to make Brackstynn a star will go to waste when he’s burned out at 21. Or better yet, it will go to waste anyway when José from the Dominican Republic flashes a glove like you’ve never seen and Miguel from Venezuela parlayed a broomstick as an bat into 40+ home run potential.
Private equity deserves blame, but so do unrealistic parents who buy into the idea that this is the only way.
Posted on 4/11/26 at 2:40 am to ReauxlTide222
quote:
It took precedents over anything
Leave it to a gump to not know how to spell precedence.
Posted on 4/11/26 at 5:51 am to NIH
quote:
lsu777 is about to blow your dumbass up. If you spend $250k to get your kids a free ride to LSU Eunice you do it every time.
Fack me, I laughed hard
Posted on 4/11/26 at 6:46 am to TexasTiger08
quote:
777 will be here shortly to tell you that Junior needs the reps year round against elite competition to make varsity at his 6A HS in North Texas.
He lives where I do. Sadly if you want to play HS ball here it's true.
But we have probably the best baseball high school of all time and the other local high schools have caught up. When I played ball 30+ years ago it was true that if you weren't on the right all star tram by like 6th grade, your odds of making Barbe were almost 0
That culture has completely permeated all ball, though. There were 2 rec leagues when I was kid and the top talent was still produced.
But I can also say the odds weren't 0, because a kid I became good friends with moved here from TX and made the team (ended up the #1 starter our senior year and later played college ball)
Posted on 4/11/26 at 7:11 am to SlowFlowPro
Rec league seems fairly strong where I’m at. More kids playing soccer and lacrosse but the baseball fields get a lot of use. Most of the travel ball kids still play rec league here from the people I know.
Posted on 4/11/26 at 7:35 am to SlowFlowPro
quote:
When I played ball 30+ years ago it was true that if you weren't on the right all star tram by like 6th grade, your odds of making Barbe were almost 0
But is that the chicken or the egg?
Like did they have a monopoly on the good kids vs there actually being a benefit to your skill to be on that team?
Posted on 4/11/26 at 7:38 am to dirtsandwich
My philosophy on this stuff is that the same kids who would make the elite high schools and/or go to college/pro would do this in the old rec league style or the new travel ball style. It's not like MLB players have become so amazing over the past 20 years compared to those in the past (and baseball is the sport that translates best over history).
The middling/bad kids today are much better, though. This creates effectively a self-fulfilling prophecy where so many of these kids have been removed from rec pools that the only ones left in rec are the kids who fail PE. So if you want to be just a kid, you have to play travel ball and devote crazy amounts of time to be middling within travel ball, with no hope of this meaning anything long-term (I mean who gives a shite if average middle school kids today are much better than average middle school kids 30 years ago?).
It's just insane. Devoting all of this time, money, effort, and losing real family/personal time just to be a more advanced mediocre player. Then the culture grows and creates excuses as to how this is the new normal and is totally rational, when it's pretty insane.
If you're going to devote these resources to set your kids up for a better future, there are MUCH better outlets that have much better long-lasting results. Chess, coding, robotics, music, reading properly, art...hell even spelling or just tutoring. Oh I have a good one: foreign languages. Any of these things will help a kid be in a much better position to get a scholarship and succeed in college/life long-term. Much more than baseball or hockey.
And if your kid isn't smart enough to benefit from these things, there are other outlets. Basically the "trade school" stuff like cars, basic electronics, etc.
*ETA: and before people who support travel ball come in and say that those outlets are gay and sports are better for bonding, etc. Sure, but the travel ball culture ruined that. Hence the self-fulfilling prophecy. Kill travel ball and go back to a more sane rec format and your kids can do both social ball (that will have no long term impact) and an actually positive outlet (which will have a long term impact).
The middling/bad kids today are much better, though. This creates effectively a self-fulfilling prophecy where so many of these kids have been removed from rec pools that the only ones left in rec are the kids who fail PE. So if you want to be just a kid, you have to play travel ball and devote crazy amounts of time to be middling within travel ball, with no hope of this meaning anything long-term (I mean who gives a shite if average middle school kids today are much better than average middle school kids 30 years ago?).
It's just insane. Devoting all of this time, money, effort, and losing real family/personal time just to be a more advanced mediocre player. Then the culture grows and creates excuses as to how this is the new normal and is totally rational, when it's pretty insane.
If you're going to devote these resources to set your kids up for a better future, there are MUCH better outlets that have much better long-lasting results. Chess, coding, robotics, music, reading properly, art...hell even spelling or just tutoring. Oh I have a good one: foreign languages. Any of these things will help a kid be in a much better position to get a scholarship and succeed in college/life long-term. Much more than baseball or hockey.
And if your kid isn't smart enough to benefit from these things, there are other outlets. Basically the "trade school" stuff like cars, basic electronics, etc.
*ETA: and before people who support travel ball come in and say that those outlets are gay and sports are better for bonding, etc. Sure, but the travel ball culture ruined that. Hence the self-fulfilling prophecy. Kill travel ball and go back to a more sane rec format and your kids can do both social ball (that will have no long term impact) and an actually positive outlet (which will have a long term impact).
This post was edited on 4/11/26 at 7:44 am
Posted on 4/11/26 at 7:42 am to GeauxTigers123
quote:
Like did they have a monopoly on the good kids vs there actually being a benefit to your skill to be on that team?
It's just an odds thing. Barbe was so elite (the gap has closed now but nobody was close back then) that if you weren't at that level by that age, it was just unlikely you could catch up. There wasn't this huge gap in training back in those days like there is now, so kids in the SLC little league (the better of the 2, whose all star team was basically the Barbe farm team) were still competing with the kids who would end up at Barbe. They could theoretically move up to all stars.
This kind of goes into what I said in my other post just before this one, where I think the same kids would rise to the top in either system. All that travel ball is doing is raising the level of the lower/middling/mediocre players higher (which gives their parents a false sense of hope that their middling/mediocre player-child will turn out great).
Posted on 4/11/26 at 8:05 am to Drewbie
quote:
After that I played for the Brewers, Dodgers x2, Cubs x2, and Red Sox x2.
This is the right way.
Posted on 4/11/26 at 8:52 am to High C
In Ascension Parish, it seems to be striving. They have around 1,500 boys playing in the program. Only about 200 of them play travel ball. It is good for travel ball coaches to let their players play rec too. I have seen some real good coaching when I am watching my grandson. The fields they play on are horrible though. They do have some bad travel baseball teams that start up from this league. Last year a rec team beat one of those travel teams in a scrimmage badly.
Posted on 4/11/26 at 9:34 am to High C
in some areas it is growing, but it's all 12 and below.
Posted on 4/11/26 at 10:05 am to choupiquesushi
quote:
in some areas it is growing, but it's all 12 and below.
The younger age groups are still ok in my local rec league. You really see the drop off after 8U in number of kids playing. I think that by then the better players have moved on to travel ball, and the lower end players realize it’s not for them and stop playing baseball altogether.
Posted on 4/11/26 at 10:12 am to SlowFlowPro
quote:
It's not like MLB players have become so amazing over the past 20 years compared to those in the past
They have though… especially the pitchers… you can’t make the big leagues now without stuff that would have been electric 20 years ago. And fielding has improved like that too
Posted on 4/11/26 at 10:27 am to High C
Rec = 1 game per week. Baseball is awesome. The more baseball the better.
Maybe the solution is to join multiple rec teams. We did rec until 8u. We didn’t switch to tournament ball because of status, we just wanted to play and practice more because son loved baseball and was kind of all he wanted to do.
Maybe the solution is to join multiple rec teams. We did rec until 8u. We didn’t switch to tournament ball because of status, we just wanted to play and practice more because son loved baseball and was kind of all he wanted to do.
Posted on 4/11/26 at 11:23 am to SlowFlowPro
The biggest difference I see is that there are no longer vacant lots where kids to play sandlot ball. When I lived in Kosciusko, MS we had a fenced in field that the owner bush hogged in the summer just so we could play. He had a grown son and the neighborhood kids played there when he was home. Nobody would do that today because if a kid got hurt, parents would sue the owner of the field today. There was another field at the other end of our street that younger kids played on. Our field had a piece of a shingle as home plate and bricks or rocks for bases. The small kids field didn't even have bases.
Even though we had the field in our neighborhood, we would sometimes ride our bikes across town and play on the city Little League fields during the day. All of our games were at night. Teams didn't reserve them and there were no locks on the gates to keep us out. Just like with the field the individual neighbor owned, the city probably locks the fields when they aren't in use because the parents of a kid that might get hurt would sue the city for not supervising the kids. They'd probably be fully booked for someone's practices anyway. All you needed was a bat, a couple of balls, and as long as half the kids had gloves to share with the other team, you could play all day. Just remember to go home for supper. The world's just a lot less fun today.
ETA:
Sandlot ball is where I developed my love for the game. I really didn't have fun playing Little League because my dad was my coach. He yelled at my brothers and I just like he did at home. The one summer I played Pony League ball was for another kids dad. Maybe because I had two older brothers to compete against, & turning 15 in January of my freshman year, I was the best player on the team. I had lots of fun playing on that team. Our coach let me switch hit and batted me at clean up.
I never went out for my high school team. Maybe because I thought football was my game. The only other time I played on a team was American Legion ball after my sophomore year of college. After I got to know one of his assistant coaches, I had a try out for Coach Lou St. Amant, when I was going to NLU/ULM. I didn't make the team, but he needed a short stop and I was an outfielder who had played 1st base & had caught some.
Even though we had the field in our neighborhood, we would sometimes ride our bikes across town and play on the city Little League fields during the day. All of our games were at night. Teams didn't reserve them and there were no locks on the gates to keep us out. Just like with the field the individual neighbor owned, the city probably locks the fields when they aren't in use because the parents of a kid that might get hurt would sue the city for not supervising the kids. They'd probably be fully booked for someone's practices anyway. All you needed was a bat, a couple of balls, and as long as half the kids had gloves to share with the other team, you could play all day. Just remember to go home for supper. The world's just a lot less fun today.
ETA:
Sandlot ball is where I developed my love for the game. I really didn't have fun playing Little League because my dad was my coach. He yelled at my brothers and I just like he did at home. The one summer I played Pony League ball was for another kids dad. Maybe because I had two older brothers to compete against, & turning 15 in January of my freshman year, I was the best player on the team. I had lots of fun playing on that team. Our coach let me switch hit and batted me at clean up.
I never went out for my high school team. Maybe because I thought football was my game. The only other time I played on a team was American Legion ball after my sophomore year of college. After I got to know one of his assistant coaches, I had a try out for Coach Lou St. Amant, when I was going to NLU/ULM. I didn't make the team, but he needed a short stop and I was an outfielder who had played 1st base & had caught some.
This post was edited on 4/11/26 at 11:54 am
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