re: The Failure of Travel Ball

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Pros; BrayJayDyynn will get a scholarship, everyone gets together for "Ball Mom" pics, I've got sweet Tshirts that say "Ball Dad".

Cons; We've run out of room for all of his "World Series Rings", recently learned the hitting coach is not a tax deduction, my Hotels.com account hasn't comped me my free room yet.

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Nobody does that.

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Travel and tournament ball is the death of moderately talented kids learning and getting better through rec play. It seems like you are either on a team of beginners or on a weekly tournament team.

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This is most every sport. Hate it. After about 10 it’s all or nothing. Basically parents shell out thousands and basically have one parent available to drive at 4:00 pm every weekday

I’m not a knee jerk defender of so-called travel baseball, especially for younger kids, but let’s not act like non-travel kids are getting developed (or would be getting developed, if travel didn’t exist) better in their local rec league than they are by playing travel.

The level of coaching in travel is certainly not always good and often downright bad, but that goes doubly for rec baseball, to the extent it still exists.

This is an interesting discussion. One question I have is whether kids of all income levels in the DR or wherever have access to better coaching than most American kids do, and if so, why?

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Kids in Argentina probably play +40 hours a week because they don't have anything else to do

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I don’t think Argentina is the example you want to use here. I’m not sure any of these countries would really merit “the kids are good at sports because they have nothing else to do”.

I think that’s the wrong explanation, for both soccer and baseball.

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Yeah they just have the most popular sport in the world pulling them away

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Yeah. How many star soccer players come from Japan, Korea, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico?

As for other nations, yes, Soccer is king. But we're not talking about European kids being better developed than US kids in Baseball, are we?

If you don't see that today's American kids have far more options to pursue being an athlete than most other countries, man, all I can say is you need to get out and see the world a little bit.

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Nobody does that.

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You would have better results trying to convince a brick wall that he's a concrete sidewalk.

The people with incorrect negative views don't want to be enlightened, out of fear of having to admit they were actually wrong about something.

My son has been playing select ball for just over 3 years now. He's always been undersized, so the dad coaches on the rec teams always wanted to just push him into right field and have him bat 9th. Never mind he hit better than their kids and could actually throw strikes.

So now we're in a program with zero dad coaches. Every coach we have played D1 ball. Half of them made it to various stages of pro-ball (2 spent over 5 years in MLB). So yeah, now my kid is getting actual coaching instruction from baseball dudes that know the process and he is competing hard against kids a year older than him. That's a big deal in the 13/14u world. And he's on track to play for his high school which is one of the top 6A schools in the state.

He'd never have the opportunity if these so-called experts had their way and killed select ball. Will he play in college? I'm pretty sure he'll get to play at some juco, which will be perfectly fine by him. Will he be a pro ball player? Nah, not a chance. But at least he's playing past 12 years old, which is when the majority of the rec-ball players give up on the sport, because they never actually learned how to play baseball. They merely learned how to watch the coach's kids be stars on their daddy's teams.

All that said, yes, there are some entitled dickhead parents at almost every tournament we play at... and 100%, those parents are supporting teams that are comprised of dad-coached teams.

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So now we're in a program with zero dad coaches. Every coach we have played D1 ball. Half of them made it to various stages of pro-ball (2 spent over 5 years in MLB). So yeah, now my kid is getting actual coaching instruction from baseball dudes that know the process and he is competing hard against kids a year older than him. That's a big deal in the 13/14u world. And he's on track to play for his high school which is one of the top 6A schools in the state.

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And how much is that setting you back?

There’s at least a few problems with the way we are doing it:
1. Cuts out too many kids
2. Too many games / too few practice reps at a young age
3. Poor coaching, lack of fundamentals instruction and reps at a young age.

You say former D1 guys are coaching your son, but that doesn’t make them as good as the guys coaching kids in the DR. Coaching is more about a philosophy and instructional ability than it is about anything else, especially the coach’s accomplishments as a player.
And then what are their motivations/goals? I think economics makes it more about winning games than developing players.

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Travel and tournament ball is the death of moderately talented kids learning and getting better through rec play. It seems like you are either on a team of beginners or on a weekly tournament team.

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Then again, my moderately talented nephew played nothing but rec ball, made his HS team, and was starting by the time he was a senior. Maybe because the more talented kids who played every weekend on a travel team were burnt out and quit baseball at 15.

What high school was this for context? So many variables in place. Travel ball prices out the poorer kids is always the argument but the same thing isn’t said for AAU basketball.