How Bad Do You Really Want This?
Four years, three kids, and everything nobody tells you before you sign up for travel baseball and softball.
As I write this, my 17-year-old son is out jogging.
Nobody told him to. Yesterday, playing for his national travel team, the highest level he has ever reached, he struck out. Kids strike out all the time. It is the most ordinary thing in baseball. But this one was different. It was reckless. Careless in a way that the other parents in the stands noticed, the kind of at-bat where you can see a kid has quit competing and started just going through the motions.
I didn’t want to go all negative Nancy on him about it. I didn’t corner him in the parking lot. I just sent him the video of the at-bat. No caption. Nothing. He watched it and he knew right away. He could see himself going backwards. He could hear it, too. The video picked up the parents in the stands and his own teammates reacting in real time, and that was more than enough. These are people who love him, and that is exactly why it stung. Nobody had to lecture him. The tape did the whole job for me.
So we talked in the car. And that is where the question came up. The one this whole article is named after, the same question travel sports has been asking my kids and me for four years now, just worded a little differently every time. Because once you have already been through the private coaches, the drills, and the thousand hours of practice, it eventually comes down to this.
“How bad do you really want this?”
I told him the truest and hardest thing about the level he is playing at now. “You’re on a team where everyone is good. You can’t coast on talent anymore, because everyone here has it. Everyone’s good.” He nodded. He already knew. I ran through a few athletes who had hit that same wall and had to choose the work over the talent that carried them there. One of them I will come back to later in this article.
He didn’t answer me with words. He laced up and went for a run. That is the answer I was hoping for. Not because a run fixes his swing or his footwork. Because the run means he still wants it. And in travel sports, wanting it is the whole game.
He is seventeen. I can count the seasons I have left with him on one hand, and lately I have caught myself doing exactly that. I try not to let him see me do it.
Rule One: Both of You Have to Love It
Let me get the most important thing out of the way, because everything else in this article stands on top of it.
You, the parent, and your kid, the player, both have to love the sport. Not like it. Love it. Above the trophies, above the college dream, above the highlight clips. If that love isn’t real on both sides, travel sports will find the crack and pry it wide open.
Here is why. Travel can feel like a grind, if you let it. It eats your weekends, your money, and a shocking amount of your emotional energy. A rec season is a handful of Saturday mornings and orange slices. Travel is tournaments three hours away, back-to-back games in July heat, pool play at 8 a.m. and bracket play at 9 p.m., and a two-hour drive home where nobody talks because you lost the last one on a dropped pop fly.
You do not survive that on ambition alone. You survive it on love. When your kid genuinely loves the game, the losses sting and then they let go. When they are only in it because you want them there, or because a coach convinced you they had “potential,” the losses pile up and turn into resentment. I have watched it happen to other families, and I have watched it from the dugout too, as the coach holding the lineup card, which is somehow worse. From both chairs it looks identical. What gets me is how ordinary it looks while it is happening. No blowup. No single bad day. Just a kid who laughs a little less at each practice, stops asking for extra reps, and starts treating the thing they used to love like a chore somebody assigned them. It does not set off alarms. It just quietly raises an eyebrow, if you are paying attention at all. And then one day the kid is 13, done, never touches a bat again, and the parent still doesn’t understand why.
So here is where I land on it, as a coach and as a dad who learned this the hard way. My job in that dugout is to be a safe place, not one more source of pressure. Kids get plenty of that already. And pressure does not build players. It hollows them out. I know because I did it myself once. I leaned on my own son too hard, pushed a little too much, and I nearly shoved him right out of the game he loved. He almost quit. And when a kid quits because you squeezed the joy out of it, that is game over. You do not win that back with a pep talk. There are better ways to motivate a kid than pressing on them until they crack, and I promise you they work better. Trust me on this one. I have stood on the wrong side of it and watched it almost cost me everything that matters.
So before anything else, ask your kid the real question. Not “do you want to make the team.” Ask “do you love this.” And be honest with yourself about your own answer too, because they will feel it if you don’t.
Everything Changes at 12U
Here is the thing nobody puts in the flyer at signups.
Travel sports is basically all fun, all the way up to 12U. The kids are little, the stakes are low, everybody plays, and the trophies are big and shiny. Parents get along. Coaches rotate positions so nobody cries. It is joyful and it is easy to fall in love with.
Then 12U ends, and the floor drops out.
After that age, it gets serious. Playing time is earned, not handed out. Rosters get cut. The gap between the kids who put in extra work and the kids who don’t becomes a canyon. Even their heights are so uneven. There are kids who’ve grown big enough that they look like they just came from prom. And this is not a coincidence: right around that age is when most kids quit. The game stops being a playground and starts being a proving ground, and a lot of them decide, reasonably, that they would rather do something else. There is nothing wrong with that. But it is the fork in the road, and you should know it is coming.
For the families who keep going, the higher you climb, the more brutal it gets. Higher division, older age, better competition. Every level up is a level where your kid is suddenly not the best player anymore. Sometimes not even close. And that is the point. That is the whole point. The higher levels are asking your kid a question every single game: how bad do you really want this. It is the same question I asked my son yesterday. He is answering it on a sidewalk right now.
Starting Over, Over and Over
This is the part that hurts, and it is the part you have to be ready for.
Every time you move up, or move to a new team, or your kid grows into a tougher bracket, you start over. Depending on how good your kid is on that particular roster, they might land at the bottom of the depth chart. Riding the bench. Batting last. Watching kids they used to dominate get the innings they want.
I will not sugarcoat what that does to a kid. My kids have questioned their worth over this. They have sat in the car afterward wondering if they are even any good, if they belong, if this was all a mistake. I have been in that car with them, and it is one of the hardest places a parent can sit, because you cannot fix it with a pep talk and you cannot fix it with money.
What you can do is get through it together. My kids and I have treated it as a team problem, not their problem. We work at it together, and in the middle of it I keep asking one small question. Not “how do we get you more playing time.” Just: “Do you still like this?”
If the answer is yes, we keep going, and the depth chart sorts itself out over time. If the answer is no, then it is time for a different conversation, and there is no shame in that either.
There is a real upside buried in all this starting over, too. Every new team is a new set of teammates, new coaches, new families in the stands. Your kid makes friends across towns and leagues. You network with parents and coaches you would never have met otherwise. The circle keeps widening. That part is genuinely great, even when the on-field part is humbling.
Dear Parents, Your Level Of Support Matters
the question on the parent for a minute, because travel sports asks you “how bad do you want this” too.
Are you willing to do the driving? The two-hour hauls, the 5 a.m. departures, the hotel nights, the tournaments in towns you have to look up on a map? Are you willing to do the helping? Throwing extra reps in the backyard, filming at-bats, running to the field early so your kid can get loose? Are you willing, maybe, to coach?
And here is the honest truth about all that driving and helping and coaching: in my house, it is not a one-person job. Not even close. My wife and I split it down the middle. We divide practices between our son and our daughter so that both kids get a parent in the stands. She is the one who researches the travel teams, digs into the organizations, and reads between the lines on the ones that are just after your money. I mostly show up to practice with a bucket of balls. She books the hotels, maps the tournaments, and handles the ten thousand logistics that live in the gaps between coaching and game time. And let me be clear about something people gloss right over: it is her money on the line too, not just mine. This is a family commitment in the most literal sense of the word. If you have a partner, travel is going to find out real fast whether the two of you are actually a team, because it will test that before it tests anything else.
Because it gets even bigger when you are a coach. I know this firsthand. Coaching is a different level of commitment entirely. Now you are not just responsible for your own kid, you are responsible for the whole roster, the lineup, the parents, the practice plans, and the emotional temperature of a dugout full of 12-year-olds. It is enormously rewarding and it will absolutely eat your life. Go in with eyes open.
And here is where loving the sport yourself stops being a nice-to-have and becomes essential. If you love baseball or softball, the driving is not a chore, it is a chance to talk to your kid with no screens around. The backyard reps are not a sacrifice, they are the best part of your week. Parents who love the game glide through the logistics that break parents who are just showing up out of obligation. That love makes all of it lighter.
It’s Only a Grind If You Call It One
I want to sit on this one, because it might be the single most important thing I have figured out in four years.
My mother-in-law once looked at how much my kids and I practice and called it overtraining. I kindly pointed out that she doesn’t even like sports, lol. And then I explained the thing she was missing: this is not overtraining. This is quality time. It is some of the best time I get with my kids all week.
When I am out with my daughter, we are not grinding. We are hitting, sure, but between reps we are figuring out what we are going to cook when we get home, and cracking up about the funniest plays we have seen on the teams we have been on. When it is my son in the backyard, we are throwing, but we are also talking about our neighbor’s ridiculously impressive vegetable garden over the fence. And a lot of this happens right there in our own backyard, down in the batting cage, which is where the whole thing turns into a sitcom. My wife will appear in the window above, looking down at the cage like a hawk, and start critiquing the kids’ drills from her bird’s-eye seat. Uninvited color commentary from the second floor. It is one of my favorite things in the world, and I don’t think any of us would trade it for anything. Those are the conversations I will remember when they are grown and gone. And they will be grown and gone. That is the thing that sneaks up on you out there in the yard, glove on your hand, sun dropping behind the fence. The reps were never really the point. The reps were the excuse to keep my kid in the backyard with me for one more hour before the hours run out.
And we look back on all of it. The heartbreakers, the championship games we lost in the last inning, the tournament the very next weekend where we won one and felt like kings. My middle daughter, the dancer, is the most incredible cheerleader my son has. And my son turns right around and is her biggest fan when she is competing on a dance floor. And my wife is the biggest fan of all of them. This is the most involved in sports I have ever seen her in my life, and somewhere along the way she became the loudest voice in our corner. When I make it to a game, I film every moment and send it to her. When I can’t make it, she films it and sends it to me, so that neither of us ever really misses anything. Between the two of us, somebody is always there, and somebody is always recording it for the one who couldn’t be. We have a helluva time. All of us. That is not a byproduct of travel sports. For my family, it is the whole point.
Here is the part I want every parent to hear. The word you use for practice becomes the thing practice is. Call it “the grind” and I promise you, that is exactly what it will turn into for your kid. Semantics matter more than people think, especially with kids. The language you wrap around the work is the language they will carry inside their own head for the rest of their lives. Choose it carefully. It sets them up to succeed, or it teaches them to dread the very thing they are supposed to love.
I thought about this watching the Knicks win the championship this year. In the middle of the celebration, they flashed back to a clip of a teenage Jalen Brunson dragging his feet through a workout, his dad, Rick Brunson, a journeyman NBA player himself, calmly asking him, “Do you still want to do this for a living?” Jalen said yes. And his dad said, “Well son, this is what it takes.” No yelling. No grinding it into him. Just a quiet question and a quiet truth. Years later, Jalen scored 45 in the clinching game and went looking for his father in the crowd before he did anything else. That is the model. Ask the question, respect the answer, and make the work something you do together instead of something you inflict.
I take after that. Every practice.
Three Kids, Three Completely Different Paths
I have three kids, and they are the best proof I have that you cannot force this.
My 17-year-old is the travel baseball kid. My 15-year-old is a competitive dancer, and she is incredible, truly, the real deal, and she plays tennis on top of it. My 12-year-old is in travel softball and she loves both baseball and softball.
My middle daughter tried softball and baseball early on. She was fine. But I could tell from the very beginning that her heart was somewhere else. I never forced it. I knew she wanted something different, and dance turned out to be that thing. Watching her find it was better than any amount of me pushing her toward a sport she was lukewarm about ever would have been. Her tennis is the same story: it is hers, she chose it, and that is exactly why she is good at it.
My youngest is a different case. She is inspired by her big brother. She watches him play, she wants to be out there, and she genuinely loves the game. That love came from her, not from me. I just gave it somewhere to go.
Same house. Same parents. Three completely different answers to “what do you love.” The job is not to pick the answer for them. The job is to pay attention to the answer they are already giving you.
The Freshman Cut
However, my son’s story deserves its own article, and one day it will get one. But here is the short version, because it matters.
He played Little League all the way up to high school. Loved it. Lived it. Then he tried out for the freshman team as a freshman and got cut.
Cut. From the freshman team.
For a kid who had played his whole life, that is a gut punch that is hard to describe. So let me describe one piece of it, because the whole story really does belong in its own article someday.
I was at work when it happened. I had my son’s location open on my phone, that little tracking dot, and I watched it leave the high school to head home. Except it never made it home. It stopped at the elementary school next door, the same one where he first learned to play the game, and then it just did not move. For an hour, that dot sat in one place. And it was raining. My boy was standing out in the rain in front of his old elementary school, in the shadow of the high school that had just told him no, and he could not make himself walk the rest of the way.
The kids he had come up with, the ones he had shared a dugout with for years, they made it. He was the one who didn’t. Everybody who knew him was stunned.
My wife and I got in the car and went and got him. Nobody said much of anything. We just sat there, the three of us, and let it be as heavy as it was. There is no bat you can buy, no lesson you can book, no thing a father can say that lifts that exact hurt off your kid’s face. So I didn’t try. I just showed up and sat in it with him.
And then, somewhere in the quiet days after, without a single word from me, my son decided he was not done. He tried out for travel. He made it. He made it again as a sophomore, and from there it has been history. He is now on a national travel team, the highest level he has ever reached.
I am telling you this because the freshman cut is exactly the moment most people expect a kid to quit. He did the opposite. That single decision, to keep going after getting told no, is the reason he is out jogging right now instead of sitting on the couch wondering what could have been.
What You Actually Get Out of It
I have spent a lot of words on how hard travel is, so let me be just as clear about why it is worth it, because the positives are massive.
The competition itself is the gift. Playing against better kids, week after week, makes your kid better in a way that no amount of easy wins ever will. And here is a fun byproduct nobody mentions: when a travel kid goes back and plays rec, or plays with the neighborhood kids, they are often just destroying everyone, haha. That is not me bragging. That is what happens when you spend your weekends against the best and then step down a level. The confidence that comes from that is real and it carries into everything else they do.
Then there is college. If your kid decides they want to play in college, travel is very often the road that gets them there. Here is the part that blindsides a lot of parents: recruiters don’t really watch rec, and they mostly aren’t watching high school either. That one stuns people. You can have a genuinely talented kid tearing up their high school league, sitting near the top of the MaxPreps leaderboard, and still not get the time of day from a D1 coach, or any coach for that matter. Not because the kid isn’t good. Because that is simply not where college coaches are looking. They are at the travel events, the showcases, the big tournaments. That is the pipeline. Miss it, and it doesn’t much matter how many high school arms your kid is lighting up.
And this is important: college ball is possible at a lot of levels, not just the big D1 programs you see on TV. There is D2, D3, NAIA, junior college, and more. There is a real path for a lot of kids, and travel is where that path starts.
The team my son is on now takes this seriously in a way I did not fully appreciate until we were inside it. They expect every kid on that roster to play college ball, and they coach like it. Everything is pointed at the next level. And my son, the same kid who stood in the rain outside that elementary school a couple of years ago, has told me flat out that he wants to play in college. After everything, he is not just still playing. He is aiming higher than he ever has.
But even if college never happens, even if your kid decides they don’t want to keep playing at that level, they walk away with things that outlast the sport. There are tons of rec leagues out there, and they are full. Your kid can play forever if they want to, in a beer league at 40, whatever. The networking and the confidence they built along the way become huge. They know how to walk into a room full of strangers and belong, because they have done it on every new team they ever joined.
And it teaches teamwork in a way a classroom never will. Real teamwork, where you are counting on the kid next to you and they are counting on you, where you win together and lose together and figure out how to keep showing up for each other after a bad game.
The Big One: Resilience
For me, as a parent, that is the reward that towers over all the others.
Resilience.
Travel sports will knock your kid down. Repeatedly. A cut, a slump, a bench, a bad coach, a team that folds, a season where nothing goes right. And every single time, they have to decide whether to get back up. Nobody can make that decision for them. Not me, not a coach, not a paid instructor. They have to choose it.
What I have watched happen over four years is my kids learning, in their bodies and not just in their heads, that getting knocked down is survivable. That a slump ends. That the bottom of the depth chart is a starting point, not a verdict. That is a lesson that has nothing to do with baseball or softball and everything to do with the rest of their lives. Jobs, relationships, setbacks I cannot protect them from. They are building the muscle to handle all of it, one hard weekend at a time.
My son out on that run right now is not training his legs. He is training that muscle. He got knocked down and he chose to get back up, on his own, without me telling him to. You cannot buy that. You cannot fake it. And it is the single best thing travel sports has ever given my family.
The Negatives Nobody Puts in the Brochure
Alright, let me be fair. There are downsides, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
Yes, there are money-grab teams out there. Organizations that are more interested in your check than your kid’s development, that promise exposure they cannot deliver, that stack a roster with paying families and let half of them ride the bench all season. They exist. But that is exactly what research is for. Talk to other parents. Watch a practice before you commit. Ask hard questions about playing time, about coaching philosophy, about where past players ended up. A good organization will answer those questions happily. A money grab will get squirmy. You can usually tell the difference in one conversation.
The cost is real, and it is not small. Fees, travel, hotels, tournaments, and the gear. Oh, the gear. If your kid plays baseball or softball, you are going to become a regular at the sporting goods store, and I do mean regular. Bats, gloves, cleats, batting gloves, helmets, and the endless replacement of things that get lost or grown out of. Budget for it, because it adds up faster than you think.
And the calendar. This is the one that surprises people most. When you go travel anything, be ready to sacrifice your weekends. Not some of them. Most of them, in season.
And here is what nobody tells you about the top levels: it stops being just weekends. My son’s national team is loaded with upperclassmen, the 18u guys, and in the summer the tournaments stretch clean through the week and into the weekend. A Perfect Game tournament can start on a Wednesday and not wrap up until Sunday. And that is on top of practices on Monday and Tuesday. Do the math on that. For stretches of the summer, this is close to a seven-day-a-week commitment. That is the deal as you climb, and nobody hands it to you in the brochure.
Know going in that you asked for this. Nobody tricked you. If you resent every Saturday, you are going to have a bad time and so is your kid. If you can make peace with it, and even come to love it, those weekends, and the Wednesdays and the Thursdays, become some of the best memories your family has.
One more thing on the culture: most travel parents are genuinely supportive, and most coaches are too. The horror stories are real but they are the exception, not the rule. The right team and the right situation make all the difference, which is why finding them, and having a straight conversation with your kid about what their actual goals are, matters so much. Have that discussion. Keep having it. Their goals will change, and so should the plan.
Talk to Your Kids About the Money
Here is one I feel strongly about, and I know not everyone agrees with me.
Some parents never tell their kids what travel costs. I do. Not the full spreadsheet, not every line item, but my kids know it is significant. They know it is a real commitment from our family.
The argument against this is that it makes kids feel guilty, that it puts pressure on them, that the money should be the parent’s problem and not the kid’s burden. I understand that view. I just don’t share it.
When I tell my kids what goes into this, I am not trying to make them feel guilty. I am making sure they don’t take it for granted. There is a difference. A kid who knows the family is investing in their dream shows up differently than a kid who thinks the fees and the gear and the hotels just materialize out of thin air. It is not guilt. It is respect, going both directions. I respect them enough to be honest, and they respect the opportunity enough to give it their all.
A Few Things Nobody Warned Me About
Since I am handing out everything I wish someone had told me, here are a few extras.
Watch the arm. In baseball especially, the pressure to throw more, harder, year-round, is intense, and young arms are not built for it. Pitch counts and rest are not suggestions. The kids who get hurt young often never come back the same. Protect the long game over the short win.
The car ride home is more important than the game. This is the one I had to learn. After a bad game, the last thing your kid needs is a breakdown of everything they did wrong on the drive back. What they need is you, on their side. The best thing you can say is often just “I love watching you play.” Save the coaching for practice. The ride home is for being a parent, not a scout.
Multi-sport is a feature, not a distraction. My middle daughter dances and plays tennis. My youngest plays two sports. The obsession with picking one thing at age 10 and grinding it into the ground is, in my opinion, a mistake for most kids. Cross-training builds better athletes and it fends off burnout. Let them be more than one thing for as long as they can.
So Should You Do It?
If your kid genuinely wants to compete at a higher level, then yes. Go travel. It is great, and I would do it all over again.
But understand the deal you are making. The commitment is not just your money. It is your time, your weekends, your emotional energy, and your willingness to sit in the hard car rides without trying to fix everything. Make that commitment with your eyes open, and make it alongside your kid, not on top of them.
And make it without conditions. I hear parents say they don’t want to “waste money” in case their kid quits later. I understand the instinct, but here is my honest opinion: the moment you say that out loud, you have already quit. You have put a condition on your kid’s dream, and kids feel conditions even when you never say them to their face. Once the deal has strings attached, you are not a team anymore, and a parent and kid who are not a team do not get very far in this. Commit fully or don’t commit. And here is the thing nobody tells you: even if your kid does walk away from the sport someday, they will not remember the money. They will remember that you were all in. That you showed up, every weekend, no strings. That appreciation outlasts the sport by decades.
Because the rewards are immense. A shot at college if that is the dream, and it is a real shot at more levels than most people realize. Confidence that spills into everything else. Teamwork that sticks. And resilience, the big one, the thing I would pay for twice if I had to.
The love makes the rest survivable. When the love is real, the bottom of the depth chart doesn’t matter. The slump doesn’t matter. The cut doesn’t matter. Because in the end, none of it does. Unless your kid isn’t playing at all, and even then, there is always a rec team down the road with an open spot.
The Catch You Won’t Know Was the Last
Here is the thing underneath all the advice. The thing I actually sat down to write.
Somewhere in these four years, I played the last game of catch I will ever play with my son as a little boy. I don’t know which day it was. Nobody tells you. There is no whistle, no final out, no announcement over the PA. One summer the ball came back soft and high, and some summer after that he was throwing gas and asking me about the neighbor’s tomatoes, and the little kid was just gone. Quietly. The way they always go. I would give almost anything to know which afternoon that was, so I could have stood out there a little longer. I can’t. That is the deal nobody mentions at signups.
So here is what four years of travel actually taught me, and it has nothing to do with baseball. Play every catch like you don’t know which one is the last, because you don’t. Sit in the traffic. Take the 5 a.m. drive. Learn the vegetable garden by heart. Say “I love watching you play” until they roll their eyes at you. Do it now, while they are still in the backyard, because the backyard does not last, and the hours run out, and no amount of wanting buys a single one of them back.
There is mercy in it too. My youngest is twelve. She fell in love with this game watching her big brother, and now she is the one dragging me out to the yard while he trains for a level I won’t be able to follow him to much longer. I get to do the whole thing over again with her. Only this time I know how it ends. This time I am paying attention to every throw.
My son is going to come back from that jog in a few minutes. Sweaty, quiet. He’ll grab a water, tell me the run felt good, and we will not talk about any of this. But I asked him how bad he wanted it, and he answered me with his feet, because he still loves it.
And the whole time I was asking him that question, I was answering a different one I never said out loud. How bad do I want this. These years. This backyard. This kid, for as long as he’ll still throw with his old man.
Bad enough that it is going to wreck me when the last catch comes.
Bad enough that I won’t even know it was the last one until it is already over.
So go play catch with your kid. Today, if you can.
That’s the whole article.
This was a great article worthy of a podcast