This weekend, parents across the national will climb into cars or even board planes, prepared to drop a few hundred dollars on hotels and meals in cities where the only attraction is a youth baseball complex.

For some, the two days spent watching their kids play in five or six games will be one of a few special mini-vacations this summer; for others it will be a repeat of the weekend before and a preview of the next.

Coming home with a trophy would be nice. But the motivations often go beyond that.

Some do it because their kids love baseball more than a trip to Disney World.

Others feel the pressure to keep up with their children’s peers.

Still others have in mind a kid named Jason Heyward, who is now the power-hitting right fielder for the Atlanta Braves and the leading candidate for National League Rookie of the Year.

At 20 years old, Heyward is praised for the way he plays the game like a seasoned pro. And, in a way, the Ridgewood, N.J.-born Heyward already is just that.

He started traveling the country when he was 8, arriving in the majors with essentially a 12-year “career” of intense training and playing schedules behind him.

If a poster child for the cause of professionalizing youth sports was needed, Heyward is it.

Former major-leaguer Billy Ripken marvels at the all-consuming schedules of many of today’s youth players. But aside from pointing out that he and his Hall of Fame brother Cal Ripken Jr. didn’t grow up playing 100-plus baseball games a year, Ripken is reluctant to criticize those who do.

“It really comes down to how it’s framed,” says Ripken of parents’ expectations.

He and his brother built a youth baseball complex just off Interstate 95 in Aberdeen, Md., offering young players perfectly manicured, scaled-down versions of Oriole Park at Camden Yards and Yankee Stadium. Not surprisingly, he sees no harm in parents shepherding their kids to play there or at other youth baseball meccas like Cooperstown, N.Y., or East Cobb, Ga.

Just make sure it’s framed as a fun and challenging experience, he says, and not as a stop along the way to the majors. Parents should not assume that their child’s story could one day mirror Heyward’s simply because their training and playing regimens mirror his.

“Jason Heyward is 6-foot-5 and 240 pounds,” Ripken says. “There’s something else there besides all the training.”

Of course, not all parents who sign their kids up for year-round play and professional training are expecting them to become the next Jason Heyward. But they feel the stories of Heyward and other highly trained athletes have set a new standard not only for what it takes to get to the majors but — through the trickle-down effect — what it takes to earn a college scholarship or make the high school varsity. Their examples are seen as evidence of the need to train more, travel more and play more, and to start all three at younger ages.

To what end? What are most parents expecting from all this intense play?

That’s a question too few parents ask themselves as they sign their kids up for such grueling schedules, says Rob Gilbert, an associate professor of sports psychology at Montclair State University.

He worries that few parents realize when they are more into the goal than their kids are.

Gilbert likes to say there are typically two kinds of kids in sports – “the get to’s” and the “got to’s.”

“The kid who says ‘I get to go to practice’ has the passion,” Gilbert says “The kid who says, ‘I’ve got to go to practice’ has lost it.”

Creating superstars

Where is this all heading?

This burgeoning youth baseball culture will produce more Jason Heywards. It’s already produced Bryce Harper, another youth travel team veteran who was the No. 1 overall pick by the Washington Nationals in the recent Major League Baseball draft. A phenom who started playing T-ball when he was 3, the 17-year-old earned his high-school equivalency diploma after his sophomore year so he could attend community college and be eligible for this week’s draft before he’s even eligible to vote.

However, there are also dangers with parental over-involvement — with team-hopping, coach badgering and player misbehavior the most obvious.

Parents who disagree with a coach or decide their children aren’t getting enough playing time quickly start shopping for another team or form their own. Club-team tryouts sometimes attract up to 150 kids, including those looking to defect from a team they joined only a year before, say several club-team organizers.

Many worry that the values of youth sports are being corrupted, with the focus increasingly more about the individual instead of the team.

“You have all these parents teaching kids it’s OK to quit a team,” says Ron Lichtenberger, a Wayne, N.J., father of a 15-year-old girl who plays club softball. “I’ve known kids who’ve played on seven teams in seven years.”

Parents who overestimate their kids’ abilities and blame coaches for their failures are breeding a generation of young athletes who are increasingly becoming disrespectful and uncoachable, says New Jersey Mariners club team coach Jeff Luna.

“I’ve seen kids on other teams yell at their coaches — in the middle of a game,” Luna adds.

Volunteers passe

The attitudes of players and parents have gotten so combative that the volunteer coach is fast becoming a thing of the past, says Tony Cerbo, who runs the for-profit Cerbo Baseball League in which many North Jersey club teams compete.

Cerbo, who also runs for-profit teams, thinks there’s a growing market for paid coaches because many parents have come to mistrust — and eventually destroy the goodwill of – volunteer coaches.

“People who call me up about joining one of my teams, the first question they ask is whether my teams are coached by dads,” he says. “People have no respect for the time that these coaches are putting in.”

Cerbo used to volunteer to coach the teams of his oldest son, now 20. When his second son, now 15, started playing, Cerbo had had enough. “I wasn’t giving away my time for free anymore,” Cerbo says.

John Ciurcu, recreation director in Franklin Lakes, N.J., agrees that there’s a growing sentiment among parents that if someone is volunteering their time, they must be in it solely to benefit their own kid.

But Ciurcu, who used to work as a trainer at a for-profit center, says parents can grow equally disillusioned with paid coaches and trainers. “You’re buying the training sessions and you’re buying the batting lessons and now you’re thinking ‘I’m paying for all this, why is my kid sitting on the bench,”‘ Ciurcu says. “The ‘you owe me’ mentality starts in.”

Recreation directors like Ciurcu are perhaps in the best position to try to curb the explosion of “Daddy Ball” teams splitting off from town travel programs. Franklin Lakes hires trainers to run travel-team tryouts and make the final decisions about who gets to play, a strategy more towns are using. This cuts down on accusations of volunteer coaches favoring their neighbors or their kids’ friends, Ciurcu says.

Other rec directors say many parents have become so intent on advocating for their child’s needs that they badger volunteer coaches into quitting.

“Our volunteers are slowly but surely becoming less coaches and more mediators dealing with parents’ complaints,” says Ben Stentz, recreation program supervisor in Princeton. Stentz adds he no longer feels like his job is just to manage programs for kids. “Our job has become managing the expectations of adults.”

Losing perspective

When parents get on these paths of constant conflict, more often than not it’s a sign they’ve lost their way in the world of youth sports, Gilbert says.

They start to look at the external factors and assign blame rather than considering the most important internal factor: “What does the kid want?” Gilbert says.

Maybe a kid isn’t doing well on a team or responding well to a coach because he simply doesn’t want to play anymore. “Parents can get so involved themselves that they don’t recognize when their child has lost the passion to play,” Gilbert says.

What signs can a parent look for to know whether they are on the right youth sports path? Lichtenberger says the best clue to his daughter’s desires is the fact that he’s given her a choice to dial down and she declines. “She’s making the decisions, not me.”

Leslie Matthews, whose two sons have traveled the country playing on the Teaneck Titans, an intense travel team coached by her husband, says in the early years she used to question whether it made sense for her family to commit that much time and energy.

What finally convinced her that a life that revolved around baseball was right for her boys was this observation:

“These boys — with all the games they play, and all the practices and the training — what do they do when they have some free time?” Matthews says. “They play baseball.”

WEB RESOURCES:

–Youth Sports Research Council at Rutgers University, youthsports.rutgers.edu

–Institute for Coaching and Center for Sports Parenting at Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center in Montclair, yogiberramuseum.org

–Institute for International Sport, internationalsport.com

–Institute for the Study of Youth Sports at Michigan State University, www.educ.msu.edu/ysi

Copy the Story Link