Travel Teams Are Bad for High School Sports — Time to Ban Them
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that travel teams have corrupted high school athletics by giving wealthy families an unfair advantage.
Key Takeaways
- Travel teams create an uneven playing field - Kids who can afford year-round travel teams dominate high school rosters
- This is an equity issue - Lower-income students can't compete when their peers have been training year-round since elementary school
- Banning travel teams would restore fairness - Leveling the playing field would make high school sports accessible to all students again
Transcript
Elite travel teams are ruining school sports, and I think it's time that we ban them and say, if you want to play on a school sports team, you can't also be on a travel team.
And it's not about the schedule conflicts, because the schedules don't conflict.
These kids play year-round, they play weekends.
The problem is that it's an unfair advantage for the families who can pay for it, and it just locks a lot of kids out.
competitive sports right like if you're trying out for a team in high school and you didn't have a lot of money or your parents for whatever reason didn't put you on a travel team or you just didn't want that lifestyle by the time you get to tryouts in high school you are like thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars behind the kids who did have that opportunity and this is just distorting high school sports in a way that I think is just bad for everybody, right?
It's this kind of rat race.
A lot of the travel team parents don't even want to do this.
They just feel like they have to.
Matt Iglesias has a pretty good article out on his sub stack today about how this is kind of bad for communities that like instead of youth sports just being a thing that everybody does and enjoys, everything is now hyper competitive.
Kids play year round.
It costs thousands or tens of thousands of dollars a year to have your kid in these leagues.
So now it's not about whether the kid is interested, whether the kid is good at it, it's about how much money the parent can pony up.
And I think in a lot of cases, parents are even paying, like part of the appeal here is this is how you get your kid a college scholarship, right?
Is put them on a travel team.
and they'll get really good, they'll get noticed by scouts, and then that'll pay for their college.
Well, the travel teams now, in a lot of cases, cost more than the college scholarship it will be worth.
So just write a check for college instead of these travel teams, save yourself hundreds and hundreds of hours and lots of driving around and sitting in tournaments and stuff.
But I think from the public school perspective, every kid in public school deserves a fair shake.
And I don't think we can prevent kids from practicing in their driveways, nor should we.
But I do think we can put rules in place that level the playing field a little bit, right?
Like if some kids were taking anabolic steroids and that was why they were, you know, making the cut for the team, we would recognize that it's legitimate to say, no, you can't use steroids and be on a high school sports team.
That's just not right.
I think travel teams have, you know, a different mechanism where but have a similarly corrosive effect on high school sports.
Because the whole idea here is this is supposed to level the playing field, right?
This is supposed to create opportunity for kids who wouldn't otherwise have it.
And if that opportunity is being gobbled up by people who can pay $10,000, $20,000 a year for travel teams and spend all their time taking their kid to these tournaments and stuff, that's just not what public schools are for.
So that's my case.
That's why I think we should say if you're going to be on a travel team, you can't be on a school sports team and vice versa.
Let me know what you think.