Reply to Are kids still doing it all? Rise of travel sports and scheduled kids.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don't get why so many parents are signing their youth kids up for travel. Are rec and local teams terrible from 2nd grade and on? Does every halfway decent kid have to join a travel team if they want to play? [/quote]

As a parent heavily involved in our rec league and with 3 kids playing rec, the answer is yes. When everyone good leaves for travel, it's hard on the kids who legitimately care and want to play who stay in rec for whatever reason. You find a unicorn team where the players are really working and the coaching is good, but so often it's something parents seem to view as extra babysitting. They aren't fun to sit on the sidelines with because they aren't even there, they don't help out with much (leading to burnout for the few volunteers who do step up), and they don't care if their kids don't care and take the whole team down with a bad attitude. Joy.[/quote]

This is so accurate.

Travel (“travel”- they don’t actually go far) in our town is so close and so accessible in terms of distance, abilities accepted, and cost that almost everyone does it. Rec is just a few dedicated families who have always been coaches/volunteers in our town and some diehard crunchy families who are really gung-ho about community sports leagues. The rest of the people are:

-executive functioning-challenged parents- would never be able to commit to travel and rarely figure out the rec schedule. Their kids show up infrequently and often missing key items…like cleats and game jerseys. Everyone bends over backwards to make it work for the kids but the parents never improve

-parents who are really introverted/isolated and don’t want to carpool, volunteer, do snacks, etc. Rec is the outer limits of their ability to participate in community activities.

-parents who don’t want their kid to do the sport and their kid doesn’t want to do the sport, but they have other kids and need to have them in x place at y time, so the rec sport is easy babysitting. [/quote]

I would add one more tier of people who play rec:

-parents of kids who play another sport on a travel team, but everyone is telling them early specialization is bad and it's important to play multiple sports when their kids are young, and their kids show an interest in the rec sport, even though their primary sport is their travel sport.  They will compete hard when they show up, but will only attend practices and games that do not conflict with their primary sport.  Some of them are great athletes and it may annoy the other kids/parents who show up consistently that the more talented players on the team aren't reliable or that they still get playing time in games despite their many absences.    [/quote]

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