I’ll start with a confession: I was part of the problem.
That’s not false modesty or a rhetorical device to soften what I’m about to say about the adults who turned our town’s recreational youth sports leagues into something unrecognizable. I genuinely made things worse. I yelled at kids. I put pressure on my sons — Henry and Elias — that no eight or nine-year-old should have to carry. I got sucked into a competitive arms race that had absolutely no business existing at that age, and I didn’t figure it out fast enough. I’m ashamed of it. I’ve apologized to my kids. I’ll carry that regret for a long time.
But here’s the thing: the culture I walked into set me up to fail. It didn’t make my failures inevitable — I still own them — but it made them a lot more likely. And that culture is what I want to talk about.
How It Starts
Rec sports leagues depend on parent volunteers. Coaches, board members, organizers — without them, nothing happens. That’s genuinely good. The problem is that a small group of very competitive, very organized, and very connected parents figured out that if you volunteer for everything, you control everything.
Coach every team your kid is on. Stack the rosters so your kid’s friends are always teammates. Join the board. Then join the other sport’s board. Then the other one. When you control the schedules, your kids can play both rec and travel without conflicts. When you control the rosters, your kids always have the best teammates. When you control the board, the rules apply to everyone else.
I watched a team use catchers all season during COVID when the league had specifically banned them for safety reasons. That was my first red flag. I ignored it. The rules, it turned out, were more of a suggestion for some people.
I want to be clear: I don’t think these parents are evil. I think they mean well. I think they got so locked in on doing right by their own kids that they lost the forest for the trees and never managed to take the blinders off. They’re not sitting around scheming — they’re just people who stopped being able to see past their own sideline. That’s a very human failure. It just happens to have real consequences for a lot of other kids in this town.
How It Compounds
Once the inner circle had control of the rec league board, they started travel teams. Nothing wrong with that on its face. But here’s what it looked like from where I was standing: instead of running those travel teams as separate entities — which is how it’s typically done — they ran them inside the rec league organization. Same insurance. Same infrastructure. Same registration system.
I can’t tell you with certainty that was a deliberate calculation. Knowing these people, I doubt they even framed it that way in their own heads. But the effect was hard to ignore: every kid who signed up for rec baseball, including all the kids who would never be invited to play travel, was in the same pool funding the same overhead. The travel program was operating at artificially low cost, with the rec league’s infrastructure underneath it.
And then some of those travel coaches told their own kids they couldn’t play rec. The kids benefiting most from the rec league’s foundation weren’t even participating in it. The fields — public fields that belong to the whole town — got priority-scheduled for travel teams. Rec teams got whatever time was left over.
Maybe none of that was intentional. But it was the outcome. And the outcome matters.
A neighboring town had a similar travel program and did it completely differently: travel kids were required to also play rec. Everyone contributed. Everyone benefited. Their rec league is healthy. Ours is on life support.
The only hope for our rec league is the next generation of parents coming up. But the current board members all have younger kids, so the same group isn’t going anywhere yet. It may not survive. A generation of kids in this town may grow up without a functioning rec league because a group of well-meaning adults got so focused on their own kids that they never stopped to look at the bigger picture — and nobody around them ever made them.
The Umpire Problem
Here’s a small story that tells you almost everything you need to know.
Youth baseball uses teenage umpires. They’re learning, they miss calls, it’s part of the game. One of the kids I was coaching — a sweet but emotional kid — got called out on strikes and completely lost it. Pointing at the umpire, the whole routine. I went over to him and said what you’re supposed to say: it’s not the umpire’s fault. That’s part of the game. You shake it off and you move on.
His parents and grandparents were standing right there. They looked at him and said: yeah, that umpire sucked.
I was his coach. I was trying to teach him something true and useful. And his own family walked right over it to make him feel better in the moment. That kid is going to be a nightmare to coach in five years — and nobody in that family will understand why.
The Arms Race
Once you see the inner circle operating, you panic. Or at least I did.
My kids weren’t in the group. They weren’t going to get the winter clinics, the inside access, the stacked teams. I could see them falling behind in real time. So I did what panicking sports parents do: I signed them up for camps. Private lessons. More camps. I built a batting cage in the basement. Then one in the yard. Then I bought a pitching machine — which, to my knowledge, they used exactly once.
I called a coach who came highly recommended. He asked how old my kids were. I said ten. He said — and I really, truly wish I had listened — I don’t work with kids under twelve. It doesn’t make sense. Go play catch in the backyard. Make a game out of it.
I heard him. I didn’t listen. I kept booking camps.
The problem wasn’t just the money, though that added up fast. It was that my kids were too young to understand what getting better actually takes. You can put a ten-year-old in front of a pitching machine and run him through drills, but if he doesn’t yet have the internal drive to want to improve — really want it, not just say he does because you’re standing there — you’re not developing an athlete. You’re just creating stress. I didn’t understand that. I thought desire plus access equaled progress. It doesn’t. Not at that age. Probably not at any age, but especially not then.
The cost of travel baseball is genuinely insane even before you buy a single piece of gear. Thousands in fees, then custom gloves, $500 bats, batting gloves, arm guards, leg guards, sliding shorts, bags the size of a carry-on. Some programs run families ten thousand dollars a year so their nine-year-old can play tournaments on weekends. I kept it cheaper than that. But cheaper is relative when the whole thing was a mistake to begin with.
What I Did Wrong
I had no business coaching kids. I volunteered during COVID because the leagues needed people and I had the time, and I thought it would be good for my boys. I had no training, no background in youth sports, and apparently very little self-awareness about the stuff I was carrying to the field.
I have a loud voice. I used it wrong. I got sarcastic — it’s my default mode and it works nowhere near children. I got frustrated when kids didn’t apply themselves, as if eight-year-olds are supposed to have the focus and discipline of adults. Car rides home became film sessions when they should have been nothing at all.
My kids would say they wanted to get better. They said they loved the sport. And then they would do nothing on their own. I took that as a contradiction and got angry about it. What it actually was: kids saying what they thought I wanted to hear, because I had made the whole thing stressful enough that the honest answer — I just want to have fun, I don’t want this to feel like a job — didn’t feel like it was allowed.
That’s on me. And it’s on the environment. Both things are true.
Where We Ended Up
Henry quit. The emotional weight of the games — the pressure he felt, the breakdowns, none of it balanced out by actual enjoyment anymore — just became too much. I can’t blame him. I helped build that weight.
Elias is still playing, but he doesn’t practice on his own. Not once. We’ve had the conversation more times than I can count: if you want to get better, you have to work at it when nobody is making you. He says he understands. Then nothing changes. I’ve backed off pushing him because I know what pushing looks like when I do it, and it isn’t good. But backing off has its own cost.
This summer, Elias’s team is going to Cooperstown. If you’re not familiar, it’s not just a tournament — it’s a week-long experience where teams from all over the country come together, kids sleep in dorms, and for a lot of them it’s the defining memory of their youth baseball career. It’s a genuinely big deal. Our team raised over $30,000 to make it happen. Thirty thousand dollars. Parents, businesses, car washes, fundraisers — the whole community came together around it.
And we’ve told Elias: this is it for travel baseball if nothing changes. Not as a punishment. As a reality. We had the talk. Cooperstown is the trip of a lifetime and he should enjoy every minute of it. But travel baseball is a serious commitment of time, money, and energy — from him and from us — and if he can’t show us he actually wants it, we’re not doing it anymore.
I don’t know how it ends. Maybe Cooperstown lights something in him. Maybe it doesn’t. Either answer is okay. What isn’t okay — what was never okay — is what we all built together in this town: a system where a handful of well-meaning adults lost the forest for the trees, couldn’t take the blinders off, and turned something that should be joyful into something exhausting — and where parents like me, with our own unresolved baggage, made it even worse for our own kids.
There’s a guy on Instagram — @coachballgame — who teaches everything I did wrong. I found him too late.
The fun got sucked out of it. For everyone.
A few years ago I put together a framework for how I thought the league’s younger divisions could be structured — developmental levels, age-appropriate rules, machine pitch over coach pitch, and the reasoning behind each choice. Whether anyone ever uses it or not, you can judge for yourself.
Even that's Odd 
Leave a comment