Coach Dad helps dads, coaches, and sports families navigating the pressure, politics, emotions, and purpose of youth sports.
From playing time and parent drama to leadership, faith, discipline, and character, we talk about what really happens behind the game - and how dads can lead well through it.
But every sports family needs to ask a better question:
Is this sport serving our family, or has our family started serving the sport?
In this episode of Coach Dad, Jim Miller talks about the pressure families feel in youth sports, the cost of travel teams, the hidden sacrifices that come with the schedule, and why dads need to lead their homes with wisdom.
Jim unpacks the obvious costs like team fees, uniforms, tournaments, hotels, gas, and meals. But he also talks about the hidden costs: sleep, health, marriage stress, sibling sacrifice, family rhythm, and the loss of margin.
This is not a guilt episode. It is not an anti-sports episode. It is a reminder that sports are meant to be a tool, not the end goal.
The goal is not just to make the middle school team, the high school team, or even play in college. The bigger goal is to use sports to help form discipline, humility, hard work, teamwork, and character that will serve kids when they are 35, 50, and leading their own families.
Because the mission is bigger than the game.
And it starts at home.
📩 Join the Coach Dad email list for weekly encouragement, practical tools, and honest conversations for sports dads, coaches, and families.
Credits:
Photo/Video: Noah Miller, Micah Miller
Video Editing/CoachDad Theme music: Asher Miller
🎧 Listen to Coach Dad wherever you listen to podcasts. Contact: team@coachdad.live
So if somebody were to walk in your house and tell you how you're gonna spend your money, where you were gonna travel, what kinds of food you were gonna eat, when you would wake up and go to bed, or any of these other kinds of just demands that they would place on you, you would kick them out of the house immediately. No questions asked. They're not allowed in here. But when it's our kids' sports, uh we just kind of roll with it. Welcome to Coach Dad, a show for dads, coaches, and sports families trying to look better at home in the stands and on the field. Here's your host, Jim Miller.
So hotels every weekend, just grab and drive through on the way to games and practices. Uh siblings just falling asleep in the back of the car, uh just rolling around town all the time, early out of bed, late into bed. These are just some of the things that we have taken as the rules of the game these days with kids sports. And so as we're navigating this world of youth sports, I think there's some really important conversations
that need to be had internally. Each one of us needs to start to answer some questions for ourselves and for our families. And then moms and dads need to have these discussions with each other. We need to get the kids involved in talking about the wins and losses, we need to get them talking about the things that are the positives and the negatives. What is the cost of the thing that we are moving towards? Now, just to say that that travel ball is too costly for families is is a blanket statement, and we're we're not gonna go there. That's there's no one size fits all, there's nothing that fits for one family that's gonna
everything is gonna fit the same way for another family. When we think about this kind of a dynamic, the the the travel ball sports as a whole, each family has to make a decision about what are the things that they're gonna allow and not allow in their lives, and even more so, we need to come to terms with why it is that these things are allowed or not allowed. Um, as we're approaching this sports season and as we begin to move forward in this in this thing, then there are some sacrifices that are gonna
need to be made for us to play the sport. I mean, obviously, at the at the lowest levels, at the lowest levels, there are sacrifices. You're giving up one or two evenings or you're giving up a Saturday morning. Um, you know, Upward Sports, I used to help run upward sports leagues, and that was for for most of these kids, that was just a Saturday morning. They would show up on Saturday morning, they would practice for 30 minutes, and then they would play a 30-minute game. But that's a Saturday morning that you had two hours that you could have been doing something else. And you had money that you spent on uniforms and on and on that gas to get back and forth to the practice. That that those are all decisions that needed to be made. Now, when we when we look at the idea of the margins around the sport, that's a pretty important thing for us to consider and to think through. And then ultimately, I want
us all to start to really plan and think about what is our ultimate goal through the sports? What are the things that we're trying to achieve through these sports? When we look at sports, are we looking at the sports uh are we looking at the sports as a tool, as a resource, or are they the end to themselves? And these are all really important questions for us to answer. Um so when we just make these decisions about things like travel sports, travel baseball, uh, AEU basketball, when we look at all these tournaments that we're gonna be
playing all around the country or in different places, uh there is a cost associated with it, and we need to have honest conversations about whether the cost is worth it. Is a cost of the travel, the money, the time, the sacrifices that are being made, are those costs worth the effort of what we're putting into it? Are we gonna get as much out of it as we're putting in? Right? That's always the that's always the thing that we need to consider. So let's take a step back. When we look at travel ball, when we look at AAU, when we look at these different types of things, what are the the reasons that we would say we want that kind of pressure on ourselves?
You know, what is it that we're what is it we're trying to gain access to? Or what is it that we are trying to say, this is why we're doing it? One, you know, most of us when we have these conversations with families and parents and we say, hey, why is it that you want your kid in travel ball? They say, well, we ran into a bunch of politics in Little League, or we ran into politics with Daddy Ball or coaching and the way the coaching was being run. Uh we run into people that say, you know, um, my kid is just is just a little, he's a little bit of a better player, and he was kind of bored at the level that we were at. Uh there are a lot of kids that would say things like, Well, we have goals of our kid, we want our kid to be able to play on a high school team, and then for them to be successful, we need to make uh we need to make some extra strides in the kinds of things that we're doing, and the types of coaching that we're getting and the in the competition that we're playing against. And other people are saying, Well, I'm I'm gonna my kids can play in college or professionally, and so these are all different tiers of what it is that we're trying to do. But I want us to take a step back. One of the things we always talk about with Coach Dad is that the mission is bigger than the game. The mission is bigger than the game. And if we, when we are talking about
sports, if the end game is the sport, then we have taken that sport and it is in a place in our lives where it doesn't belong. We've taken the sport and put it in a place in our life where it does not belong. Sports shouldn't be the end. Now, are sports good? Yes. Are sports great? Oh my gosh. Do we want to compete? 100%. Do we want to win? Absolutely. Do we want to play well? Yes. Sports is fantastic at teaching process. When you put work
into sports, you become more successful. That's that's a fantastic thing to teach. When you put in the work of grinding away, of doing the extra reps, of thinking about the things that we're trying to do to be
successful, then you're gonna see the result is gonna be a positive result. When you look around at the teams that competed a high level, every team that I ever played on that got to a high level, the kids that were on that team, 90% of them were the ones that were part of the reason that they were there is because they put in the extra time. I played with a guy in college who was notorious. He was notorious. When the team would go down for batting practice and we would go down to the batting cages, he would stand in the batting cage and he would always be the first one down there. And he would hit three buckets full of baseballs, and we all just stood around and went, Come on, let's go! Come on, we got other people that want to hit. That dude put in the work. Now, he ended up being a major leaguer. I would say he should have come later and done the work when other people weren't
waiting to get in there, but he put in the work. I mean, I you cannot deny the fact that he put in the work and the extra swings. He was taking the time and putting in the effort, and the result was that he went to the next level. Now, not everybody that's listening to this has kids that are gonna be in major leaguers. Not everybody listening to this has kids that are gonna make their high school team. We all have a ceiling that we're that we're gonna be moving to. But the difference is that what we want to try to do is we want to take that ceiling and we want to push as close to the ceiling as we can possibly get. So if our ceiling is that you're gonna be a great high school player, then man, you'd be the very best high
school player that you can be. If the ceiling for you is that you're gonna be a great contributor on your on your minors baseball team, then man, let's find a way to be the best contributor on that minors baseball team that you can be. If you're gonna be a guy that is a special teams player, and that's it, you're gonna be one of those guys that that helps out on coverages. Uh if you're gonna be somebody that that comes in in the last two minutes of a game and and guards and you know, to just guards a player on the other team to try to keep them from scoring, that then figure out what it is that your role is and how it is that you're supposed to be. Uh, what are the the things that you're trying to uh ascribe to, and figure out how you can be the very best version of that. And let's aspire to that in the best way possible. But while we're saying this, let's also recognize that ultimately the W is not the goal. When we think about these sports, let's let's look at the cost of what we're doing, right? One, we've got the the cost that's obvious. The obvious cost is the amount of money that you're paying into the sport on a monthly basis, right? Or by a season or by a month. A lot of a lot of the teams do it this nowadays, they just do it by month. So
that pays for a lot of different things, right? It pays for the officials, it pays for the coaches, it pays for equipment and uniforms and entry fees into these tournaments. But and while those costs are a little bit more obvious and are really easy to calculate, the costs that you don't necessarily calculate going into the season are the fuel cost, you know. If you're going to practice three or four days a week, then you got the gas money to get there and back, right? You got the time that you're putting into it. You've got meals, meals are more expensive when you're not cooking at home, when you're going out to eat. So you've got these meals that you're buying when you're on the road. Uh, there's also the health factor, right? You're you're so if you're eating
meals on the road late at night, then you're you're just not going to be as healthy as you would be otherwise. A home-cooked meal is obviously gonna be more healthy than something that you drive through to eat. So there's a health factor that's involved. Sleep cycles are really important, especially for kids, to be able to have a consistent time that they go to bed and wake up. And so if you're going to practice it uh, you know, late in the evening, eating a late dinner on the way home, and then they're getting home, and then they've got homework, then they've got other things that they're supposed to be doing on a daily basis, and they're going to bed really late, getting up early, the sleep cycles are all messed up. There's the marriage stress. I mean, the difficulty of husband and wife kind of separating each evening to take kids in different directions, that's going to be stressful on the marriage. That's going to be a difficult thing for people to come through and to work and to work out. Uh, that time with your spouse is really important. And so when you guys are separated three, four, five days a week because you're running kids to different parts of the city to have their practices, to do their thing, then
then there's a marriage component that's going to be another cost that needs to be calculated into what you're doing. So we have all these hidden costs, the obvious costs are there, and then the hidden costs are there. Hotel rooms, um, babysitters, maybe. I mean, there's you you name it. There's all these things that you guys you guys can come up with these lists better than I can. So, this is all stuff that needs to be taken into consideration as part of the conversation that we have about whether travel ball is going to be a good idea for us. Okay. So I want to I want to look at the idea of asking
the honest questions. You know, earlier I talked about what are the reasons that we're doing this, and then I'm sitting here in a garden, you know, I'm not at a baseball field or a basketball court. You know, we're we're just sitting here in a garden today, and you're asking yourself,
why are we sitting in all these flowers and what's the what's the deal here? Uh well, the reason I'm sitting in a garden is because I want us to think about this idea of what it means to be sewing into the ground. There's a component of sports that is discipleship.
When we are playing a sport, the ultimate purpose of sports is to teach your kids, to teach them how to be better people, better adults when they grow up. So the goal, the end goal of sports is not the making the middle school team or making the high school team or college, getting college paid for is a fantastic, they're just an amazing byproduct. Uh getting to play in the major leagues would be tremendous, unbelievable. Going to the NFL, playing in the NBA, all of these things can be just a tremendous opportunity that we're looking for. But let's be realistic about what it is that we're looking at here and and let's see, let's see the fact that if we are playing sports for the sake of the sports, then we're teaching something to our kids that we don't want to teach them, honestly. Uh the thing that we want to teach our kids, we want to make sure that we're teaching them about being a
good person, right? Being the right kind of a human being. That we want to teach them about discipline and hard work. We want to teach them about being a good teammate. We want to teach them about how to win with humility and grace. And we want to teach them about how to lose with humility and grace and how to how to be a good winner, how to be a good loser. We want to teach them about the kinds of lessons that you can you can take away from sports that that are gonna serve them later in their life when they are running a business or when they're running a family. The fact that there are just there are jobs that we do that we don't like. That we don't like doing. I mean, I don't like hitting off of a T necessarily. That may not be the ultimate goal for me is to go hit off of a T, but if that helps me become a better baseball player to serve my team, then hey man, I'd I'm willing to put in that work and effort and the time. So let's talk, let's take a step back and let's start to ask the questions ultimately, what is the purpose of us being
a sport? If the purpose of me being in that sport and having my kids there and us doing all these things that are sacrifices for our family, if those are ultimately to get them on the high school team, then that's a that's an imbalance and that's not gonna serve our family in the right proper ways. So if though these are lessons that are gonna serve them when they're 35, when they're 50 years old, they're gonna be able to walk out the lessons of the things that they've learned through the hard work of being on a team, then what we need to see from that point is that this is worth it. This could be worth it, right? Maybe it isn't. I can't say definitively it's worth it, but maybe it could be worth it. Maybe this is something that we could consider as worthwhile investment
for the future. So that word there is an investment. We want to consider the investment, what it is that we're investing in time, energy, resources, in order to get a particular return on that investment. And if that investment is worth it for our family, then that should be the decision maker. So when we look at travel ball,
is travel ball bad? And the obvious answer to that is no, it depends. I mean, travel ball itself is not bad. Travel ball can be fantastic, it can also be a bear on you and on your family and on your kids. Um, now personally, I was I played baseball at a time where I was on one of the four or five
select baseball teams in the state of Texas, right? So this is years ago. There were literally like five or six teams in the state of Texas. There were one or two in the sit in the city of Austin. Uh everybody on my select team played college baseball, so it was it was a different game than it is today. So, but today when we look at it, we need to make a decision if travel ball is gonna be something that's gonna serve our family or not. And we see it as a tool and a resource. So when you think about travel ball, let's make a decision based on whether it's gonna serve our family or
whether our family is gonna have to serve the sport. That is where we can begin to make a good decision moving forward for our family about whether it's the right thing or not. So listen, I really appreciate you listening to all this way if you've listened through the whole thing. Um if you have listened to this and you think it would be helpful, man, I would love it and just appreciate it if you would share it with another coach or a dad. We also have a community that we're building up at coachdad.live, which is our website, coachdad.live. You can sign up for our newsletter where you send out weekly encouragement and letters to people uh and just on topics that we cover here and asking about. That's a great way for you to share your thoughts with us as well. So thanks for listening, and remember the mission is bigger than the game, and it starts at home.
