baseball

[acmom]

We are not a baseball family but many friends are. Around here we have several facilities that offer off-season skills/coaching/batting practice. I would look into him working with a trainer at a facility over the winter and see if he likes it and how he does. That should give you an idea of what will be a fit for him when baseball starts.

This is a good idea. The organization/travel team that my son plays for offers hitting/pitching/catching clinics as well as options to play on a winter league "house" team, both of which are open to anyone, without trying out or joining the travel team. A lot of the travel team kids do the hitting/pitching/catching clinics but also have a separate team practice/skills development time, which is not open to others.

For our travel teams, the tryouts for next year's team already occurred (they happen in late Aug/early Sept). Team activities will start in Nov with indoor practices and leagues through the winter (if Covid allows that this year) and then move outside in the spring. They start outdoor tournaments in late spring and those run through July/early Aug.

Around here, most younger players that do travel, play rec as well so that they are eligible for "All Stars" and the tournaments that lead into the Little League World Series. The travel teams take that into account and reduce their schedules during the rec Little League season.

[hellokitty]

My youngest does travel ball (his older brother does club and rec and never did travel, but will be doing high school). I call ours, "travel ball lite." We mostly stay within our region, only having to do overnight stays 2x during the summer season. Travel ball is very consuming and expensive, your life gets turned upside down. We have two other boys, so that is one reason why we stayed with the, "travel lite" team, bc we cannot literally go out of town each weekend, for the sake of our other two kids' activities and also bc my husband takes 50% call for his job, so he literally cannot leave the our area when on call for work.

What we have seen happen to kids who do travel ball is that there is usually an, "in" crowd, they tend to be favorites and get more playtime. Then they always have kids who are the backup kids. Very good players by rec standards, not quite as strong by travel standards. They are the first ones to get benches, consistently play outfield. If the coach is good, the kid won't feel bad about it, but a lot of travel coaches from my experience have an unhealthy obsession with winning and it can be very hurtful to kids, even if they otherwise felt good about their performance and role on the team. Both of my boys who've played baseball had had a lot of tears, even kids on the team who are the top players cry. It's a hard sport, you have to hit a ball with a freakin' stick, even pro players don't have the best stats, but kids don't know that.

So, anyway, make sure if he does travel he is with a team with good culture. The one we are in now has pretty good culture. Many of the parents, like us are in healthcare, due to having to work a variety of ALL days of the year, many, like us cannot do a true travel ball schedule, it's just not possible. So, I feel like we got pretty lucky that we got into a good group. My son's been on this team going into 4 years now, so it's mostly the same boys, we consistently lose one and then replace with one or two for a variety of reasons. There are some other really gung ho travel teams in our area, the one for our district, I hate the dad who is the coach, he is a jerk, so we didn't even want our son to try out for that team. He teaches his own kids to be super aggressive and we have two kids from his team who came over to our team that said it was a night and day difference in the overall team dynamics and the parents were really upset bc their boys weren't the favorites and didn't get much play time, yet they are paying gobs of fees, plus hotel and travel expenses, etc.. As long as you know what it will look like, it helps a lot. We never realized until we got into how crazy it could be and just lucked into a team that worked out for us.

[westwoodmom04]

My kids play a lot of different sports, but travel baseball was by far my least favorite. Mostly because of the role of parent coaches. Most travel/club programs move to paid coaches pretty quickly but in baseball, it seems to be only the truly elite teams. Everywhere else, it’s some ridiculously unneeded high number of parent coaches (five coaches for a dozen kids), most of whom are there to fight for their own kids playing time and position. It seemed pretty typically that one or two of the coach’s kids would be really good, and the rest would be among the worst on the team, but be the kids playing the more skilled positions with painful results. Add in that the games suck up at least one full afternoon of each weekend. It’s kind of sad because I think youth baseball os responsible for its own demise. Lacrosse games are much shorter, faster paced, and the dominated by the paid coach model at the travel level, at least here in the mid-Atlantic, and have become far more popular.