Originally Posted by carleton

Yup.

A few years ago in a small/medium sized town in Georgia (an hour South of Atlanta), I witnessed tryouts for a baseball league with players being aged like 8-12. It looked like NFL combines. The coaches literally had stopwatches timing the 8 year olds as they ran bases.

I thought to myself, "This sh*t is ridiculous."

And it got more ridiculous after the kid makes the team. There is no team equipment. Not only does each kid have to have their own glove, each kid has to have his/her own helmet and bat. Then you gotta have a gear bag to haul all of that in. An the uniforms look like college uniforms with nice material and stitching and names on the back, etc...and fitted ball caps.

Then there are "travel teams" where you travel across the region during the summer and play tournaments. This means mom and/or dad have to take off Friday afternoons to drive to the next state, hotel, restaurants, entry fees, etc...

This culminates in a lot of pressure on the kid. Imagine, after all of that, wanting to tell mom and dad that you don't want to play anymore? Even if they are understanding, the kid still may feel the pressure of not wanting to quit after all of the investment.

I know this is cliche, but back in my day whoever showed up made the team. You paid $5 for a team "jersey" (which was just a colored tshirt). You were big time if your team had tshirts with numbers on the back. All we had to provide on our own was pants, cleats, and a glove. And we could wear the cap of our favorite MLB team. The team provided bats, helmets, and even the catcher's gear. And this was HS summer ball. No pressure AT ALL. I also played on my HS team during the school year for 3 years, it was a bit more regimented with tryouts and the uniforms were nicer, but still not the pressure of playing today.

I've heard friends and coworkers telling similar stories about other sports including cheerleading.

Only a very, very small percentage of these kids (say 0.01%) will even get a college scholarship much less make it to the pros, but 99.99% of them have to participate in the grind...as well as 99.99% of the parents.

Further, there are the parents who don't handle all of this well and do put a lot of pressure on the kids. It's awful. There was a documentary on Netflix called Trophy Kids that shed a lot of light on the subject.

Honestly, I'd rather a kid not participate in sport than get involved in the system above. I'm sure that "Casual" versions of these leagues exist, but I haven't run across them.