“I guess you missed the whole, change uniform from year go year thing. No way any real friendship can be built like that.”
Do you actually have any experience with children on a travel team? Do you think that every year the roster is completely new and parents don’t make an effort to keep their children on the same teams?
It really sounds as though you read the article and taking every negative thing as the only truth.
No. Do you?
The whole thing sounds to me like pure insanity though. I’m not talking part-time, I am talking about the full-time travel.
I would be willing to bet that it is the parent driving the child most of the time. A kid has a little talent and fun, and the parent takes that goes nuts. What normal parent thinks it’s actually good for a kid to live a life like that? What about roots? what about stability? None of that exists with a life like that.
My nephew played for 6 different teams in the 12 years he played travel ball.
He knows lots of kids but never talks to any of them. No friendships were formed.
Of the kids from his longest tenured team that I know, about 6 have been on more than 4 teams and few of them keep in touch anymore.
We had one year were the team was kind of family-like. But after that it was just another minor league business. (My nephew left the team one year later)
My nephew was deprived a normal childhood (with such things as friends and unstructured time to just play) as he was either practicing or playing ball full time.