Rec Ball/ Travel Ball

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Jun 8, 2016
16,118
113
If there isn’t a LL team within the area one lives you can join one in another area. However, it does have to be approved by the District Administrator.

Also, LL requires all players to play in a certain amount of games in order to be eligible to play on the All-Star teams. However, I honestly don’t know how they would check to be sure this even occurred. When I coached a LL All-Star team and also was the site TD at our field for some of the District games, this info was never asked to be validated. I don’t believe it was validated at the District All-Star Coaches’ meeting, either. The only thing I recall being verified was that each player resided within our boundaries, attended a school in our boundaries or had a waiver signed by the DA if they did not. Also birth certs were checked.
My guess is that everything they did was on the up and up, at least technically, as I am sure there were plenty of people checking as they were steamrolling everybody..lol.
 
Mar 8, 2016
313
63
I went through these drafts back when I coached my kids in rec softball and rec baseball. The first year I was very naïve and thought we were going to split the players up evenly plus I wasn't in the "in crowd". By the time you had the coaches kid and the assistant coaches kid and the kid who needed to ride with the coaches kid, there was not a lot of drafting left. I basically got everyone who was left over. Of course by the end of my rec coaching tenure I had learned the game and become part of the problem.
 
Dec 2, 2013
3,409
113
Texas
I went through these drafts back when I coached my kids in rec softball and rec baseball. The first year I was very naïve and thought we were going to split the players up evenly plus I wasn't in the "in crowd". By the time you had the coaches kid and the assistant coaches kid and the kid who needed to ride with the coaches kid, there was not a lot of drafting left. I basically got everyone who was left over. Of course by the end of my rec coaching tenure I had learned the game and become part of the problem.
During the skills assessment all the coach's kids were evaluated too. We then ranked them where they would fall in the draft order. As you can imagine there was some gamesmanship going with the ranking but the commissioner had the final say. Some kids that weren't very good should not be ranked 1 or 2. That coach is already handicapped. I got the assistant coach that was a warm body with twins, one was the lights out pitcher that cried all the time. I had 3 #1's(including my DD) on my team to start out. So I had to wait until the 4th round for my first pick. When it comes to team make up I am a socialist. I wanted it to split as fair as possible. I have been on the short end of the stick with parents trying to game the system. Suzie needs a ride, Sally wants to play with her friends from school, etc. At 6u and 8u okay. After that, no way.
 
Jul 14, 2018
982
93
Based on a lot of conventional wisdom here on DFP, what happens in my area is unusual, but it’s pretty consistent within a 30 mile radius or so.

All of the kids start in Rec. The 8U-10U programs create an Allstar team of the most dedicated players, and most of those teams go on to form travel-level teams where they enter tournaments after the season is over, and continue to play in the fall.

When they come back to Rec in the spring, the Allstars are divided equally among the number of teams there are based on registration. The new kids have little chance to make Allstars after 10U, but a few have.

So in reality, Rec Allstars are dominated by a handful of local travel teams. Some parents get stars in their eyes and bolt for bigger orgs, but a majority of teams have been playing together for years by the time they start playing high school ball.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Aug 23, 2016
359
43
When DD was younger, there was a nearby rec league that would take its summer all-stars and play as a travel team in the fall through March 31 (the deadline here in So Cal for players to stop playing travel if they want to play All-Stars). They'd sign up for league ball and then get picked as the league's all-star team again, and dominate other all-star teams because they had that travel experience. It seemed like the girls would have been better off staying in travel, but I guess they would have had fewer cheap all-star trophies....
 
Aug 12, 2014
644
43
One of the rec leagues in our area is a Babe Ruth league and we've had TB teams join because they wanted to play in the national BR qualifiers. One year, there were two TB teams in the 12U division (6 teams total) and one of the other teams refused to play them. The coach told the commish to adjust the schedule or they would forfeit the games. The TB coaches did have the decency to skip the playoffs.
 
Jul 31, 2021
71
8
One of the rec leagues in our area is a Babe Ruth league and we've had TB teams join because they wanted to play in the national BR qualifiers. One year, there were two TB teams in the 12U division (6 teams total) and one of the other teams refused to play them. The coach told the commish to adjust the schedule or they would forfeit the games. The TB coaches did have the decency to skip the playoffs.
I just feel rec is for girls learning and shouldn't be for travel kids. Dont get me wrong some of these rec all stars can kick butt. But if my girl was just starting out and made Allstars then got killed by a team of travel players and she said screw it that would be wrong. Having said that the instance I was speaking of just got put out in state in 2 games.My post was really just what everyone thought. Baseball just seems to be more strict on it.
 
Jan 25, 2022
880
93
I see. Around my area, there are several large rec leagues that have, what we call internediate teams. These teams will play 4-5 B/C tournaments all within a 20 monute drive. The players also play rec ball. The coaches of these teams used to try and keep them together under the guise of 'needing to practice as a team and prepare for tournaments.' As you surmised, they went out and trounced the other teams in the rec league, so much so, that participation rate for the various leagues dropped precipitously. Many families saw these teams, their coaches and the league BOD as playing politics and playing favorites. So they left and went to one of the smaller leagues that didn't have such teams. It got to the point where the larger rec leagues had to do something about it. They responded in 2 ways. One way was the girls on those internediate teams wanted to participate in rec ball, they would be spread evenly throughout all of the available rec teams or the girls from those teams were forced to enter the draft pool and drafted. The second was a majority of those leagues went to a yearly draft. At the end of each year, all teams are disbanded. The following year, all players enter the draft pool and new teams are formed. This limited the ability of coaches to stack a team. As a result, most of those coaches quit the rec leagues and went strictly to TB. Most of those same coaches' (now) TB teams ended up disbanding because they tried to prevent their players from playing rec ball by mandating it. They claimed that the rec leagues had poor coaching. Kind of Ironic considering they were coaching for the rec league as little as the previous year and then some years before that.

Nevermind. I'm stupid.
 
Apr 20, 2018
4,581
113
SoCal
During the skills assessment all the coach's kids were evaluated too. We then ranked them where they would fall in the draft order. As you can imagine there was some gamesmanship going with the ranking but the commissioner had the final say. Some kids that weren't very good should not be ranked 1 or 2. That coach is already handicapped. I got the assistant coach that was a warm body with twins, one was the lights out pitcher that cried all the time. I had 3 #1's(including my DD) on my team to start out. So I had to wait until the 4th round for my first pick. When it comes to team make up I am a socialist. I wanted it to split as fair as possible. I have been on the short end of the stick with parents trying to game the system. Suzie needs a ride, Sally wants to play with her friends from school, etc. At 6u and 8u okay. After that, no way.
Did you use the serpentine draft? So the last coach would get two picks in a row. If the were 5 teams he would get the 5th and 6th picks? And then the 10th and 11th.
 

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