We committed to baseball and because my two boys were a few years apart, did pretty much nothing but baseball all summer as we shuffled between two teams, sometimes states apart.
As a parent whose kids are well past that stage, looking back, I might have done things different. My boys missed out on fishing trips, family vacations, etc....
As the "Got the Call" topic gets going, everyone is going to have to go through that sooner or later. Don't look back and wonder where the years went. "Got the call" (kind of) with the oldest when, because of injuries and surgery, he had to hang them up. Hopefully won't "get the call" with the youngest for awhile, but there are no guarantee's in life.
Maybe we should have kept it "more laid back" baseball wise and still had the time for living.
I just have a hard time telling 13 yo's to decide what they want to do at the risk of everything else. I coached a travel team through 14U. We didn't have the extensive schedule they do nowadays, but if we couldn't field a team a certain weekend, we didn't go to the tournament. It wasn't life or death.
Hope this makes sense. I'm not that good with words (eh Chill?
).