Stop Letting Delusional Travel Ball Parents Run Youth Sports
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses how parents living vicariously through their children have distorted youth athletics.
Key Takeaways
- Youth sports should be for kids - When parents' egos take over, the experience becomes harmful rather than beneficial
- The odds of going pro are nearly zero - Treating every game like a scholarship audition puts unhealthy pressure on children
- Schools should set boundaries - Athletic programs should prioritize student development over parent ambitions
Transcript
Travel ball dads, no one is jealous of you.
The strong feelings that you get from other people who are resentful of what you've done to youth sports are not coming from a place of jealousy.
This is not sour grapes.
So when I see comments on my recent videos like, oh, you must have got picked last as a kid.
Oh, your kid must have gotten cut from the team.
Please understand, this is not coming from a place of jealousy.
We don't envy you.
We are mad that you have ruined youth sports in your kind of Uncle Rico vendetta against the childhood that you wished you could have.
And the fact that you are so delusional about your own kids' prospects of becoming a Division I or a professional athlete...
And the fact that you are willing to ruin a good thing for everybody else just says a lot about who you are.
And that's been reflected in so many of the comments that I've received that are just nasty about athletics and treat athletics as if it's like the grandest human achievement.
Like if I...
Didn't make varsity as a kid then then that says something about the rest of my life And I was not an athlete as a kid I don't especially care about athletics and I think what the travel ball dads especially like the the kind of insane level Travel ball dads have to understand is that most adults do not care or want to care that much about youth sports And it is weird That so many people care so much that they're willing to ruin a good thing.
And I think what we used to have is what we need to go back to.
What we used to have is we had truly elite, you know, full-time athletes, people who are competing for the Olympics and really making that their whole life.
That was fine.
If you wanted to live that life, that was fine.
Because it didn't ruin it for the rest of us.
And what the rest of us got to experience was normal childhood filled with normal athletics.
You know, we had good, healthy competition.
But we didn't have this insane-o level of travel ball that takes all of your time and all of your money.
And if you're not rich, you can't do it in the first place.
And if you do have the time and the money, then you're going to have to do it.
Like, it's not a choice.
And I feel really, especially for the families who are caught in the middle where...
If they want their kids to participate at all, they have to go all in on the Insano travel ball.
That to me is the biggest loss here.
The loss of casual interest.
Because I think in childhood, through high school, kids should be allowed to be casually into something.
They should be allowed to get good at something.
But they shouldn't have to commit with an Olympic level of intensity because most kids who try stuff are going to try different stuff and they're not going to stick with what they originally picked.
And many of you travel ball families have found that out the hard way after spending thousands and thousands of dollars and years of your life on one sport.
Then your kid says, actually, I don't want to do that anymore.
And they should be free to do that.
They absolutely should be free to choose what they're interested in.
And we should not be living vicariously through them.
We should do stuff that they enjoy.
And there are lots of families that say, I like travel ball.
We enjoy it as a family.
We can afford it.
We have the time.
Great.
More power to you.
But you shouldn't be forced to do intense travel ball just as a baseline to participate.
So let's separate this out a little bit more.
If you want to go pro, go do your pro thing, but don't ruin community and school sports for everybody else.
And please stop thinking delusionally that everybody else is jealous of you.
Stop thinking delusionally that your kid is going to go pro.
And when you do the math here, You've got to do the math on expected value.
Expected value means this.
What is the value of the thing that I'm hoping to get?
If I'm hoping my kid gets a Division I athletic scholarship, maybe that scholarship is worth $250,000.
But you can't think, therefore, I will spend $250,000 getting my kid really good at ball.
No, you have to divide by the number of people who are also competing with you in that rat race that I talked about in my last video.
for that same scholarship.
And for most of us, for the vast majority of us, that calculation is going to be deeply negative.
And we're okay with that up to a point if we're casual about it, because we want to spend money on having our kids do fun and productive and socially valuable things that are good for them.
But it is insane to think that I'm going to get a return on that investment in the form of a scholarship.
So I think we've got to let all these delusional dads who are living vicariously through their kids...
and pushing them into intense levels of competition that the kids themselves don't want.
Like, we gotta start putting them in their place.
Let me know what you think.