There are ways around that. In the league I played in, the managers got to choose their coaches before the draft, so the manager whose son is one of the best players talks the father of another top player to be one of his coaches. Some leagues have the common sense to require that the draft take place before managers choose their coaches, and someone whose child is on a team can coach only for that team. No, I have no idea what happens if siblings play on different teams.
When I said “being good and winning”, I meant the sort of mentality that IME a lot of these dads have- it’s about being excellent, playing to win, hustling, etc… not about being a 7 year old, having a good game and eating pizza afterward with your teammates.
Fundamentally the problem is with the dads of the “good” kids- they’re almost certainly the ones who’ve been pushing/coaching their kids since they were old enough to pick up a ball, and are now feeling like having to play with kids whose parents didn’t do that is “holding them back”, despite the fact that these kids can’t necessarily even multiply and divide yet.
They’re why there’s an explosion of club/travel teams- someone figured out that they could sell this particular mentality to parents, and nobody looked back. I seriously doubt it’s the 8 year olds pushing to be on travel teams.
But… I don’t think the answer to preserving Little League is to try and remake itself in the image of the travel teams by making themselves harsher. All that’s going to do is drive away the less committed parents/worse players to rec leagues, and not necessarily offer anything to the other players that the travel teams don’t already offer.
I’d say that what Little League offers that none of the others do is uniformity and tradition- it’s Little League, the baseball program that American boys have been part of for more than three quarters of a century. It’s the world’s largest organized youth sports entity, etc…
I’m mostly of the opinion that even Little League takes itself and baseball way too seriously, and wouldn’t mind seeing it go away, if the alternative is having the nutty types go be on travel teams, and the rest be on rec-league teams.
We allow each manager a designated coach whose child is then “seeded” by the player agent (with the advice of others) if the player agent doesn’t have a child playing in that level and by the other managers (with the approval of the player agent) if they do. The coach’s kid is “protected” from being drafted by anyone other than the designated manager until after the that manger’s pick in the round to which the player was seeded has passed.
We also seed the unpicked sibling when one sibling is drafted.
Oh. OK.
I’m one of those managers that want their kids to hustle and play hard. I think most of the lessons to be learned in youth sports are really only present when the kids are trying to win. You don’t really learn to deal with failure if you lost a game where no one was really trying. You don’t learn the benefits of practice and hard work if you aren’t working hard. You don’t learn about teamwork if everyone is half-assing it.
T Ball is mostly a baseball themed playdate. If they know where the positions are and they learn to run on contact and run through first base by the end of T Ball, you would be well ahead of the curve. I agree that snacks are one of the most important6 parts of the event.
But at around age 7 effort and practice makes a difference in not only how well they play but what they get out of the game.
This is not true.
Most kids get exposed to actual baseball training at about the same time. Some kids are just more focused, coordinated and athletic than others.
I think its a couple of things.
I think someone figured out that many parents were getting frustrated with the “everybody plays” culture.
There are more dads that are getting involved with their kids lives than in the past. They are spending more money on sports as people have (rightly IMHO) determined that a balance of sports, music, art, academics is important to helping a child reach their potential. But this has also pushed a lot of less athletic kids (who in the past just skipped sports) onto the ball field. The dads you are talking about try out the travel teams for a few practices, and their kids have a LOT more fun so they leave little league and that kid’s friends follow him.
And Little League’s uniformity doesn’t really start until majors. Minors are largely left to the local leagues.
At the majors level, the mandatory play rules have been 2 innings in the field and 1 at bat for as long as I can remember. So the uniformity you are talking about probably means much less “everybody plays” than you think.
I’m not even suggesting we use that standard all the way down. I’m saying that the “everybody plays every inning and at least a couple of innings in the infield” rule is driving good players away. They can live with a continuous batting order because everyone has about the same number of bad batters. But when your infield is packed with kids that can’t catch, you’re only playing half a game. A lot of Little Leagues only have one mandatory infield inning per game, some have none, others only require players to play every other inning.
Who would pitch in these rec leagues?
The places where little league has died has generally lost baseball altogether. The travel teams need the pool of players that are drawn to little league but once the little league dies the travel teams start to wither because most rec leagues stop at T Ball and only a few have coach pitch/machine pitch.