Continuing my coverage this year of youth baseball. We covered the local High School tournaments and Little League tournaments so far. We talked about all the local area draft prospects ahead of the draft. I have a draft post covering the multitude of College Wood Bat leagues, but since those leagues are almost over I may just save it for next year. Now lets try to bridge the gap between little league and high school.
The youth landscape in baseball has changed a ton since I was a kid in Northern Virginia. It used to be simple:
- you’d play Little League until you were 12
- then you’d play Babe Ruth til you were 15
- then if you were good enough you’d play HS ball in the spring and you’d play American Legion in the summers. But you could always play “Senior” Babe Ruth from the time you were 16-18.
- and that was it. If you weren’t playing some other sport there was always “fall ball” at each age level, but the above were the leagues that “counted.”
Now a days, I’m not even sure what is going on with youth baseball. We all know about the wide growth of travel baseball, which has essentially destroyed Babe Ruth at its older levels (thanks to the siphoning off of any one talented enough to pitch). But now apparently there’s a whole slew of leagues i’m not familiar with:
- “Major60” and “Major70” distinctions for 11 and 12 year olds
- Modifications to the classic “little league” rules to try to capture those kids they’re losing to travel teams
- Pony League baseball (more prevalent in southern virginia; is there even a northern virginia league?)
- Cal Ripken youth leagues, which I guess is a division of Babe Ruth for youngsters
- Travel teams; do they even have “leagues?” Or do they just go to tournaments?
Back in the day, when Babe Ruth had no competition for the youngest teens, winning the 13-year old and/or the 13-15 year old Babe Ruth tournaments still meant something. Likewise, American Legion was essentially a hand-picked/all-star team of your hometown high schools. Now, I’m not so sure. How is American Legion faring, considering that big-time travel teams now have all the major prep prospects out there? As far back as 2005, there were stories in the Washington Post about how Legion ball was badly suffering. It seems to me now that Legion ball is struggling just like senior Babe Ruth ball.
That being said, I did go looking for district and state results for the leagues I grew up knowing. We reveiwed Little League’s local and state tournaments, so here’s the subsequent state results for Babe Ruth and other amateur youth leagues:
- Babe Ruth 13s: Gainesville-Haymarket beat Greater Loudoun for the state title. Regionals are Sarasota, FL starting 7/30/14. Nationals are in Glen Allen, VA.
- Babe Ruth 13-15s: Arlington beat Greater Loudoun for the state title. They move onto regionals in Varina (Virginia) starting 7/30/14.
- Babe Ruth 16-18s: Greater Fairfax beat Northern Fairfax County for the state title. They move onto regionals in Alabama starting 7/23/14. (Editor’s update: Greater Fairfax came out of the loser’s bracket after breezing through pool play to make the finals, but lost to the Alabama state champion Gulf Coast in the SE Regional final).
American Legion’s district tournaments are complete; the state tournament kicks off on 7/28/14 from the great Fireman’s Field in Purcellville. Your 8 teams in the Virginia American Legion state tournament are from Roanoke #3, hosts Leesburg #34, Stafford #290, Williamsburg #39, Albemarle #74, West End (Richmond) #361, Big Island (outside of Lynchburg) #217 and lastly my “home post” of 180, Vienna. Editor Update: Here’s the tourney results: Vienna Post 180 went two and out, losing to Albemarle and then Williamsburg (by forfeit of all things) to end their involvement in the tournament. Albemarle breezed through the state tournament, winning 4 straight to win the State title. Big Island fought through the loser’s bracket to
Cal Ripken Leagues (not to be confused with the Cal Ripken Collegiate league, nor “Ripken Baseball,” a for-profit academy run by the Ripken brothers) have all finished their state tourneys as well, and most of those state champs are already deep into their regional tournaments.
I have no information on Pony League baseball, other than what’s on their incredibly confusing website. Pony baseball has more divisions than … well something with a lot of divisions. My pun-making ability failed me here.
I have no idea if there’s even organized leagues for these multitude of travel teams. I know there’s an official Northern Virginia Travel League, but nowhere on this site can i find something like a “schedule” or “standings.” Do these teams just exist to go play weekend tournaments? The locally based EvoShield Canes “schedule” is just a list of tournaments they’re playing in. So what do these teams do the rest of the time? Don’t they play regular games?
I dunno. My kid is too young to force me to know all these things yet. Hell, he may not even play baseball. Are there readers out there who can fill me in? Is it even worth tracking these all-star results anymore, thanks to the complete dilution of talent?
Feedback welcome/encouraged.
Can’t help here. My little guy is seven. He is starting to play baseball, but I don’t know if he’ll stick it out or be into it enough that we’ll get that deep into the travel leagues. My daughter is a travel soccer player, and I am mixed on the whole thing, frankly, so I am not sure which way I am rooting for my son to go. On the one hand, she is getting much better training then I ever got as a kid (I played baseball in NJ in similar leagues as you, and kept playing up into college). On the other hand, in a very real way, the structure of ‘team’ is replaced in importance by individual performance, which I don’t think is the best message.
Who knows, I may just be feeling a case of the old being replaced by the new. It feels like a bad change to me, though.
Wally
29 Jul 14 at 5:34 pm
There was an article in the WP a few months ago about Travel baseball and the farce it has become. Here it is: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/stealing-home-how-travel-teams-are-eroding-community-baseball/2014/05/23/5af95d34-df6e-11e3-9743-bb9b59cde7b9_story.html
The author’s point was about eroding of community I guess … but he alluded to two other significant issues that travel baseball has brought:
1. overuse of pitchers
2. predatory pricing.
#1 goes without saying; when you used to play 18 games a summer and now you play 40 …that’s just a lot of games. #2 is more troublesome, deeper into the culture of this country. YOu have to pay significant money to play in these leagues … money that lower income families can’t afford. And that’s just registration and uniforms. Each tournament has entry fees too. You apparently have predatory coaches exposing how their travel team will showcase your kid for future college scholarships when in fact all the guy wants is your registration fee. I’ve heard stories about massive complexes in the middle of no-where where land is cheap where people have put up baseball field after field, then do nothing but run tournaments with $1200 entry fees. An example is outside of Cooperstown: click here to see the Cooperstown complex from the air.
I dunno. I’m troubled by it all. As you are. But this stuff has been going on in “select soccer” for decades. Was it just a natural evolution? Is it really that bad of a change? I (luckily) will have the means to pay for my kid’s travel baseball if he chooses it, but I fully realize how such an evolution in the youth game has made the sport far more lilly white/suburban than it traditionally has been.
Todd Boss
30 Jul 14 at 8:23 am
I agree with you, and am also troubled by a bigger, different issue (although possibly it is like the community issue; I haven’t read the link yet). In addition to the growth of profit-making centers inserting themselves in the middle of amateur athletics, with all of those changes (even if they weren’t scams), the reason for all these changes is to make the highest levels of play: USMNT and USWNT, in the case of soccer, and professional baseball: produce the best players. But that represents .001% of all the kids that start playing travel at age 10 or so. And the cost to produce those few highly elite athletes is a drastically changed athletic experience for everyone else. A worse experience, if you ask me. Its one where parents complain to their 8 yr old kid’s coach that their child shouldn’t be playing defense because it doesn’t showcase their skills. And they do it in front of their kids, which sends its own message to the kid. Like I said earlier, individual performance trumps team outcome, because the goal is to get noticed by the coach at the next level up. Stuff like that. Kids look at teammates as competitors for a spot on the next team, rather than their teammate.
I think that I have shared this story before: I coached my son’s rec soccer league last fall, and we coaches (U7 mind you, meaning they were 6) received a note from the club’s technical director that we should stop telling the better kids to pass the ball to their weaker teammates, and just let them do it on their own. That soccer wasn’t a team sport and how else were we going to develop the next Messi or Mia Hamm unless the kid who was better at age 6 was chased around the field by the entire other team, developing his foot skills. I couldn’t let it go, so I sent him a polite note back saying that he was probably right, that is how those superstars get developed, but that wasn’t my aim as a volunteer coach of such young kids and that I wasn’t going along with his program. My goal was for all of the kids to get a positive experience out of playing soccer, and by that, I meant that they felt like they were improving, and that they felt like important members of the team. So the kids would pass to each other and play like a team. To me, it was a somewhat surprising example of how the emphasis to create ‘elite’ players was reaching down even into the most basic levels of youth rec sports.
There is no doubt that things have changed. I think parents just need to be thoughtful and honest about what athletics offer these days and what they hope for their kids to get out of it. It is the rare kid that will be a starter on most HS varsity teams. It is the very rare kid that is going to get a scholarship, that is just simple math based on all the kids that start playing sports. Some parents like these changes though, they think that all the competition helps prepare kids for the competitiveness of the world. Maybe they are right. For me personally, if my kids genuinely have a strong interest in something specific, I’ll support them as best I can. If they are just somewhat interested, I have been thinking that the mainstream sports have become this big up-or-out push, where the goal is to get a scholarship or make the pros and anything less is failure. Which sucks for all the kids that do well but fall short of that goal, since they may feel like failures somewhere inside. The less traditional sports may still offer the things that I valued in sports: challenging yourself to see what you are capable of, rooting on your teammates, the concept of sacrificing for the greater good (team success) – corny stuff like that. My son loves watching American Ninja Warrior, and we have been talking about parkour for him. Stuff like that, although it is all new to me.
I have come to believe that ‘sports’ as I used to think of the term is only left for us paste eaters of the world. I’ll bet that baseball for Bryce Harper has felt like a job since he was 11 or 12. Just a guess.
Wally
30 Jul 14 at 11:26 am
Interesting story about the soccer technical director. I would have told him to pack sand as well.
I often wonder how I’d react if, say, my kid was a pitcher and I found out his coach was over using him. Or I wonder how I’ll runa team as an eventual coach. One thing I never want to be though is one of “those parents.” HBO had a documentary run by Peter Berg called State of Play that was absolutely appalling to watch as a parent. Four situations involving kids who played football, basketball, tennis and golf, each showing different levels of obsession and just downright embarassing behaviors. How do parents get to that point?
I dunno; we laugh at the dumb quote from Varsity Blues (I don’t want. your life.) but damn doesn’t it seem prescient in the context of this conversation? It said the exact statement that all over-bearing parents who are trying to re-gain their youth achievements through their own kids need to heed and hear.
Todd Boss
30 Jul 14 at 4:30 pm
I saw that HBO show too. I think the episode was called Trophy Kids. The parents were nuts. I remember the golf dad telling the camera how much he loved and was proud of his kid (7 yr old girl winning golf tournaments), but he could never tell her because it would make her weak. But the football dad from UW was the craziest. The guy actually seemed psychotic. But after having been around youth sports for a little while now, I wouldn’t say that it is a misguided attempt to relive their youth that drives most parents. I really think that they believe they are doing what is best for their children. ‘It’s tough love, but something that will make them stronger in the long run’, like the golf dad. I don’t agree with them, but I think their motivation is to do the best thing for their children, not their own glory. At least that is what I think about the parents I have known that I consider overbearing.
I have coached a variety of the youth sports now: baseball, soccer, basketball, softball. Plus had kids in LAX (boys and girls). You’ll have to get into it and form your own opinions and let me know what you think. I think soccer generates the most intense and unrealistic expectations from parents and coaches. Which surprised me. But those of us who didn’t grow up with the game (like me) may not appreciate how intense it is for people who follow it. But here is my advice: stay involved. Coach them when you can, even if it is a sport that you don’t feel familiar with. It is worth the aggravation to be there with your kid (even if they don’t seem to appreciate it)!
Wally
30 Jul 14 at 8:43 pm
HBO documentary craziness rankings: child-abuse football parent, obsessive-compusive basketball parent, whining golf parent then the tree-hugging tennis parent. 🙂
I thought it was completely telling that the golf parent’s child won an event … an event where parents were banned from the course. How can you be mad at your kid for not making a putt, or not making a shot? Be supportive, be loving. I dunno.
I was never in any “jeopardy” of getting a college baseball scholarship (well … not from what we knew at the time anyway; that’s a different and long story), so my family never knew of any such pressures. I wonder how different it would be if it looked suddenly like my kid was the next Bryce Harper. I’ll be honest; i love baseball, but I have ZERO desire to spend every frigging weekend driving to tournaments and staying in crummy $59/night hotels so that my kid can play in some meaningless 8-U AAU tournament. I’ve watched my friends do it and just don’t get it.
I can’t wait to try my hand at coaching other sports … if I get the chance.
Todd Boss
31 Jul 14 at 8:18 am