Travel expands and expands until public leagues all die

by MattG, Tuesday, July 07, 2026, 07:32 (14 days ago) @ HullieAndMikes

My oldest was in travel baseball RIGHT as we were hitting that inflection point.

At first, everyone was in the public league and the absolute best dozen or so kids in town also played on the local travel team.

A couple years later, our town’s travel program had 3 teams, 2 of which were full time, so those kids had to drop out of the public league (and it established the public league as “less-than”, which hurt participation even more)

By his 8th grade year, there was one public league team in our town; which had to travel 10+ miles to a different city for every game. We were doing weeknights in, like, Homer Glen or Lockport.

A couple of years later; most towns have a half dozen travel teams and NO public leagues.

We went from a cheap and convenient fun option for everyone (with truly exceptional players being singled out for additional high level play), to a wildly expensive league with 1/3 as many kids participating and everyone else frozen out.

It’s such a recent development that even current MLB guys think it’s alien.