In the preteen years I put together a travel team that was a prep team for LL all stars. The roster was the fifteen mostly likely kids to be the eleven or twelve to make all stars. The idea was to play better competition than the LL regular season on Sunday and teach a team full of p, c, ss and cf how to play their potential all star position. I picked my coaches not the league. But they were dads from the league.
When my son was eleven during a rain delay of a LL all star game I chatted with the opposing coach. We decided to out together a team at 13u of kids we felt would be fun to train into high school players for three years and had real talent. We both played college ball. We started keeping track of the best players in our LL district. We also started investigating the dads for who played college ball and would be interested in instructing and coaching. The big draw to the team was a pitching coach who an SEC All American and made it to AAA. The fee to play was whatever covered costs. It was about $600 to play ten tournaments.
When my son got to varsity I asked him how knowledgeable the coaching staff was with instruction. He said very good. But he had already learned everything they were teaching from the travel team coaching staff.
Not every dad with a kid playing baseball has my background. I know a dad who found a dad who played college ball and put together the same kind of team. All the dad who started the team did was recruit players and administration. This team was also about $600 per summer.
If my kid was asked to play for a team with four dad coaches I would start with questions to make sure it’s not daddy ball. My first two questions would be 1) What positions do the coach’s kids play? 2) Is it warranted? In my team’s situation my son was his school’s shortstop and didn’t win the starting shortstop job on the travel team. We had three players who became all conference shortstops at their high school.
Some of our players also got instruction at academies. But it was their choice. I called the academies to make sure the kids weren’t being pulled in two directions with instruction.