A friend of mine has coached youth baseball for the better part of two decades. He says the problems are 1) There are a lot more youth sports for children to choose from when we were young. 2) The drive to specialize at an early age. There are kids 10 and under playing on traveling teams year round now. That means if you choose soccer, basketball, etc. as your sport (or if your parent chooses it for you) there’s no “off season” to play baseball in. 3) The expense of baseball. No, playing in your local Little League isn’t that expensive. But if “playing baseball” means playing a on a traveling team, the costs are pretty large, larger than basketball. And the shoe companies will underwrite the more successful traveling basketball teams in hopes of building relationships with future starts. They don’t do that for baseball. 4) The lack of athletic scholarships for baseball, even in D1 schools. Yeah, most kids who play any sport aren’t going to get a scholarship offer. But in basketball and football there are at least full scholarships there to fuel a dream. Boys know that even if they bust their butts and are really talented the most they can hope for, unless they are a catcher or a pitcher, is a partial scholarship.
I played baseball with my friends on the corner. No uniforms or leagues were required. Few of us were in a league. Expenses were: cheap glove, one of the kids had to have a bat.
Adults killed baseball when they decided kids were too stupid to do it on their own.
Especially this:
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The drive to specialize at an early age. There are kids 10 and under playing on traveling teams year round now. That means if you choose soccer, basketball, etc. as your sport (or if your parent chooses it for you) there’s no “off season” to play baseball in.
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Once a kid is over 10 years old, he/she is a “baseball kid” or a “football kid”, etc. And football (and somewhat less so, basketball) coaches actively recruit the best athletes.
As people got more serious about kids sports, less kids play, and now people travel to these crazy weekend tournaments hundreds of miles away. It is insane, so more people drop out, adding to the need to travel to compete. I finally told my kid if he wanted to he could find a sport he wanted to do, or I would borrow an air pistol and get him into competitive shooting. He chose shooting. That was fine with me, because I grew up shooting and the people in shooting are awesome.
Sadly many of the good coaches who try to teach and do things the right way are often overcome by the politics of the ballpark/league and lack of ethics of those parent/coaches who will do anything to get their kid ahead.
I play pick-up Senior Softball four mornings a week from when the snow melts in the spring to when the snow covers the ground in the fall with like minded retirees.
You ought to hear what they say about their grand kids. The girls are playing soccer or fast pitch softball tournaments almost every weekends and dittos for boys who are are playing on baseball travel teams as young as 10, 11, 12 years old! It's ridiculous!
Where we play in Warren, MI, there's a park with 6 diamonds and we've been unofficially granted exclusive use of one of the diamonds in the back that has no outfield fence.
Several weekends each summer the park will host a baseball tournament for kids between the ages of 12 to maybe 15, with different age divisions. You should see these teams when they show up. Each and every kid has matching cleats, pants, shirts, caps and roller gear bags associated with their respective teams. The gear bags themselves cost over $100 each..........
And the sad part about it is, if a parent wants their kid to play on this "super duper travel team", they pretty much have to commit the entire summer to the coach and his team if they want their kid to play........It's politics!
When I (and likely you) was growing up in my small northern Michigan town, all we had was one little league park and maybe 6 or 8 teams.............Then at the end of the season the league managers picked the kids to represent our city in the Little League World Series and we would start playing against the other small cities in our district......
When you think about it, there is no way a team from my old neck of the woods would ever be able to advance beyond the Regionals simply because the teams you would be playing against would have a pool of over 500 kids in which to choose from................
To reinforce my points, my old high school, Boyne City, went up against Ithaca High School which is west of Saginaw this past fall in the state semi-final Class C football championship. Ithaca came into the game with 69 straight wins and 4 consecutive state championships. Ithaca barely squeeked by with a 20 - 16 win over Boyne City and lost in the state final to St. Mary Catholic Central out of Monroe.
What's noteworthy about this info is the fact that Ithaca, with its winning football history, can recruit noteworthy football players from around their highly populated area and St.Mary Catholic Central can recruit players by offering tuition subsidies. Just as all the private schools do.
So when you look at a team such as Boyne City who only has its own kids to draw from, it's kind of hard for them to compete against metropolitan areas..........