The 5 Steps To Youth Baseball Success: Part 2

The Playing Options: The Truth About Youth Baseball Options (Travel Ball)

Travel ball or tournament baseball, either way it’s still all travel ball. There’s lots of pluses and minuses. I’ll start with the advantages. One is that if you want to play travel ball, your child will typically be around better and stronger players. In general, they’re not going to have as many of the weak links that you would have on a Little League team with a travel ball team.

Additionally, you’re going to have fewer parent coaches. With fewer parent coaches, you’re going to get more professional coaches. Typically, you still might have some parent coaches, but usually they may be trained a little bit more, have more high school playing, or have a collegiate playing background. Another perk is that you’re going to play a lot of games, sometimes up to four or five, six games a week or a weekend. This can be good, but it also has its downsides too, granted, you do get a lot of baseball in.

One of the downsides is that “winning is everything”

You sign up for tournaments to try and win a trophy every single weekend. So this win at all costs model does wear off some of the fabric of how we designed the youth experience. It may not work out well for some of the kids that may not be the most competitive on the team because it’s so focused on winning, and winning, and winning instead of the process of just getting better game to game, which you typically get through more of a league structure like in Little League.

Next, is that your schedule in travel ball is going to be totally unpredictable. I mean, we’re talking about unpredictable locations, game times, and unpredictable opponents.

You might sign up for a low-level AA tournament and it doesn’t fill. So they’re just going to put you in a Majors or AAA tournament where you can get beat three times in a row, have three games over the course of the weekend, and your child will get five, six at bats, which is not very good. The unpredictability is problematic as well.

I said lots of games are a perk, but there could be a serious downside to it too. In fact, I know many collegiate coaches that will not recruit, or they will look elsewhere other than for travel ball players. They don’t want travel ballplayers, or at least that travel ball player that’s been playing year round since they were 8, 9, 10 yrs. old, because they’re more susceptible to burnout, and their bodies are more susceptible to get hurt because they’ve just been putting so much wear and tear on their ligaments and joints throughout their years.

A lot of travel ball players will end up getting Tommy John because their arm care has not been managed appropriately. Five games a weekend, which is often what you get on a travel ball experience, is risky because your body is not meant to play five games in a weekend. The professional athletes that have been training their whole lives and have the best strength trainers in the world, they don’t play five games in a weekend.

Why are we subjecting a ten-year-old to play five games on a weekend? He pitched on a Saturday and we’re going to throw them out there, catch games and play shortstop on a Sunday? Not good for their mind, not good for their bodies and will cause some burnout.

There’s high costs whether you have to pay to play to get into watch your kids, pay for expensive bats, jerseys, uniforms, and the travel ball team itself. You may have to drive and fly or stay in hotels. There can be some serious high costs. With a profit driven model, there’s not that handcrafted element that you’ll get with playing in a Little League where they’ll make decisions with the kids in mind first.

Their decisions are made with profits in mind first. So you’re going to be playing through rain, hail sleet. It doesn’t matter. 8AM in the morning till 11:30 at night, you’re going to be playing games. Because the more games they play, the more money they’ll make. Lastly, there’s no need to travel at the age of 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, or 14 yrs. old.

We don’t need to go to Arizona to play a team from Florida. We can play a team from Gilroy in our hometown and it’s the same level of talent. You don’t get any better playing a team from San Diego that you would from playing a team in Redwood City. You just don’t. There’s good talent right around here in the Bay Area. So it’s just unnecessary, especially at that age.

So,Travel ball suggestions…First off, I don’t believe travel ball should even exist before Little League. Why are we teaching nine and ten, eleven year olds how to take a lead or how to hold a runner at second base, or how to hold a run at first base?

They don’t need that. They need to learn how to feel, how to throw properly, how to field a ground ball, how to support their teammates. They’re just not working on the right stuff. So I think that for Little Leaguers there’s no room for travel ball. If you’re 12 years old and under, just wait until Little League is over.

There are all different types of travel ball.

So make sure you find the right fit and the right level for your child, it’s super important. You never want to throw your kid in there with a team that’s been around forever and is going to be playing at the majors level if your kids never played travel ball, and he’s not at that level. So make sure you get in with not just the right program, but the program that’s at the right level.

When it comes to picking your travel ball provider, look for good human beings first, it’s super important. Look for the type of organizational leader that you’d want to babysit your kids. For instance, people that you trust, people that you know are going to put people before profits, very important. If it feels slimy, if you’re going to go to a tryout and they’re evaluating your child like it’s some division one showcase combine – that feels a little slimy to me, I would go in a different direction for sure.

Go with a program that’s a little bit more kid friendly and fun. Focus on creating a meaningful experience with the kids and not just creating a winning program. Lastly, is to watch a practice and how the games are run. Is it just the coach hitting ground balls out there, or are they really just giving a quality instruction?

Do they have a good ratio or are they throwing out two coaches with fifteen players? These are things that I would be considering when considering travel ball.