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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Aren’t tryouts next week? I mean this kindly, but if your kid doesn’t play travel, don’t they have almost zero chance of making a public high school team? [/quote]

He's in eighth grade and doing eigth grade tryouts right now. He says it's going well.  He may not make the HS team, but baseball is not his primary sport.  He's a good player, he just likes other sports better and so doesn't do travel. He could probably play travel if he wanted to put in the time to do it, but honestly it has always seemed like a waste of time and money if it's not your kid's passion or primary sport.  I've seen 3  families that we are close with dedicate every weekend of their lives for years and years to baseball in order to  support a really passionate and seemingly talented kid who was a star on their travel team.  Those kids ended up going to really marginal colleges to play baseball with the hope, I guess, of MLB or transfer to a D1 school. Two of those kids (one is my cousin's kid) left the sport altogether when it was clear they weren't going to MLB or a D1 program. Those 2 kids ended up transfering to a better college after having wasted 2 years at the marginal school. The other kid got injured and ended up not even graduating from the marginal school or any college. I have to think those families wonder whether having their entire lives dicated by baseball schedules for like 8 years and spending their kids's entire childhoods at baseball tournaments was really worth it in the end.

Honestly, I don't get it. Youth athletics are out of control. It's ridiculous that preteens and teens have to specialized to the point of neglecting all other aspects of their lives if they want to play on their school's team.  Money and time wise, baseball (and a lot of other travel/club sports) seem like a long con run by a bunch of grifters preying on the fears of parents that their kids won't get into college or won't otherwise succeed unless they follow the travel sport bridge to nowhere. [/quote]

The kids have fun and the money is not important so I don't see an issue. [/quote]

It's not so much about the money as it is about the time.  Maybe there are other things your family could do -- other experiences they could have together or individually?  Travel? Other sports? Other interests? Maybe it would be nice to have family memories that don't all center around baseball. It seems insane to make your lives so narrow for so long when there is so little payoff in the end. The kids that I know who stayed dedicated all the way through the college recruitment process ended up worse off because they had such tunnel vision about baseball. [/quote]

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