At the end of the tryouts for the travel basketball teams for our town, they always tell the kids not to be discouraged if they get cut; but to find another team somewhere and keep playing. Our high school boys varsity coach, who oversees the boys travel team tryouts, likes to tell the kids that his varsity squad often is largely made up of kids who never played on the town travel team, or if they did, they played on the B team.
I always thought they were just trying to make the kids feel better, but it turns out, it's true.
When my youngest son failed to make the travel team this year, a few parents whose kids were also cut got together and formed a team at a local facility that runs basketball leagues and clinics all year round. One of our son's teammates has an older brother who is on the high school's freshman team, and looking at that roster, I realized that many of those players had not played travel basketball at the youth level. My older son is a freshman, and he'd played travel basketball through sixth grade. Of the 11 kids who were on his sixth grade team, only five of them are playing high school basketball now.
And that perfectly illustrated the fact that making the youth travel team doesn't mean your son or daughter automatically will play in high school. Conversely, getting cut now, or choosing not to play for some other reason, doesn't mean your son or daughter won't be able to play in high school.
My wife and I knew -- and our son knew, too -- that he was always a longshot to make the team, even though he'd spent a lot of time in the summer and fall refining his shot in our backyard, and working diligently on improving his ballhandling. The odds were against him at the tryouts because everyone who played on the A and B teams the previous season returned, so unless the basketball association decided to expand the rosters, any new player who was going to make one of the travel teams was going to have to take the spot of someone who had been on the team last year.
Two new kids did make it. Both were obviously too good not to -- no-brainer picks for the A team. That meant two kids dropped from the A team to the B team and two kids got cut from the B team.
Ultimately, my son wasn't good enough to bump someone else off the team. But that's OK. He is enjoying the team he's on and my wife and I and the other parents believe that, in the long run, our kids may end up being better off on this team than they might have been had they made the travel team. They are practicing and playing games against travel-level opponents, and that's the most important thing for their development. And without intending any disrespect, our kids are being coached by a paid coach who knows the game and how to teach it, whereas the travel teams are coached by parent-coaches.
High school is still a few years away for our son, so we can't get caught up in looking too far ahead for him. But it's comforting to know that when the time comes, nothing that happens now will hold him back then.
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