This is 100% what happened in my area. We have lots of small towns that can put together 2 Little League teams on a good year. They travel to the nearby towns to play. The quality of ball was pretty strong.
Once travel ball started up in our area it didn't fill a void it created a vacuum. Top players left LL to play travel. That led to the middle of the road players becoming the top LL players, giving their parents the delusion that they were stars, so they left for travel ball teams. Shitty travel ball teams with lousy coaches and filled with mediocre players, but travel ball teams nonetheless . So the dominos continued to fall to the point that even bad LL players were joining bad travel teams.
The end result was a competitive Little League became complete garbage and a lot of areas teams couldn't field teams or they had to bring up coach pitch aged kids to fill their teams. And a lot of bad travel teams were created. So the travel ball surge killed Little League and the competitiveness of travel ball.
That to me is the saddest and most troubling part about both baseball and softball travel ball amd its destruction of the local Rec leagues. Kids bailing at 9, 10 11 yrs old and the leagues go to crap. I wish kids would stick around in theor local leagues as in our time ("back in the day") til 14 or 15. Then go play TB like we would with American Legion ball and with your HS teams in summer amd fall ball. But...I know that is loooong gone now.
Even HS ball is affected and thought of as less important than TB in many parts of the country. We've seen girls stop playing HS and focus on just TB...but it happens in all sports now. Soccer is the most Ive seen
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