Skip to main content

Should I sign up my son for travel ball? No, let's play more wiffle ball


As soon as I had my first son, Mason, I would joke with my friends that we were going to train him to be a left-handed pitcher.  A Southpaw.  Daddy's retirement fund.  Maybe even daddy's unfulfilled dreams.

 Oh, how dumb I was.

 In the years since, I have been lucky and blessed enough to have two additional sons.  I've also gone on to coach several youth teams. 

 It started out fun.  We were learning together, growing, developing. 

 After a year or so, the hyper competitiveness kicked in.  The attitude of the players changed into "haves" and "have nots" very quickly.  Some kids would hold themselves in higher regard because they made a certain travel team.  The other kids inevitably felt excluded for no good particular reason.

 It bothers me. 

 The expectation is that my son needs to play on the travel team.  Somehow, I'm not fostering his development if he's not spending multiple nights practicing and entire weekends playing baseball.  Somehow, even if the kid is still in elementary school, he needs to be spending more time shuffling back and forth to the baseball field than he is with the rest of his family.  I can't figure out how other people do it, but we've slowly figured out: it's not for us and that is okay.

 To a large degree, I am beyond thrilled and flattered that other people see the talent I see.  We've been asked on multiple occasions to try out for these teams.  Based on how he competes with his peers on a regular basis, I'm pretty confident he would make the team.  

 But I don't have the heart to do that to him or our family.  

Signing a child up for a travel team in elementary school feels like doing something I want to do as opposed to something he wants to do.  My interest in him being a great ballplayer cannot outweigh my interest in him having a childhood filled with impromptu backyard games and a little boredom.  

 Don't get me wrong: travel teams have their place.  They may be a viable option for some families.  But if your heart is telling you not to do it, then don't.  Chances are, it's not something you'll regret.  Instead?  Schedule an outside BBQ and a classic game of wiffle ball.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fantasy Baseball: A few weeks in, how do we adjust and adapt?

We are several weeks into the season and, at this point, we can all agree that everything we knew going into the season was thrown out the window as soon as the games started.  That said, there is still a lot of baseball yet to play and for us, as fantasy nerds, a lot of in-season management to navigate.  As we move forward into summer, here are a few things I either have done or am thinking about doing. Use your FAAB to get the young pitchers and sell them, almost immediately, for impact bats. Put this one in the category of "shiny new toy."  Sure, I have preyed on our inattentiveness, but in re-draft settings, I see no issue with snagging these higher-end rookie pitchers and then flipping them.  In two different settings, I was able to flip Bibee for Miguel Vargas and then, separately, Mason Miller for Jordan Walker. Will these trades work out for me?  Probably not, but I have a lot more faith in Vargas and Walker, particularly, than I do in Bibee and Miller.  Find the leve
Post a Comment
Read more

The More Good Days than Bad Days Principle

There are seven days in a week, about 30 days in a month, and 365 days in a year.   Not all of those can be good days.  No one has 7 perfectly good days.  Likewise, I've never gone through an entire year without a single bad day.   I have two reactions to that: The first reaction is the whole "control what you can control" thing.  You can control your effort and your attitude.  And that's absolutely true.  But sometimes a day is so bad that no amount of effort or attitude will fix it. The second reaction is that, in any given week, if you have 4 good days and 3 bad days, you're still winning.  Even if you have a few "meh" days, but the good ones are still outnumbering the rough ones, I think we're in a good place. The same goes for our practices with our little leaguers.  We've had some truly rough and awful practices.  The coach's didn't show up with patience, the kids didn't show up with their attention spans, and it w
1 comment
Read more

Fantasy Baseball: Mock Draft Reactions

It's December and, for the diehards, it's officially draft season for fantasy baseball.  Frankly, it's fair to ask whether the fantasy baseball season ever really ended.  While it's true that many of us began tending to our wounds in October, diagnosing the hits and the misses, a few of us never really stopped thinking, obsessively, about fantasy baseball.  For me, personally, I have been trying to stay permanently in "draft-season" meaning I want to be in some form of a draft between now and the end of March.  Recently, I was fortunate enough to join several industry experts, including Scott White, Frank Stampfl, and Chris Towers in a 12-team head-to-head points mock draft .  In this article, I will cover a few high-level observations (heck, even a few things that surprised me) and the lessons I learned. Lesson #1 :  Aaron Judge was not universally considered a first overall pick and that surprised me. This one surprised me.  As soon as I drafted Judge, the
Post a Comment
Read more