Tie game. Late. Sunday afternoon of a two-day tournament, our fifth game in about forty hours, and I caught myself standing in the third base coach's box hoping it would just end.
Not hoping we'd win it. Hoping it would be over.
Because winning meant another game. And another game meant another hour and a half in the sun with a roster that had nothing left, kids who had been at a baseball field since Saturday morning, and a pitching staff I had already stretched further than I was comfortable with.
I want to be honest about what that felt like, because I think a lot of coaches have felt it and almost none of us say it out loud. It felt like a betrayal. I'm a guy who played this game professionally. I love it in a way that has cost me things. And there I was, in charge of thirteen kids who wanted nothing more than to win a trophy, quietly rooting against the thing they wanted.
I felt like garbage about it for a long time.
It took me years to work out that the feeling wasn't a character flaw. It was a correct response to a badly designed weekend.
Do the arithmetic nobody does
Here is the standard format, and if you're a travel parent you already know it by heart. Two games Saturday. Two games Sunday morning to get out of pool play. Then, if you're actually good, a semifinal and a final.
That is five games. Sometimes six. In under forty-eight hours.
At six innings a game, that's thirty-plus innings of baseball for a group of eleven-, twelve-, thirteen-year-olds inside two days. And most teams are showing up with eleven or twelve players to cover it, because rosters are built to a number that keeps playing-time complaints down, not to a number that survives a Sunday.
Now put a pitching staff on top of that. Five games needs somewhere around five starters, plus relief, plus whoever throws the championship. Most twelve-year-old teams do not have five kids who can throw strikes on demand. They have two or three. So the same arms come back, or the coach hands the ball to a kid who can't find the zone and the game turns into a walk-a-thon, which is its own kind of misery for everybody in the park.
What it costs, in numbers that are not mine
I don't need you to take my word for this part.
A 2026 review of youth arm care documented an eleven-year-old who threw more than 160 pitches across a single weekend. Not a season. A weekend.
Roughly 94% of youth teams do not comply with Pitch Smart guidelines — the rest-and-volume standards that exist precisely because we know what happens to a growing elbow under this load. Summer travel ball largely operates outside any enforcement structure at all; pitch counts are left to individual coaches, which means they're left to the same person the format has just cornered.
The injuries this produces are not mysterious. Medial apophysitis. UCL stress. Rotator cuff damage. In kids whose growth plates are still open. Sports medicine has been saying this in plain language for two decades, and the tournament calendar has not moved an inch.
We are running a format that requires coaches to do the wrong thing to compete, and then calling it a discipline problem when they do.
The roster math that makes it worse
The logic is about parents, not baseball. Fewer benched kids, fewer playing-time conversations, fewer families threatening to leave. I understand it. I've felt the pull of it.
It works fine when your team is stacked. When your team has any weak links — and most teams do — it means the same handful of players absorb everything. It means your best arm is also your shortstop is also your catcher. It means by Sunday afternoon you're running a semifinal with a kid who caught twelve innings the day before.
A roster built to avoid difficult conversations is a roster with no depth. And a weekend built on six games punishes exactly that.
Every kid on my team is a pitcher
This is the part I'll go to the wall on.
Somewhere along the way it became normal for an eleven-year-old to identify as a pitcher only. Or the reverse — a kid who announces, at eleven, that he doesn't pitch. Both of those sentences should be impossible at that age.
On my teams, every player is a pitcher. Not because I need nine arms in a tournament, although I do. Because at eleven, nobody knows what a kid is going to be. The chunky kid who can't run grows six inches and throws 88. The shortstop's arm doesn't develop and he becomes a second baseman who hits. You cannot see any of that yet, and specializing a child into a single role before his body has decided what it wants to be is guessing with his development.
Teach every kid he can play any position through high school. Some of that is practical — it means you survive a Sunday. But most of it is that a twelve-year-old who believes he's a pitcher-only has already been told a story about his ceiling by someone who doesn't know.
Why the format exists anyway
Not because anyone hates children.
More games is a better product. Families drive two hours; they want more than two games out of it. Tournament operators have a facility rented for a weekend and revenue that scales with games played. Teams want the bracket, because the bracket is what you post about afterward. Nobody in that chain is behaving unreasonably on their own.
Which is exactly why it doesn't fix itself. Every individual actor is responding sensibly to their own incentives, and the aggregate is a weekend that grinds up kids' arms and eats two entire days of a family's life.
And here's the part that makes it sting: the people having the best time are the ones winning. If you go 5-0 and take a trophy home, that weekend was incredible and you'd do it again next week. If you go 1-4, you spent your entire Saturday and Sunday at a ballfield watching your son not play much, and by the drive home you're wondering whether he's on the wrong team — either because he's not good enough for this one, or he's too good for it. Same weekend, same format, completely different families walking out of the parking lot.
That's the grass-is-greener engine, and the tournament schedule is what feeds it.
What I actually do about it
Not a manifesto. Four things, and all of them are available to you tomorrow.
Set the pitching rules before the weekend, in writing, and don't relitigate them in the moment. My number is my number. If the semifinal is on the line and my kid hits it, he comes out. The single hardest part of this is that you decide it Thursday, when it's cheap, instead of Sunday, when it costs you a trophy. Announce it to the parents in advance so it isn't a surprise and isn't a negotiation.
Carry more players, and tell families why. Fourteen instead of eleven. You will have more playing-time conversations and a healthier team in August. Say the reason out loud at the beginning of the season and most parents will actually respect it.
Develop every arm from the youngest age. You cannot decide in July that you need a fifth pitcher. That decision happens in February, in practice, by giving everybody innings when the innings are cheap.
Be honest with yourself about which weekends are worth it. Not every tournament needs to be a six-game bracket chase. Some weekends are for development, and if you've told your families that clearly, an early exit isn't a failure — it's the plan.
The thing I'd tell my younger self
That Sunday, standing in the coach's box hoping for an ending, I thought something was wrong with me.
Nothing was wrong with me. I was a coach who cared about thirteen kids' arms more than a plastic trophy, placed inside a structure that made those two things fight each other. The guilt I felt was the format's guilt, and I was carrying it because nobody had told me it wasn't mine.
If you're a coach and you've had that feeling — say it out loud to another coach. You'll find out immediately how common it is, and how little any of us have done about it because we each thought we were the only one.
If you're a parent, understand that when your son's coach pulls him after fifty pitches in a game you're winning, that is not a coach who doesn't care about winning. That is the only kind of coach worth having.
And if you run tournaments: five games in two days is not a competition format. It's an endurance test we're running on twelve-year-olds because it sells.
More on how youth baseball got here in Big Travel Ball, and on what a season actually costs in travel ball training costs. If you coach and you're tired of losing practices to rain with nowhere to go, that's what we built CageList for.
Isaac Hess is the founder of CageList. He pitched professionally for seven years after a total hip replacement at nineteen and coached 13U and 14U travel teams, plus two decades of private lessons through MADE Baseball.
