Travel Baseball Tryout Conundrum – Part 2

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Ok. So you’ve sat down and had the conversation and took the experiment from Part 1. You read your son’s goals and expectations and it says he wants to play with his friends and have fun. Your goals and expectations list 14 things that you want him to get better at and also includes being on a team with a great coach (that doesn’t get defined either, but we will save that discussion for later), that plays great competition and surrounds your son with only the best players. There is clearly a discrepancy between his goals and your goals. This is a MAJOR problem.

He probably isn’t ready to play travel or isn’t mature enough to play travel. Maybe recreational baseball is still his best fit. You could maybe warm him up to a travel experience by finding him a lower level travel team that meets his casual expectations and introduces him to your more complex expectations. However, ignoring his casual expectations and seeking out the most intense team possible could be a recipe for disaster.

If you decide to go the casual travel team route, you might find that the goals he writes down during your mid-season experiment have changed slightly. Perhaps he wants higher caliber teammates or decides he wants to get better at a few aspects of the game that he is struggling with. In any case, you can see that his goals are starting to move more towards yours, but it is a progression and it’s on his timeframe and not yours.

It’s very important that this process is constantly monitored. If your son loves the game and enjoys working hard to get better at the game then he will naturally start to change his goals to lean more towards a higher level travel experience. If he doesn’t acquire a passion for the game, then he is probably best suited for the lower level travel experience or maybe even a recreational level.

WRITTEN BY JASON CLYMORE

I originally posted this on our old website  on August 8, 2012