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[quote=Anonymous]It totally depends on the kid.  My son also played for DC stoddert soccer, rec league, and he was an unabashed star.  Parents would literally be pacing on the field until my son arrived for the game because they knew he was the only hope for our team.  If there were 15 goals scored by our side, my son scored 14 of them.

Anyway, all of this is a preface to the natural decision we took, when he was 8, to switch him to travel.  Surely a kid who loved soccer this much and had so much God-given talent was meant for travel soccer.

Well, it's been 9 months now and I can tell you, all my son talks about it how he hates soccer, how he begs us to quit, and how next year he wants to go back to rec soccer.  We should never have switched him.  Number 1, it totally destroyed his self esteem.  Before, he was a soccer superstar.  True, he was among a group of spastic 8 year olds, but who cares?  My son felt like he was Pele.  On a travel league, all of a sudden he is confronted by kids trying to get college scholarships through soccer, screaming at him when he makes a mistake.  Even the parents get upset if a kids makes a mistake.  It's a totally different mindset from rec.

Second, it's insane practice.  Because my son hated the DC Stoddert travel league he was in, we ended up having him do tryouts in Maryland, and he went and landed on some team which is an hour away for practice.  It practices two times a week and then they have Saturday AND Sunday games.  The only burst of sanity from our family was that after about 8 weeks of that we told the coach our son could only go to one practice a week, take it or leave it.  They have allowed him to have this abbreviated soccer practice schedule, but even then, he loses the entire afternoon once a week with the travel and his weekends are totally shot.

FInally, it's crazy expensive.  It just cost us $600 for the spring season (about 10 weeks) and that doesn't include the required uniforms/gear.  My son said he wanted to continue for the spring so we signed up, but then he immediately regretted his decision.  Wanting to teach responsibility, his dad and I have said if he wants to quit now, he has to pay us back the $600 we just plunked down.  But seriously, I have never seen such an unhappy kid and at this point I don't even care about the money.

I know some kids love soccer and travel is great.  I think in my son's case, it all changed when the kids changed (before, class friends, and now, a bunch of kids for whom this is their whole world and my son is screwing with their chances of success if he lets a ball go past him), when the coach changed (before, a whole bunch of "yeah team!"s, and now some crazed lunatic screaming at the kids left and right), and when the hours changed (before he just did his saturday games).  There must be some threshold of how much your kid has to love soccer to switch to travel (or you need to switch to the right travel).  Obviously, my kid has not passed that threshold.[/quote]

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