Time to Change Travel Teams?

Is your travel team working with you or against you? For many kids and parents, this is their first time though this experience and they are not sure how to judge. It is easy become emotionally involved because their uniforms are so pretty or they tell great stories of successfully getting kids into college, but you need to dig a little deeper.

The first question is whether your goals are the same. Let’s get the big, sometimes ugly, subject out of the way. Everyone talks about recruiting, but if recruiting is an important factor I want to know specifics. How many kids have they helped? If D1 is important, how many kids per year do they produce? What specific schools? Did these kids just show up and get a scholarship or did the team actually develop them? Do they offer kids and parents specific helpful advice on recruiting? Listen carefully to their responses and see if their credibility impresses you.
Okay, now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk things I think can be more important. Do the coaches have the experience to help develop players to the desired level of performance? Every coach has to learn sometime, but I want assurance that this one has the experience and knowledge to get my daughter there now. There is way too much “daddy ball” out there and our kids come to lessons so upset because coaches don’t have the needed experience, or worse, their daughters get total favoritism when it comes to mound time and expectations.
Are the personalities a match? Even a great coach can be wrong for a kid if their personalities clash. As a parent I quickly learned that our daughters were very different in the way they learned to be successful pitchers, different in how I needed to help them stay motivated, and different in how to best help them establish the self-discipline to be successful. And, each needed different things in their coaches, which was an important factor in choosing not only travel teams, but their eventual D1 schools. Choosing a great coach for one kid might not be the best fit for another.
Are they responsive to a player’s needs? Quite often we will teach a kid a new pitch but the coach refuses to call it for any number of reasons. Perhaps his daughter was a pitcher and she never threw that pitch, so he does not understand how to use it. Maybe they don’t like your drop because you cannot throw it for a strike, even though it gets a ton of “swings and misses”. If they never take time to learn how to best use your skills, that can be a problem. On the other side of the coin, we also have coaches who contact us to learn how to better support their pitcher. They may come to watch a lesson so they can be on the same page. That is a huge plus.
Speaking of good fits, recently one of my students was asked to “play up” with a team. People think that playing against older kids makes you better, but that is not always true. Upon further questioning, the kid was going to play far above her age level, and the reason was that the team didn’t have any good pitchers so they thought they would find a younger one. Think about how many red flags that raises. My pitcher is pretty amazing, so I asked if the kids on that team have huge goals and if they amaze her with their work ethic and skills. Well, not really. So, my amazing kid is going to sit in the dugout with a lot of older kids with no real ambition? Is that an input we want? She will have no competition for mound time? And, she will not have the support to win against good teams? Come on, really? How many bad habits can she learn in this environment?
Finally, don’t read me wrong. “Team hopping” is a terrible idea. Do your research, choose wisely the first time, and help her to know exactly what she wants from a travel team instead of just getting emotionally drawn into a team. Then, constantly monitor things and make sure the team fulfills her needs. Live up to your commitment, if at all possible, and learn from the situation.
Is your team working with you or against you? It’s not a decision you make on the sidelines at an emotionally charged game or based on one coaching decision. Know what she wants and needs, and take the time to choose wisely. You only get one chance to help her develop in the way she needs most.