Moneyball Jr.
Good report on travel baseball via the Sun Sentinel -
The nation’s newest elite baseball players are courted like free agents, flown cross-country for big games and featured on TV. Bidding wars break out over the most coveted stars, who resemble Major Leaguers in many ways.
Except for their age.
At the highest levels of 8- to 14-year-old travel baseball, schoolboy superstars are plied with privileges and showcased at pricey events while less-gifted players and their families try to keep pace by spending a fortune — as much as $24,000 annually — on tournaments, equipment and lessons.
Big League dreams, ambitious coaches and massive tournament profits have fueled a youth sports phenomenon that bears little resemblance to the local Little League.
This big-money version of the youth game is thriving in South Florida, home to hundreds of travel teams.
“Kids 9 years old … are professional athletes right now, because this stuff is so unregulated,” said Ron Filipkowski, a former federal and state prosecutor in Sarasota who was a travel ball father, coach and director. “Travel ball at the elite level is the Wild, Wild West of sports. There are no rules, no laws.”
Scant regulation combined with an endless stream of money-making tournaments have created a high-pressure world of non-stop, year-round baseball, where youngsters driven by coaches, tournament organizers or their parents may play in more games than some adult pros. Some will end up on operating tables before they are out of high school, or get burned out and quit, medical experts and others told the Sun Sentinel.
“Some parents feel if they miss a tournament, their [child] is falling behind,” said Alex Fernandez, a former Florida Marlins pitching great who coaches the Pembroke Lakes Bulldogs 14-and-under travel ball team. “A lot of people live through their kids. That’s where the trouble comes.”
Advocates counter that travel ball instills expert skills in America’s pastime at a younger age than ever before, and offers children and their families extraordinary competitive opportunities — such as at a mid-February tournament at Pembroke Shores Park in Broward County.
The four-day event drew top-ranked teams from California, Texas and Florida — and aired to a national audience on ESPN3.
“Travel ball is as close as you can get to real Major League Baseball,” said Anthony Russo, coach of the Lantana-based South Florida Stealth. “By 12 years old, we know everyone who is [any]one.”
Gotta say, I have seen the mercenary side of this one. And, it is scary…but happens all the time.
Same stuff goes on in softball, cheerleading (yes, cheerleading), singing, marching bands, dance teams, drill teams, soccer, hairstyling (more of an adult thing due to state liscensing requirements – check out Chris Rock’s movie – Good Hair), karate, etc… Kids cooking competitions are even on the rise. There are city-wide, state, regional, national, international and inter-freaking-galactic competitions for all this stuff and there are “National” organizations hammering home big bucks putting on these competitions, selling offical gear, and uniforms, and practice equipment, and insurance, and instructional videos, and hotel packages, etc…
They are all full of politics and cliques. A big part of one of the national cheerleading competitions is ruled by a relatively small number of gay guys where “friends come first”. It is all designed to allow local businesses (“gyms”) to extract nice sums of money and pyramid it up as payouts to the competition organizers, who, in turn, hand out plastic trophies so the local “gyms” can look like winners, thus roping in more kids and money and more visits to more competitions. The bigger “gyms” might have 3 or 4 age groups with 50-100 kids at each level. If you are bringing a few hundred kids to 3-4 events a year, and buying your uniforms through these organizations, We’ll, do the math… You are going to win here and there just to make sure you keep bringing those kids and their parent’s money back year after year. At least in baseball, the score matters. Sure, calls might tilt one way or the other, but the score matters. In these subjective competitions, the opportunity for manipulating results to a certain desired outcome is wide open and ugly.
Now, I’m going to get all nostalgic here… I started out playing Little League in Queens as a kid in the 60′s. There were minor, major and senior divisions. At the end of each year, each division would select an All-Star team to play a round-robin tournament against other leagues in the area. That’s where it ended. Now, were we getting the level of reps, training and skills development that these kids are getting playing select/elite travel team ball? Not even close. Today’s elite 14 year-olds would crush 16 year-old All Stars from the 60′s and 70′s. But it wasn’t a Money Machine Pyramid Scheme either. Just kids playing ball.
Some of this new order is driven by the concept (much more fantasy than reality) that your kid might get a scholarship to college because he/she excelled at X, Y or Z. Better to have them crack the books.
#15 wrote:
#15 wrote:
FWIW, I’m in LL now. This will be my son’s 4th year and 7th team in LL. (He’s almost 9.) I have coached on or managed all of his teams sans two. And, I am managing his team this spring.
When it comes to All-Star team selection time, it sure doesn’t hurt a kid to have someone championing him. And, the more influence the person has, the better the kid’s chances.
I’ve heard from more than a few dad’s who thought their kid didn’t get a fair shake because they didn’t have an “in.”
It’s not just travel where “who you know” and “who they know” comes into play.