Advice welcome. When my kids can't learn much more from me on sports.

I think you have to listen to your kid. The bottom line is that baseball and basketball are two sports where you really need to work on your game to play at a high level.

Would your son be better off being with a team of peers playing on a competitive team or spending that time with you?

If you son likes it and it works with your family and he's among the best, I'd consider it.

Hell, around here it is not unusual at all for a 10, 11, 12-year-old baseball player to be on 3 teams simultaneously.

As long as you keep the sport in perspective and allow him time to be a kid, I think it's OK as long as he is enjoying it.

 

My sister's a super Type-A person, but neither she nor her husband ever pushed the kids one way or another.
They pushed the academically, but never pushed them with sports. They supported sports -rides, going to games and practices, etc. - but I never saw them push any of the kids with sports.
Two of the girls played a lot of sports but were always very casual. All the kids are sports fans, but two of the girls drifted out of sports for the most part by HS.
The oldest boy has always stayed active, but he just began to take it muck less seriously. He had a lot of athletic ability, but as he got older he just viewed it as a hobby.
The youngest boy and the youngest girl turned out to be the most 'into it' and are still playing, although neither is some big DI stud.

 

There's one other consideration -- what effect will this have on your family? Do you have the means and desire to pay big bucks and travel to and fro for one child's games? In my case, I've got four kids -- it would be physically impossible for my wife and I, traveling separately, to be everywhere if all of them were in travel sports, not even considering the thousands upon thousands of dollars we would be spending.

If you know any parents whose kids have done travel ball, or are doing it, it might be good to talk with them about their experiences, just so you go into this with your eyes open. After all, you might tell your son he's making a commitment, but your whole family will be making one as well.

 

Yes, Bob -- this is why I'm hesitant towards a competitive, semi-travel squad at this age because we DO enjoy our batting cage time, usually every other day. It's "our" time for the three of us (me, him and his little sister who hits softballs).

When I ask if they want to go to the cages, they scream and shout, putting down the Wii (or whatever) and get their shoes on. So I'm not worried about that. They both enjoy it.

I'm just trying to see if I can help build his skill levels in baseball without having to drive 2,000 miles in the course of a summer to do it.

 

Isn't there something between "travel team" and just Little League/Babe Ruth?

Here there are lots of AAU teams which mostly seem to play locally or within the state.

 

This thread has been very eye-opening. The clique shit is horrifying. Please dear God, don't let me become that parent.

My hope is that by the time my kids are old enough to play team sports, local/rec leagues will have come back into vogue.

 

My eldest daughter has lost more than a few friends because she doesn't play for a certain local softball team. At the middle school open house last year, she was talking to one of the softball players she was still friends with. Some of her teammates walked in and one literally grabbed this girl and tried to drag her away from the conversation she was having with my daughter.

While I wish my daughter had stayed with softball (told her this summer she didn't have to play if she didn't want to), I'm glad in a way she isn't playing any more. Besides, cheerleading took up a good chunk of her summer.

 

The dynamic on cliques is no different than when any of us were in high school. If you're spending all your time with the rest of the softball team, it stands to reason the softball team will make up a lot of your friends.

The scary part is the parental cliques. Actually, you can kind of stay out of that if you want to. The real fun comes, as mentioned earlier, when parents have built their whole social circle around their kid's travel team -- and then the kid wants to quit. That's never pretty.

Anyway, I doubt travel teams are going anywhere. (No pun intended.) They seem recession-proof. Which is why you have a whole lot of suburbs and small towns building gargantuan facilities to attract tournaments (and fill up hotel rooms and restaurants) like big cities built huge stadiums to attract pro teams (and their presumed economic benefit).

 

I coach a high school basketball team. I've witnessed ALL of this happening to players I've coached, and many in our school have quit basketball solely because of travel commitments to other sports.

We had kids come to summer games crying because they were afraid the travel volleyball coach would kick them off the team if they didn't attend a mandatory 6-hour Saturday practice that was scheduled with 48 hours' notice that just happened to be at exactly the same time as an (as mandatory as we can make it per state rules) off-season Saturday basketball tournament that our high school team had scheduled three months earlier. She missed the tournament.

Where things become a bigger issue is when high school and travel coaches are the same person, and they begin bullying high school players (who should be encouraged to be multi-sport athletes) into specializing, and then blame the non-specialists when the team isn't winning as much as the coach thinks it should.

 

RE: parental cliques -- After 4 years of AYSO, 3 years of club volleyball and 2 seasons of high school volleyball, we have exactly one family that we are friends with ... and we haven't seen them in close to a year.

 

I started AAU baseball when I was eight years old, and I really enjoyed it while I played (I'm 23 now). If your son is good enough to get on a team and play, then it can be a lot of fun, but there's a good chance it will consume his / your life. I remember doing state, national, and regional tournaments and having a blast, but I never really considered what kind of commitment it took from my parents (Dad loved it, Mom was elated when I stopped). At the same time, I did AAU baseball, travel soccer, AAU basketball, and played in baseball rec leagues / tournament teams, so it's possible to do multiple sports as well. Unfortunately, I had to quit athletics before high school due to a health condition (epilepsy). Maybe I could have played in college, but I never had a chance to play fully grown.

A few things I will mention:

1) AAU parents are incredibly intense, and they all think their kids will be getting full-ride schollies to play baseball in college. We all know this doesn't happen.

2) Make sure your kid actually plays. The team I played on was the best in the region, and some kids were on the team because their parents wanted them associated with the name of the team more than anything else. They sat the bench, but the parents didn't care. I went to see the local minor league team play while I was in college, and I remember two dads discussing how they would rather have their kids riding the pine for the team I played for when I was young than starting for a team not as good. I couldn't believe what they were saying. Don't think this way.

3) Your son will get better, and playing at a higher level of competition is always more fun than the local recreational leagues. Obviously he's young, but if you think college ball is within reason based on his projected growth, give him a chance and see if he excels. Many of the kids that I played with played in college, a handful were drafted, two are in the majors, and we all started high level baseball when we were very young. (Sorry to pump up my team / area so much)

4) Make sure the coach isn't too hyper-competitive (this is hard to avoid in AAU). It's great to win, but coaches can really ruin it for individual kids and lead to the whole burnout deal.

 

The most disturbing thing is that the real successful travel-team coaches pull this shit not only during the summertime, but during the school year -- they put heavy pressure, sometimes to the point of flat-out forbidding, against players participating in any other sports.

And the REALLY disturbing thing is some school districts and ADs go along with it. I have seen schools become state contenders in one particular sport (OK, soccer) mainly due to travel-team players. The coach/GMs of the soccer club are very much these "total commitment" type of guys. They demand their players do nothing but play soccer all year, and they make it stick. The school goes along with it because they like having a state-ranked soccer team.

The school in question is usually mediocre or worse in all the other girls team sports. Most of the teams have 1 or 2 really good players who specialize in basketball, volleyball, softball, etc. -- they don't play soccer. But the teams are usually lousy because they have no depth; they don't have any of the good solid athletes, the swingman guard/forwards, the combo middle hitters, etc, because they're all ordered to play club soccer.

The school had to drop freshman basketball and volleyball because there aren't enough players left over to make a freshman and JV team. The last couple years they've had trouble filling full varsity rosters in volleyball and basketball.

If I were the principal /AD at this school, I'd ban the fucking travel-team coaches from school grounds and revoke all permits for them to play/practice on school property. I'd rather have a fair-to-decent soccer team and functional basketball/volleyball than have a state-contender soccer team and barely-breathing varsity teams for the whole rest of the program.