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Youth baseball is fast becoming a
high-stakes race
Sunday, June 6, 2010
LAST UPDATED: MONDAY JUNE 7, 2010, 9:45 AM
BY COLLEEN DISKIN
THE RECORD
STAFF WRITER
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The Ramapo Rangers hope to play 140 baseball games
this year, 22 shy of a major league season.
If that schedule doesn’t sound tough enough, consider
that big-leaguers don’t have book reports to turn in or
science tests to take the day after a Sunday doubleheader.
The 13-year-old Rangers do have one thing in common
with the pros: baseball is no longer just a pastime to
them.
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There are many things that youth baseball no longer is in
North Jersey. It’s no longer a spring sport. Not when you
consider that the "spring" season of a town team of
9-year-olds from West Milford started in February.
It’s no longer a sport played just on hometown ballfields. Not when a squad of
16-year-olds on the professionally coached Teel Ravens club team traveled the
country on a 32-day road trip last summer to play in showcase tournaments, hoping
to be seen by professional and college scouts.
LESLIE BARBARO / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Throughout New Jersey, kids
are playing baseball as if it
were a professional pursuit.
Even kids who don’t have
fantasies about one day
making it to the majors are
playing in year-round
programs that have turned
Little League, and other
recreation programs like it,
into the cheap seats of youth
baseball.
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Teaneck Titans, from left, Michael
The goal for some kids is to
Benducci, Anthony Apreda and Jordan
play in college or beyond, but
Matthews at a tournament this spring in
parents and players say that
Aberdeen, Md.
isn’t the only lure. In a time
when video games and the
Internet have supplanted
bike rides and neighborhood pick-up games as a chief source of kids’ recreation,
many parents consider structured and goal-oriented activities an important way of
keeping their kids on the right track.
NO LONGER JUST A GAME
A five-part series:
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Steve Silverman, whose
14-year-old son Alec plays
100 games a year with the
Teaneck Titans club team,
9/8/10 4:31 PM
NorthJersey.com: Youth baseball is fast becoming a high-stakes race
http://www.northjersey.com/sports/rec_travel_sports/baseball/9...
sees value in his son learning
that you have to be
committed and make
sacrifices to be able to do the
things you love in life.
Sunday
The professionalization of youth baseball
Monday
Personal training and grueling schedules
Tuesday
How do you know whom to trust with your kids?
Wednesday
The financial and emotional cost of travel teams
Thursday
Choosing the right path
Click here each day as the series unfolds and view
multimedia coverage including video, slideshows and
photo galleries.
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"The kids go through ups and
downs and they learn how to
work hard," the Fort Lee
father says. "They’re learning
there are no shortcuts in life."
"I’d rather be doing this. I’m
very goal-oriented," says
Alec, whose dream is to play
baseball at Stanford
University and then become a
pediatric neurosurgeon.
Families also say they love the camaraderie that can form on a team in which kids
and parents spend many of their weekends together. "The friendship and bond that
we have formed with these families is phenomenal," says Joe Hubinger, whose
8-year-old son Joey plays with a West Milford Warhawks town travel team.
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The training business
As more and more kids have
begun playing sports at such
an intense level, an industry
has grown along with them.
North Jersey has seen a flood
of for-profit training centers,
for-profit teams, for-profit
leagues and for-profit
scouting services in a stillgrowing industry that’s too
new to have any standards
and too sprawling to have any
oversight or regulation.
LESLIE BARBARO / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Proponents say the
professional training helps
Teammates on the Wyckoff-based Teel
teach kids how to challenge
Ravens Americans playing hot potato
themselves. Critics worry that
before a recent tournament game at
those who can’t afford the
Diamond Nation in Flemington.
added costs are increasingly
at risk of being shut out of
competitive play and that their more-affluent peers are risking burnout and
overspecialization.
Buy this photo
One of the main drivers that has moved youth baseball so far beyond its traditional
season and its community-centric core has been the dramatic increase in the
number of club teams.
In youth hockey, soccer and basketball, club teams long ago took on the prominence
they now have in baseball. While club baseball teams have dominated in
warm-weather states where baseball could be played year-round, in New Jersey
such teams used to exist only in small numbers, intended for the most elite of
middle- and high-school-age athletes.
Fifteen years ago, there were a dozen or so club teams across the state. Now
estimates range from 2,000 to 4,000 statewide, and between 200 and 400 in
Bergen and Passaic counties.
Some are formed one year and disappear the next. Often, the volunteers who start
them — usually after an argument or feud with the leaders of an established league
or club — soon face too many organizational headaches or suffer a mutiny of their
own. Others are led by onetime professional players and are run as businesses.
"Today there’s a club team around every corner," says Mark Cieslak, a former minor
league player with the Cincinnati Reds organization who started the Jersey Bulldogs
club program six years ago. He doesn’t subscribe to the idea that his team had to
travel outside the region to find skilled competitors. "I fought against the travel
stuff for all these years," he said.
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NorthJersey.com: Youth baseball is fast becoming a high-stakes race
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tend to rise with each age bracket, and over time, parents say they just get
conditioned to writing checks for add-on costs such as private batting, fielding or
pitching lessons, personal trainers and the hotel and transportation costs of
bringing the family to a tournament.
"I’m probably going to drop 10 grand on baseball this summer," says Nancy Grasso,
a Wyckoff mother who has two sons, ages 13 and 14, who play on separate club
teams that will travel to several out-of-state tournaments. "That’s just what it costs
to play at this level."
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