Just wanted to get you all opinions on what you think are the proper amount of games 9U travel ball teams should play this spring and what benchmark you would use to determine if it was a good, bad or other season....
I am curious to see what people say. I just want to see improvement as far as number of games played would depend on how late in the year you plan on playing. The teams that play into the summer the longest should play the most games. I think kids this age need some summer so I will say 45-50 march through july 4th. After july 4th hit the pool and worry about baseball later.
If just spring for a solid travel team I would say a minimum of 10 tournaments. 3-5 games per tournament depending on how well the team does. 4-5 tourney's in the fall is what we normally do....
This certainly can vary from team to team as to the correct # of games needed/wanted by the group. This subject should have been covered when the players were signing up to be on a particular team along with travel requirements, $ needed,practice time requirements, location of practices, end of year World Series direction, etc. This is the single biggest mistake by coaches is not covering these types of requirements/directions in enough detail as so there are no surprises to the families.
But to answer your question with a number...In my past experiences with this age group 60 games give or take 10 will probably end up covering 70-80% of the teams.
50-70 games is plenty for us (12-13 tournaments and a few practice games). We start in late December and then will be done by early July...no Fall ball for us. I believe the kids should not throw a baseball for a minimum of 2-3 months after the Spring season is over considering how much ball we have already played.
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Posted - 03/28/2012 : 15:54:00
