@anotherparent posted:The angst is because if you are not on one of those top teams, you get to the big tournaments and realize how useless it is for recruiting, and that you are playing at high schools all over the area, and then you wonder why you are spending all that money.
But really people should be angry with their travel teams for pushing them to those tournaments, rather than the tournaments for grabbing for the money. If there were more honesty in recruiting, those tournaments would not be nearly as large. But there is so much ignorance about recruiting that when you are told "you want to be on this team because it goes to Georgia", if you don't know better (we did not) you just do it.
On the other hand, it is fun to hang with the top teams and sometimes beat them, or to have a personal good game against a top competitor, and I do think the players learn a lot through competing against tougher competition than they would find at home.
This should really be its own thread about travel teams and recruiting.
Should be time and date appropriate. A summer tourney in GA is not the same as an instructional camp on a GA college campus in Jan, Feb.
This is why so many really good players suffer injury before college.
Big part of it is parents thinking their son may miss out on being seen.