Part 2: A Mom's Anxiety About Travel Sports

In this episode of the podcast/newsletter, we wrap up our discussion with Christen Snavely as we address some of the anxieties parents of children in travel sports will feel. The remainder of our conversation covered many different areas and a good deal of discussion about things which are unique to baseball. In this newsletter, I will summarize some of the main points that came of our conversation.

Christen and her husband both are believers in trying to have their kids play multiple sports and are trying to avoid the early specialization trap. However, during the offseason they will do some occasional hitting off a batting tee for a small amount of time. This led to a discussion on properly crafting those early movement patterns when children are young. We discussed a book titled The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle which discusses how the nature of these repetitive movements increases the laying down of a substance called myelin on your nerves. This will allow the signal to travel faster and the movement pattern to be more easily accessed in the future. The book discusses how many organizations that produce top level talent will spend a large amount of time in the early years fine tuning the very specific movements instead of throwing kids into competition too early.

We discussed how it seems that when speaking with people in the sports world today, there is a bit of a consensus that with all the extra training that kids are able to receive now, kids today are much more skilled in their sports than they were 20-30 years ago. This may be leading to an inflationary effect where kids 20-30 years ago would have been able to have productive high school athletic careers are no longer able to if they have not put in the many hours of training. In other words, you must be much better now in order to make the team of many medium to large high schools. The elite level training more and more kids are receiving are pushing more and more kids out of sports.

The idea of early exposure to college scouts also came up. There is a push to get on the top teams of travel sports as a means to get on the radar of college scouts as early as possible. We did talk about some of the teams that do seem to do a good job with player development and getting in front of the right people. We laughed that even some of the top colleges are not immune from the anxiety of signing the next big player. Once someone gets an offer from one big school, the other schools all seem to jump on the bandwagon.

Finally, we wanted to touch on the topic of how performance training fits in to the life of a travel sports athlete. Is there such a thing as too much? We feel the answer is yes. We have a less is more attitude towards performance training. The athlete is already having regular tournaments and practices. Increasing the load beyond that needs to be done very methodically. Remember to prioritize recovery, sleep, nutrition, and actually having some leisure time. This will not only boost performance, but decrease the chances of injury.

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Simplified Takeaways…

1. Prioritize playing multiple sports (repeating this one).

2. Work on building good movement patters and do them repeatedly. You will then have an easier time accessing these movements when needed.

3. Travel sports may be leading to sports skill inflation. You need to be better and better in order to participate in certain high school sports compared to the past.

4. Don’t over do it with performance training. With all the travel and tournaments and practice, cramming in more training is not always best. Sometimes the best performance boosters are sleep, recovery, proper nutrition, and down time.

Further Reading…

1.   The book we discussed in the podcast (The Talent Code).

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