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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Having a kid that is getting some interest from D1 schools in baseball, here is my $.02 on youth baseball:

1.  I now appreciate the European soccer style of player development.  They focus entirely on building fundamental skills until kids are like 13.  They don't play any games, just do some scrimmages...often just internally, but sometimes against a different team.  They don't keep track of score and may often stop the game in order to teach kids what they are doing right and wrong. Only at 14+ do they start playing real games.

2.  Very few baseball coaches at any level try to develop players.  I actually give credit to LL coaches (good ones)...they actually do try to teach some skills although their abilities may be limited based on their experience.

3.  In my experience, travel coaches are just managers.  They care far too much about winning games.  Their teams may be different from season-to-season.  My kid never played on a team that developed kids through the team...although the coaches were of course available for private lessons.

4.  The older the kid gets and the better the travel team...the less any player development happens.  At that point, you make the team because of your skills and coaches really only care about winning games and making sure college coaches scout and recruit from their teams.  The best programs care more about the latter because honestly that is what truly matters.  It is weird, but my kid is on a team where 2/3 of the team are D1 commits and their attitude is that once the college coaches are no longer at the tournament (those coaches tend to by 9-5 M-F people)...then they don't care much more about the tournament.

5.  If you really want your kid to get better, find good private instruction and pay for that.  It's harder to do than it sounds, but be picky.  Try to find a flexible travel team that will let you play...again, just to see if your kid is getting better in true game day situations.  Until your kid is 16, don't waste $$$s on travel programs that are going to crazy tournaments...unless it is one of these premier national teams...in which case, your kid is so good that these teams find your kid.

It is hard to go against the prevailing sentiment...and can't say I abided by my lessons above all the time...but I tried.[/quote]
Why would you think European kids don’t play soccer games and keep score? Here is a link to Barcelona youth academy 9 and 10 year olds playing a match against another club. 
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-3B9IQDfD7A&pp=ygUJQmFyY2EgdTEw

And youth academy soccer is subsided by professional clubs. 
[/quote]

I will admit, I remembered the article differently for kids 12 and under.

NY Times Article on Ajax Soccer Club in the Netherlands:

"Americans place a higher value on competition than on practice, so the balance between games and practice in the U.S. is skewed when compared with the rest of the world. It’s not unusual for a teenager in the U.S. to play 100 or more games in a season, for two or three different teams, leaving little time for training and little energy for it in the infrequent moments it occurs. A result is that the development of our best players is stunted."

“As soon as a kid here starts playing (in the US), he’s got referees on the field and parents watching in lawn chairs,” John Hackworth, the former coach of the U.S. under-17 national team and now the youth-development coordinator for the Philadelphia franchise in Major League Soccer, told me. “As he gets older, the game count just keeps increasing. It’s counterproductive to learning and the No. 1 worst thing we do.”

During training sessions at Ajax, I rarely heard the boys’ loud voices or laughter or much of anything besides the thump of the ball and the instruction of coaches. It could seem grim, more like the grinding atmosphere of training for an individual sport — tennis, golf, gymnastics — than what you would expect in a typically boisterous team setting. But one element of the academy’s success is that the boys are not overplayed, so the hours at De Toekomst are all business. Through age 12, they train only three times a week and play one game on the weekend. “For the young ones, we think that’s enough,” Riekerink said when we talked in his office one day. “They have a private life, a family life. We don’t want to take that from them. When they are not with us, they play on the streets. They play with their friends. Sometimes that’s more important. They have the ball at their feet without anyone telling them what to do.”[/quote]

I think a big takeaway is that as damaged as the American youth sports development system is, everywhere else in the world is blatantly exploitative and miserable. In England, those 8 year olds are working at a job, not playing soccer.[/quote]

The takeaway is that it is fairly blunt who has a future in the sport and who will just play for fun.  You don't have parents wasting thousands of $$$s on mediocre travel teams just to finally be told at 16 or 17 that your kid never had a chance to get recruited for college.

Notice how the article said these teams encourage kids 12 and under to just meet up as friends with no parents or leagues, and just play.  You don't see that much anymore in youth sports in the US.[/quote]
I’d love to do more sandlot style games, the problem is that most fields are in use in fall and spring or permit only. [/quote]

It's basically impossible to get organized time on a ball field in NW (thank little league and DPR) for that, but the fields are often empty... Both Turtle Park and Stoddert are open for most hours — Stoddert in particular has quite a bit of neighborhood kids playing all kinds of sports. But I agree, it would be great if ALL of our public rec space was more efficiently used and made available for public use. [/quote]

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