Sooooo, travel ball is around 20 years old now (USSSA transitioned to handle other sports than softball in 1998). What is the state of travel ball in your opinion?
When my kid was young thousands of dollars and dozens of weekends spent focused on one child’s activities just didn’t seem like a good idea to us. The rumors did circle around that if you wanted your kid to make the high school team, he HAD to play travel ball. (This was more the case in a neighboring town where high school baseball was really big.) In our little town there weren’t that many kids playing travel ball, but other cities had their little leagues decimated – more than decimated – by travel baseball.
I always kind of figured that if I worked with my kid, he could be successful at baseball, and he has been pretty successful. I honestly don’t see where kids playing 100 or more games a year at 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14 really helped them that much compared to my son. A lot of them were fast growers and then petered out. They don't really seem to be dominant as a result of those years.
I wonder, is the cat out of the bag on youth travel ball teams now? The fact that they don’t really mean THAT much in the grand scheme of things; that many of them are really money making ploys, and that often kids are left broken in more ways than just physically by the travel ball experience.
Or are the same numbers of people participating?
Ps. I kind of see this as similar to the showcase thing. More people are starting to say, “No.” Even when I look up players on PG I notice that very few of them have showcase profiles. They will have a WWBA profile and that’s about it. Seems like summer teams are doing the job of selling the players now.
. Group younger than my son played in that regional, i think.
