Reply to Are travel sports bad for community?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There have always been kids who do a high level sport that involves practices kind of far from home with kids who don’t live nearby, and lots of traveling to competitions. What has changed is the age at which it all starts and how involved the parents are. Because it starts so young now, the parents have to be more involved. The whole family didn’t used to go. It would be the kids traveling with the coach or maybe one parent would drive several kids because they were old enough to be more independent. This gave parents time to stay around the neighborhood to doing their own thing and interacting with neighbors etc. In this era of intensive parenting you have parents who attend every practice and the whole family goes to competitions. It’s also the intersection of immigrant cultures with the travel sports. The immigrant families tend to all do things together so if one kid is in a sport then they will all attend together. This takes entire families away from the local community in a way that didn’t used to happen.

But honestly I don’t think any of this matters. Smartphones and online shopping/food ordering/everything have killed our sense of community more than any sport.[/quote]

Sure there have been high level athletes. However, 95% or more of the kids in travel aren’t at that high-level on existing travel teams. They are just players with wealthy parents trying to keep their kids from the unwashed  masses. If they all stayed locally, they would develop the same. [/quote]

Agreed, but this would only work if almost all kids stayed out of travel and if rec would do some sort of draft or leveling of players. It’s hard when rec ends up being this hugely wide range of experience and skill level. It’s not fun for kids who have been playing a sport to be on a team where half of the kids have never played/don’t know how to do the basics. So people put their kids in travel and it’s a vicious cycle. [/quote]

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