How many travel ball players?

[uncdrew]

@uncdrew you pretty much described my situation in southeast Virginia.

Yeah, there must be thousands of teams like us. The game and our team is very important to us, but really insignificant in the grand scheme of softball.

 

[RADcatcher]

THIS IS A FIRST PASS; SO ERRORS WILL BE MAJOR. BE KIND.

Ok... well there are some assumptions we can work off and I can show some justification of those numbers. People can argue or come up with different numbers. If ASA/USSSA/PGF/etc actually would publish their roster numbers or lists to work off this would be easier - still not accurate, but more accurate than these back of napkin type calculations.

Here are some data points and assumptions we can all argue over:

• # of HS players under NFHS: 362,048.
  • This number doesn't include all HS players BTW. States like NY don't play under NHFS. Florida has a small Christian Schools division that doesn't play under NFHS. I am sure there are many others out there.
  • In Florida, There are 193 FHSSA varsity teams and 107 JV teams under NHFS. So 300 teams at about 15 players a team
• USSSA has the only online data source worth anything, so I pulled all USSSA teams from Florida ONLY for the 2019 season.
  • I used Florida because I am very familiar with the travel scene here so I can make some assumptions based on my personal experience
  • There were 944 total registered travel USSSA teams from 8UB - 18UA
    • This number does not include teams that only play NSA, PGF, TCS/Showcase schedule, Fast Pitch Orlando and other random travel in the state. but the majority of teams probably play at least 1 USSSA event. The total # of travel teams is probably well over 1,200.
  • I considered 18A-14A as HS age teams (364) and 8U-14B as non-HS (580). 14U is always a mix but this seemed a reasonable way to do this based on the number of teams coming up from 12U
  • Observation says the average roster is right around 11 or 12.
• I took 4 HS teams I know well at varying levels of success in my county and went through their 2019 season to have a look at the rosters of the teams they played.
  • Some teams had travel players through their bench and into JV (in fact schools with JV teams generally had a lot of travel players in JV). Some had zero travel players.
  • On average, it was close enough to 60% travel players to be 60%. I looked at a few other mid-level teams and their rosters were pretty much that - 60% travel
  • So here goes the biggest assumption: this % holds and averages out for the country. I checked a few teams I know in other Florida counties and it seems to be solid enough for Florida.

So... and this is a shameful use of assumptions;

If 60% of NFHS HS players are travel players; 217,228
If the ratio of HS travel teams to non-HS travel teams is consistent (580/364=1.59); that gives 346,133 younger travel players
So somewhere near 563,362 travel players

Obvious problems:
If there are 364 Florida HS age travel teams @ 12 players a team; that gives 4368 HS age travel players; @11 per team that would be 4004 HS age players
However, if there are 300 Florida NFHS HS teams @ 15 players a team; that gives 4500 HS players in Florida but at 60%, only 2,700 of those are travel players. So that would suggest that 1,400-1,700 eligible players are not playing HS softball and my observation suggests this is not the case. It is probably more like 700.

I can see a number of players at non-NFHS schools plus some underage kids playing in 16U and 18U and duplicate teams but even then there is a clear gap I am not comfortable with.

Despite my assumptions and probably some obvious error I am overlooking, that there were close to 600,000 players who played travel softball in a given year does feel like a very reasonable number.

@marriard Amazing compilation of feedback in this post!



Looking back at travel ball Nationals, state tournaments, the mega Colorado event, softball has grown so huge.
To look at it today,
Wish there was a color coded map to show its growth over the years!