Youth Baseball: Sending all the wrong
messages?
By: Will Lowrey
As
a kid, I remember the excitement of putting my one color blue t-shirt on with
white lettering sponsored by the local soda company. I remember my matching blue button in the
back mesh “trucker” hat. The field was a
sandlot made with a broken chain-link fence surrounding with many holes in it. The backstop was made from telephone poles
with fencing put together. We would play
one or two games on Saturday and right after my dad and I would rush to a pond
bank to get a little fishing in. The
next day, it was time for church and family.
We always took a step back and ate at the dinner table, while I told my
grandparents how I had played the day before.
I think about our kids now and wonder which memories will stand out to
them. I imagine it will be similar in
remembering times with family and friends rather than the thousands of games
they played and the endless amount of trophies they received. Youth baseball has transitioned into a
generation of parents pushing for development and growth, while we are losing
the ability for kids to be kids (Smith, 2014).
The
problem with youth baseball is what society has labeled as a “must-do” to get
prepared for high school. In the past
ten years, we have seen Multi-Million dollar youth baseball complexes built in
almost every community throughout the state.
The United States Specialty Sports Association (USSSA) started a
business model that involved tournament ball for youth sports. The structure offers parents and kids the
ability to come to one sports complex on a weekend and the opportunity to play
as many as four to six games. Each
weekend offers the opportunity to be the best.
Within that sports complex, it is not uncommon for as many as fifty to
one hundred teams to be present on the many different fields appropriate for
each age level. The allure of bringing that much economic development into communities
was too much to pass on for government ran park and recreation departments. In
the beginning, many parents resisted the temptation to get into this “travel
world”, which would take such a huge financial and time commitment to be on a
team (Riddle, 2014). Over time, the
feeling of getting left behind has made a huge majority leave the recreational
world behind to suffer.
Not
only are travel teams competing on the field, they are competing to have the
nicest jerseys, the loudest music, the best coach, etc. Coaches are being paid as much as
$5,000-$10,000 a year to coach all ages of youth teams. The structure has this generation completely
hooked…..hooked, line, and sinker. You have
the ability to play at different levels depending on how advanced your team is.
Everyone is fighting to improve and recruit the best so they can call
themselves a “Major Team”. You can
easily qualify in any number of World Series opportunities offered. If you pay enough, you can even go to Disney
World to play.
It
has become so cut-throat that we are seeing teams that are competing at high
levels and experiencing great success with their teams only to cut the weakest
team members after the season to pick up better players. There is no consideration into spending time
with those kids to develop them and catch them up with the rest of the team.
That would take too much time. This
happens in every age group. Our parents
and coaches make it okay, because they won’t be able to achieve that next level
with those same kids so a business decision has to be made. Make no bones about it, it is a business
decision. But don’t worry, those parents
and kids pick up the pieces and jump right into the cyclical world with another
high level program and go at it all over again.
I
have seen the competitive nature of our parents, not our kids, come out over the
past ten years. The parents that come
into this world saying they aren’t sure they have the money or time to commit
to these programs, are the very ones that are pushing to play additional games
and travel to the best tournaments. The
immediate results of that trophy every weekend and winning is too much of an
opportunity, or an appeal on our egos to walk away from. Teams that commit to playing 4-6 per year
eventually give into the pressure and play as many as sixty to one hundred
games from Spring to Summer. A quick check on the USSSA website gave me the
ability to sign up for over 250 tournaments from January 1 to December 31 in
the state of Mississippi alone (USSSA.com, 2015).
There
is nothing wrong with creating opportunities for our youth to participate and
to achieve high levels of greatness, but at what cost? When will enough be enough? There are problems arising from this dilemma.
Kids, and I do mean kids, are making the decision not to continue playing,
because they are picking up on how much it cost to play and the burden that it
is putting on their families. There are families that have spent as much as
$15,000-$20,000 dollars in one year to participate in hopes of a college
scholarship (Riddle, 2014). Kids are playing all the way up to college and then
quitting.
There is no more
balance in what kids can normally have the opportunities to do, because of the
pressure they feel to keep up with their “competition”. There is no more
emphasis on fun, but all about winning. Kids
are feeling like Youth Baseball has become a job (Wixon, 2014). In contrast to their intentions, they are
hurting their chances to be successful at the next level due to wear and tear
on their shoulders and elbows. These
young bodies are not built to play this many games (Snyder, 2014). It is very important to follow the guidelines
that are available by the American Sports Medicine Institute regarding pitch
counts and, on the whole, this is not being done (Campbell, 2015).
Mark Hyman, author
of Until It Hurts and sports management teacher at George Washington University,
offers this insight when speaking of youth sports: “I think youth sports are an
incredibly important part of a kids’ experience growing up. There are so many valuable lessons to be
learned there. I want to do everything I
can to encourage kids to play sports, but what I’m suggesting is that the
system that is set up now is doing just the opposite.” (Smith, 2014). There are many that will debate this view,
because parents see everyone following this trend. There are limits on pitching provided by the
USSSA organization and many of the players rotate in pitching, so they see this
as safe.
As many as ten
players on a twelve man roster can pitch and offer relief to the players from
abusing their arm. The limits that are
followed by the USSSA in tournaments are presented as what is needed to protect
a young athletes’ arm. There are also
rules in place to keep players from pitching on back-to-back days and there are
limits to how many innings they can pitch in a given tournament. The only problem with this is there are no
rules telling teams how many pitches a kid can throw in any term outside of
that weekend. The amount of games that
teams are playing in the span of one year has become the problem. You can play as many as 60 games in three
months if you play every weekend. Many
are playing for 5-6 months out of the year or more, which allows for well over
one hundred games. In a 2002 study by
the American Sports Medicine Institute, they suggest that an 11-12 year old
athlete should not pitch more than 1,000 pitches in a season (Campbell,
2015). Most top level pitchers will
pitch twice in a weekend and throw a minimum of 75 pitches. If a team plays 12 tournaments, that would equal
1,800 pitches, which can easily be played in 4-5 months.
To add to this
problem, the pitcher is not truly getting rest when he is not pitching. Travel teams are not usually made up of more
than twelve players on a roster, which means that pitcher is using his arm at
another position all weekend and all season.
Keep in mind that the high level pitchers on a team may pitch two games
per weekend, which would usually make up forty to fifty percent of the games
played. You do the math: If a team plays 60 games per year, that high
level pitcher would have the opportunity to pitch in a part of or all of 24-30
games per year. That is simply not
acceptable. We are starting to see the negative
results now of the past decades’ trend.
It is time for
parameters to be set on youth baseball and for our parents to see what our
society is doing to our kids. Enough is
enough as it is also time to give our kids the opportunity to be a kid, while
still giving them every opportunity to be prepared for the next level, without
sacrificing our pocket books and our quality time with our families and
experiences in other areas of our lives.
We need an opportunity to sit back down at the dinner table and play in
the backyard.
Playing in six tournaments
per year would mean six weekends from March to July. There are twenty weekends in that time
frame. That would give ample opportunity
for families to not over-extend themselves financially. That would also equal about 24-30 games per
season, and there is nothing wrong with staying local on five out of the six
tournaments to save on travel expenses. By
adjusting to this structure, that is more than enough to develop a young
athlete when you add practice time. That
might even allow for lower income families to participate. This is greatly needed. The current structure eliminates those that
do not have the funds to be a part of something that could be great for
everyone.
There is
absolutely nothing wrong with splitting your travel team up and having everyone
participate in your local recreational league during the week to wear that one
color t-shirt and hat and make new friends and have FUN! Youth sports
should be about development and growth, not trophies (Pfeiffer, 2015). Even though we have the best of everything
with youth baseball facilities, jerseys, and opportunities in travel baseball,
your kid will always remember the moments that were surrounded with acceptance,
love, and fun more than any championship.
If you want to see what I’m talking about, let your kid call his friends
and let them go play a game with no rules set by an adult. The structured and organized games ran by
adults are taking the kid out of your kid.
(For the record: I didn't start playing baseball until the 8th grade,
and still received a college scholarship in baseball)
References
1 Campbell, J.D. (2015). “Arm injuries a concern regarding
youth baseball, too.” IU News room. http://newsinfo.iu.edu/web/page/normal/10839.html.
2 Pfieffer, Alex (2015). “HBO’s Real Sports looks into
America’s Trophy Culture”.
http://dailycaller.com/2015/07/20/hbos-real-sports-looks-into-americas-trophy-culture/
3 Riddle, Greg (2014). “Club Sports offer Exposure-but at a
Steep Price”. Dallas Morning News.
4 Smith, Corbett (2014). “Time and Money: Parents Placing
Kids in Specialized Sports do so at a Price”. Dallas Morning News.
5 Snyder, Matt (2014). “Dr. Andrews: Year-round baseball at
young age is top TJ risk factor”. CBSSports.com.
6 USSSA.com (2015). United States Specialty Sports
Association.
7 Wixon, Matt (2014). “Intensity of Specialization can lead
to burnout: Club Sports bring increased competition, regimentation”. Dallas
Morning News.
