Those youth sports travel teams

I was on the Freaknomics page and . . . they’re not all bad—they have lots of good stuff too! Here’s a transcript of a podcast about Little League:

Youth baseball — long a widely accessible American pastime — has become overrun by $10,000-per-year for-profit travel leagues. Zachary Crockett peers inside the dugout.

They have some history, some stories, some economics . . . it’s all worth reading. The theme is that volunteer parent-coached Little League is being superseded by private travel leagues which are competitive, expensive, and time-consuming.

I also wanted to share some stories from my personal experience as a youth sports coach.

Here in New York we were involved for several years with West Side Soccer League and West Side Little League. The soccer league was much better than the baseball league, but both faced competition from travel teams.

West Side Soccer League is a lot of fun. Part of this is the nature of soccer itself: just in the course of the game, every player gets approximately the same amount of contact with the ball (excepting those little kids who are afraid of the ball, but that’s part of coaching, to make sure they get into the play and don’t just keep backing away), and we arrange substitutions so that all players get the same playing time. One issue that arises is motivation: at the younger ages, there are a lot of kids who aren’t sure they want to be there, they show up late to practice and dog it during the games. Meanwhile, there are some other little kids who are dominant, and it’s hard to train the kids to defend against that. Once you get to age 12 or so, most of the unmotivated kids stop coming, and most of the best players are in travel teams, so you get a good level of parity on the field. Also, the WSSL organizers are really good, and they work to balance the teams each year. West Side Soccer League also has travel teams and tournament teams (an intermediate level where they play a couple tournaments a year), but this falls apart around age 12 or so because they were getting slaughtered by the more serious travel teams from the suburbs. Anyway, I like their regular rec league: even through high school the kids have competitive but fun games and play hard without it taking too much of their, oor their parents’, times.

One annoying issue that keeps coming up with West Side Soccer League is paperwork. If you want to coach, you need to go through a security check and do some required training. I have no complaints there—I can see the benefits of requiring a security check, and the training was helpful, even if not all the coaches follow the instructions. One piece of advice I remember is that you should be teaching skills, not strategy. Spend less time telling the kids where on the field they should be playing (except for the issue mentioned above, of making sure they play actively) and more time giving them practice kicking and moving with the ball. During the game, the main thing is to keep them running around. Don’t worry if they do stupid things like pass the ball in front of their own goal; they’ll learn from their mistakes. The goal is for them to have fun and develop their skills. Anyway, the point is that I appreciated the coaching training. But every couple of years they’d bug us with some new required bit of training. Similarly with the referees. Every week they’d send us emails saying they needed more volunteer refs to show up to the games, but then often they wouldn’t allow someone to schedule as ref because he or she hadn’t checked the right box somewhere and wasn’t eligible . . . The parent-run league is great, and I really appreciate the efforts of the commissioners who do all the organizing. And I can see the appeal of paying a bit for professionals to do it so that we don’t have to. The latest bit of paperwork is some official city requirement that someone at every game has to be trained to use the defibrillator . . . Every new regulation makes it more of a pain to continue. The issue here is not “helicopter parents” or whatever; it’s the mountain of paperwork.

West Side Little League was another story. The baseball was fun, and it’s all parent-run except that for some reason they pay for umpires, but the culture of baseball is just much less egalitarian than with soccer. To start with, the positions are unequal. Especially at the younger ages, the ball rarely goes into the outfield—just about every plate appearance is a walk, a strikeout, or a ball in the infield—and the coaches do not move the players around to different positions. Even beyond positioning, the kids don’t get anything like equal playing time. The coaches don’t even pretend to keep balance here. And they’d also put the best hitters first in the lineup, every time, which, yeah, sure, it’s baseball, but, again, in youth soccer we move kids around and try to give everyone an equal chance. In WSLL they’d keep the worst players on the bench as long as they can and otherwise stick them in the outfield. If this were soccer, they’d rotate all the players through the infield and let most of them pitch. . . . Oh yeah, they have pitch-count rules (for little kids, no more than 50 pitches in the game) which coaches routinely violate. As for the coaching . . . sometimes it’s fine, often not. Many times we had coaches who would spend almost all their time screaming at their own kids. I was never an official coach but sometimes I did the job when the official coaches didn’t show up. Everyone was volunteering so I can’t complain; let me just say that it never went that way in West Side Soccer League. And there’d be problems with some of the kids. I remember one player who had no confidence at the plate. He would just about never swing at the ball. He’d just stand there and hope for a walk. Which, yeah, when it’s 10-year-olds pitching this can be a legit Moneyball-style strategy, but . . . jeez, if you’re gonna be playing baseball, you should swing the bat! If you’ve never gonna swing at the plate, and then on defense you’re standing in the outfield and never seeing the ball, then why show up to the game at all? Really, what’s the point? But the coaches would just let this kid do this, game after game, year after year, to the point that the umpires would start getting annoyed and calling just about every pitch to him as a strike.

The point of all this is that, when it comes to youth baseball, I can see the appeal of a professionally-coached team. It’s not about wanting your kid to be a superstar, it’s just about having something that’s fun and well organized, a game that starts on time where the kids get some coaching and where they’re treated with a bit of respect. We got this in West Side Soccer League but not in West Side Little League.

A bit of googling turned up this related article by political commenter Matthew Yglesias, “High-pressure youth sports is bad for America.” I agree with Yglesias’s main point, that “high-stakes, high-pressure youth sports” is outta control, but I disagree with his claim that, “There’s a youth sports industry that benefits from affluent parents’ participation, and the parents themselves are stuck in a collective action problem where nobody wants to be the family that opts out,” and his solution, that “Everyone needs to act more normal.” In many cases, sure, parents and kids should “just chill out.” But I think that framing this as a collective action problem misses the more very direct issues that (a) a volunteer league can be run badly (that’s my experience with West Side Little League), and (b) there can be real obstacles to volunteering in a youth league (that’s my experience with West Side Soccer League, even though in that case I was willing to do the work). I like volunteer leagues, but I can see the appeal of paying for a professionally-run league, not because of any illusion of sporting excellence but just to make it easier for the kids to get out there and play.