"It's me! A travel sports hater with a kid in travel soccer."

Several witches I know have asked me of late, "Have you done something on travel sports?"

I interviewed expert Linda Flanagan on the topic a few years ago but I figured it was time to talk to witches with kids in the system. In fact it was the witches with kids in the system who most wanted to talk about it. I may have been inspired to do another issue after half my 14 year old's house baseball games were canceled this summer because they couldn't get enough kids to play since everyone's doing travel or high school feeder. Even if you don't want your sporty kid to do travel, there's a good chance travel will come into your world and give you feelings.

Not a single travel sports parent I heard from is happy with travel sports. But one of the crappy parts of parenting is having to go along with systems that are deeply flawed. Our individual ideals very often butt up against the child we're raising and the setting they're in. Making your kids skip something they want to do and their friends are doing to try to change a gigantic system is less fun and easy than it sounds.

Spoiler: Nobody below has a solution on how to "hack" travel sports to make it less oppressively scheduled/expensive/demanding/exclusive/capitalistic. But maybe these experiences will help you make a decision if you're on the fence about travel, reassure you that there are more travel parents out there in the stands with misgivings than you might assume, or make you feel less alone if you secretly hate sports but your kid unfortunately happens to thrive in athletics.

These interviews have been edited and condensed. I'm putting a paywall about 2/3 of the way through it because this issue involved at least eight hours of coordinating, reporting, editing and formatting. If you cannot afford to support the work but want to read the whole thing, reply to this email and I can share it with you gratis, but otherwise I hope the wall prompts you to support these efforts at any level.

My son always played a thousand sports. He only started playing baseball because in the spring of 2021 I was like, "He needs to do an activity and it needs to be outside." And timing-wise, that was baseball. So, we started playing just house baseball.

I remember that, very quickly, dads be creeping.

Men would come up to me and be like, "There's so much good out there." I was like, "Sir, I do not want to be here and I'm not flattered by this. I don't know you." It felt very crazy and thirsty, but they were dads. It wasn't like they were business owners, but it turns out they are.

I was very much like, you're not "specializing" this early. Play three sports. But by middle school, he wanted to be with his friends, and he wanted to play at a more competitive level.

As far as spectating, you have to get there an hour early. It is sometimes an hour away. Then it may not start on time. Then it may be 100 degrees in no shade, or it might be snowy. They can be over three hours long. So, now we're at five hours, then they talk afterward. I'm like, "When's dinner?" It was so stupid.

I think the biggest problem is that they're doing their best, but these people who run the teams and the coaches are not administrators, and they're definitely not like, "When is bedtime and when is homework?" It's very Oakleys-on-the-back-of-the head, entitled, like, "Hey, change of plans. We're going to be in Mundelein on Saturday." I'm like, "It's Thursday night."

I think I shared my feelings too explicitly with my son. I'd be like, "I don't think you understand the sacrifice." I said to him, "I want you to make a Google doc with the teams you've been trying out for and I want you to tell me where they practice, how much they cost, all those things. I want you to see the metrics of this decision-making."

I had to sublimate my desire to get an A in life and be like, "You know what? We are not going to make that game. If you're going to tell us in 24 hours to do something, I don't care if my son is disappointed or his favorite coach is disappointed."

I also had to be really comfortable about asking for help. I'm the one asking, "Can my son get a ride?"

At the end of this season, my son wanted more of a, "This is it, boys. We've been through war together," type speech and he didn't get it. I was like, "This is your coach's job. He's not a parent. He's not going to give you a hug. He's not going to think about you starting now." And I think that is sad when you're still a kid.

The people that are gung-ho and want to be at all the stuff and have all the swag and want to plan all this stuff? Thank god for them, because I don't. I'm watching this game via the app from my car because the weather is inclement. Or I watched his last home game behind the dugout because it was the only shade there was, and people were like, "We'll get you an umbrella if you want to see it." I was like, "I'm good. He knows I'm here."

We had a come-to-Jesus moment. I told my husband, "I know that on paper we're acting against our core values when it comes to a lot of this." However, there is the core value of just being supportive. Then I come back to, "Am I being supportive of him in baseball by getting involved in this machinery?" Also, he's a pitcher so his arm hurts all the time. I was like, "Ice and Tylenol," because it turns out I don't have the time to now get involved with the physical therapy.

If someone asks, "Why does your son or daughter want to be on that team?" In our case, it was the kids' dissatisfaction with how competitive the level of gameplay was at the rec level and also not seeing a lot of progress. He was like, "What I want is not what these coaches are going to give because they're just nice volunteers who enjoy the game of baseball."

They charge you to try out. So, it's money-making for them to encourage as many people as possible to try out. Why would you try to cast a play that you've already cast, have open auditions for a play you've already cast? I have this theory that travel sports are MLMs for men.

I always swore my kids would not do travel sports, but this year my 7th grader is in travel soccer. I really hate how at a certain point it really feels like there is just….no other real option? Why is it not enough to do it for fun, for friendship, for self-discovery – why is that not worth investing our community resources in?

Something else I did not know about soccer is that people have super strong feelings about the local/regional hierarchy of leagues. My kid is on the B team, which typically plays in a "lower" league than the A team. But this year both the A and B teams are playing in the "better" league. The coach held a Zoom call on a beautiful Saturday afternoon to talk through this change, and I was like, "What does this actually change for the parts that I need to know, ie when and where I need to get my kid for his practices and games?"

But apparently I was in the minority because there was so much outrage. OUTRAGE. Because "My kid had to put in his years in the lower league and now it's like he did all that work for nothing!" But ok, sure, I will try to keep a straight face since my camera is on. Can someone just tell me real quick if these games will be further away? No, same distance radius? OK great.

He was on a 15U team as an 11-year old, and honestly, I loved that 15U team. It was absurd but such a great vibe! It had literal elementary school kids playing alongside high school freshmen. He was such a tiny little peanut out there, and the team was this band of total misfits, some phenomenal natural-born talents who did not have a home life that made travel soccer possible; some kids who ran around like awkward colts on new legs. But my kid would play soccer at recess with his friends and they'd all be like, "You're so good!! It's insane your mom won't let you do travel with us!!!" And he kept being like, "I just want to play WITH MY FRIENDS on THEIR TEAM." So finally I caved.

Now he's on the team with his friends, but it isn't very fun. It isn't like playing at recess. And it isn't like his absurd, awesome 15U rec team, either. When he doesn't make the save, or when he misses a pass, or whatever, all the kids on his travel team are like UGH GOD and kind of cold-shouldering him at water breaks or whatever. Travel sports feel so much like, "Fuck the development of the children of this community – all I really care about is if my kid has four different coaches, one for each specific skill set in this sport, to mold him into the best scholarship-winning D1 player he can be. "Finding joy" isn't something we are prioritizing here; we find joy in drinking the tears of the losers. I tried to join a conversation at a practice over the summer, and it was a few dads all one-upping each other with stories of how kids need a good smack now and then.

My kid had his first tournament a couple of weeks ago, and they had a break of a couple of hours between games. One of the boys was sitting on a blanket, with his cleats off, just like…enjoying being a human. I remember looking over at him and being like, "that's what I want my kid to feel." Just that feeling of taking off your shoes after working hard, leaning back, sun on your face, eyes closed, not a care in the world. His mom called over and was like, "You better not be thinking of complaining that your feet hurt! You've got another game and I better see you busting your ass in it!" My god.

Idk if this is just my area, but travel teams are just the "entry level" to the insanity. It turns out that once you're on the travel team, you will be one of only a few kids who aren't also on a SECOND team, an ACADEMY team. So you'll have Academy games on Saturdays and travel team games on Sundays, practices every night M-F. It's just this constant escalation of time and money and commitment, and for what? I'm sorry, no. I have other kids. I have a JOB. I have a house that I am constantly keeping just barely on the boundary of chaos. I think he needs time to walk to the library and help fold laundry and listen to music while staring at the ceiling, processing his day. It really feels like a cultural sickness, to me. And yet I know a lot of very healthy, normal, grounded people who opt in, and that just makes me feel like somehow I am really bad at managing all of my life? Like, is everybody else fitting in all the needs and wants that go into a full, complete family life, around all this shit? Because I'm not.

I personally disagree with the entire the travel sports industry and think it has destroyed recreational sports. They have sucked all of the semi-competitive kids out of rec leagues in our area.

That said, rec teams are primarily composed of kids who don't want to be there, and parents treat the volunteer coaches as free babysitters. My son was not enjoying rec soccer because most of the kids were farting around, and he would score all of the goals. We switched into a local travel team to try it out and lucked into a great group of families. My son was able to be challenged and develop some grit by working on skills that don't come as easily and competing against better players.

It's a slippery slope. There's definitely pressure within the club to do more as they get older. We're following his lead on the level of effort he wants to put in and are willing to match it to a reasonable extent. Thankfully, he's primarily in it to have fun with his friends. Most of the kids that we see doing the most are being pushed by their parents, and that's just not for us. 

My daughter was the one who was like, "I want to do this," about travel softball. We were totally clueless at the time. The lucky part was practices were nearby, but summer sucks because you can't travel anywhere. You can't vacation.

A few years later she said, "I want to do travel volleyball." I'm like, "We can't get you to four days a week practice after school. There's just no way. And we're not going to pay the $4,000 or whatever ungodly amount it is."

There are all kinds of people involved in travel sports, and some want their kids to play collegiate sports or get scholarships, and they are pushing for this sort of elite level of play and coaching. "We want to win, we want to win." That's exhausting. There's no end to the amount of complaining and comparison. We are not doing this so our daughter will get a Division 1 scholarship. You can play in high school.

So now she's signed up for travel, and she's like, "I want to have a summer job next year. I don't want to play spring ball." So we're sort of like, we've committed to this. Are we really going to jump off the ship right now at 14U and not go to 16U? In a way, they sort of rely on us because she's a starter.

The league that we're with, it's led by someone who doesn't believe winning is everything. It's a positive group. But we've watched these intense families filter out starting 8U, 10U, leaving. It's hard because a lot of those player kids were good. You're like, "Oh, shit, we just lost another pitcher because our organization isn't aggressive enough."

There was a softball organization we played all the time. They just completely collapsed last year because all the coaches left. There's no sustainability in that. The coaches compete too. They can say, "Well, we're going to go over to this team because they're offering us better salaries or there's more of a winning advantage."

Now at school she's also being recruited for jazz band. She told the teacher "The tryouts for that conflicts with my volleyball schedule. I can't do it." He was like, "Oh, you don't have to try out. Also the practices are seven to eight a.m. on Tuesdays and Wednesdays." She's like, "I guess I can do that."

I don't want her to get burned out. Our biggest concern is that she's going to feel obligated to all these other people and things and not really be following what interests her and just start hating it all. 

We wouldn't force her, but I think she feels like she owes it to us. So we constantly are being like, "Is this too much?"

Of course, two years ago we were like, "You committed to this. You got to do it." 

I grew up in the US and played travel softball as a teenager, effectively turning softball into a year round activity and burning out by junior year, switching to the BOWLING team instead lol.

We found ourselves deep into the speed skating pipeline. My older kid (15) always loved to skate, and I 100% did not want him to play hockey, but he just wanted to go to all the public skate sessions. He'd skate around and around and eventually when he was around 8 years old, I said, "What are we doing here, bud?" and he looked me dead in the eye and said, "SPEEDSKATING!" I realized that's what he'd been doing in his head the whole time.

I found a club operating out of a rink near us and signed him up. I grew up playing team sports and wasn't ready for the amount of support you have to give in individual racing sports like this. Basically driving an hour or two to regional meets a couple of weekends a month. Deciding how far you're willing to drive: 8 hrs? 10? 15?, and how many flights and hotels you can afford during the 7-month season once your kid starts qualifying for meets?

Ask us if we thought we'd ever be provincially certified officials? Since it takes like 100 people to put on a speed skating meet, eventually everyone gets tapped to be a lap counter, timer, or guard runner.

Six years later and he's trying to get into this high-performance program in a neighboring city that he'd have to take a train to 5 days a week 40 minutes each way. This summer he attended camps in Calgary and Quebec. It's not a sleepaway camp; there's no supervision or accommodation, just a bunch of parents working in hotel rooms while their kid is at the oval for 8 hours a day.

We know at least three families that have MOVED to get their kid closer to a world class training facility in Calgary or Utah, etc.

My kid brings this up (even as he skipped his 6 am practice this morning), and I laugh so hard at him. I love the kid – but as long as I hear myself saying things like "MY commitment (time/financial) matches YOUR commitment (training/showing up)" I don't think we're anywhere close to relocating for this sport!

We do currently have flights booked for at least three competitions this season so far. We sought grandparent sponsorship to cover this season's travel. We signed our younger kid (7) up. She started up again this week…pray for me!