"Why children are abandoning baseball"

Soccer's elite/travel system starts even earlier than baseball's. By about age 9 it's time to declare you're a real player or give it up altogether. At least baseball gives you until age 13 if you want.

 

The best thing that could ever happen to parents' pocketbooks would be the end of HS-sanctioned sports. Privatize it all. The minute you did that, the carrot that youth sports coaches dangle over parents - you want your kids to play in high school, right? - would be gone. Bye bye, big fees and travel. There'd be no money in it.

The argument more often made is that parents have college scholarships dangled in front of them, but I think most parents are smart enough to know, aside from four sports (football, volleyball, men's and women's basketball) you're still paying a shitload of money in college. You're just as well off busting tail in academics, playing sports for fun, and filling your time with other stuff instead of four practices a week.

The real carrot is being on the high school team, the honor and social aspect of that. And, outside of football and track, it's basically impossible to play any of the other sports in high school without years and years of "select" teams, which means thousands and thousands of dollars.

The end of HS sports would mean, of course, some pretty significant losses in other ways. But a lot of these travel teams...it's a money-making operation, with the onus of high school sports looming out there in the distance.

It's even worse when the HS have these "lil Egrets" or "lil Wolfpaw" feeder programs. At that point you're basically being told the HS owns and control the means of production from 8 years old on.

 

So, the fact that children are too young to buy beer and a baseball game is too boring to sit through without probably has nothing to do with it?

 

Or, they could get rid of the club teams altogether and have school teams in the various sports from about third grade on as part of the phys ed curriculum.

It'll never happen because there's no tradition for it but in the end it could have been a better way to do things.

"Privatizing" all youth sports means handing the whole thing over to AAU scumbuckets who have no (none zip zilch zero) interest in education.

If they do 'privatize' all school-age sports, at the same time all college 'scholarships' for sports should be abolished too. Put it all on the table. Make the pros or go home.

 

Almost all youth sports are privatized in Canada, doesn't help a bit up here.

 

Agree whole-heartedly, Alma. I had mentioned it earlier, the misnomer that this is about scholarships. It's about the varsity.

I can't imagine that I would have been able to play high school baseball had I came of age now, in the same family situation as I did.

 

The biggest problems come when the club sports and school teams are allowed to corrupt and influence each other.

The superstud athletes -- the legitimate D-I prospects -- can do whatever they want and the club coaches, and the school coaches, will still be happy to take them on whatever terms they dictate.

It's the "pretty good athletes" -- the kids who might be (for instance) HM all conference in one sport, a solid starter in a second and maybe a utility/sub player in a third -- where the HS coaches and club coaches can tag-team 'em, say, "I'm going to make my final cuts based on who is really committed to playing this sport year-round, and whether you play club ball or not tells me that."

The coaches can even tell themselves they aren't going to take that stuff into consideration, but then they get to preseason tryouts and Clint Clubplayer makes a nice pass and they think to themselves, "ah yes, there's that year-round club experience," while Mort Multisport throws a ball out of bounds and they think, "he wouldn't do that if he played year-round club ball."