re: Tournament Baseball is a scam

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you're not developed

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that's the part that's insane

YOU CAN'T PROJECT HOW AN 8-9 YEAR OLD WILL DEVELOP AFTER PUBERTY

what's there to learn?

you can't teach kids to throw 95+.

My dominican example is my biggest argument against kids playing for these elite teams.

You'd do just as well playing locally and playing a bunch with your friends. When you get to a point where your skill set is developing (HS) then it makes some more sense.

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how hard is it to learn baseball at an advanced level at 13+?

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most good position players have been playing baseball since a very young age.

you wont find many good baseball players that start at 13.


as for my traveling team experience, we didnt pay a dime. The parents paid for their kids, and it was mostly for fun. I guess that is why. Though the other teams took it much more seriously

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but the argument for the tournament people is that it teaches them at an advanced level of baseball for ages 8-10 (or so)

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i think that is over exaggerated. most kids dont have MLB on their mind at that age.

i think most just pay to play to have fun. Sure, some take it overboard, but i think its more about fun that advancing development. Because like you said, only so much can be done at that age.

is tournament baseball not played when other leagues are being run?

i dont know, i know we used to play after the season was over. Not so much fall baseball, just like an extended season.

im not really in touch anymore, so i could be wrong.

if so, that def changes my opinion slightly. Though i dont know the reasons behind them doing that.

a lot of tournament teams are close to being year round. It's nuts how much they play/practice.

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a lot of tournament teams are close to being year round.

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what gets me is that by playing baseball year-round, you miss out on other sports

i wish i wasn't baseball only as a kid. it really put me behind in basketball and football

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Maybe that way we can get more homegrown soccer talent.

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you don't know how mad i am that i never got the chance

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.