Category: Blog

Daddy ball and bad behavior: In defense of parents

Over the past several years, there has been an explosion of articles, sites, tweets, and blog posts about the negative impact parents are having on youth sports across the country. As adults involved in youth athletics, many of us can attest to the outrageous behavior we have observed from other adults in youth athletics. “Daddyball” has become a pejorative used to disparage teams or whole programs. Despite this, we believe the majority parents are motivated by a genuine love for their children and generally do not view their children as potential college or professional athletes, but rather are just looking for an enjoyable, healthy experience for their child. With regard to the role of parents in youth baseball, we think there are two separate but related issues to address: parents as fans and parents as coaches. We’ll try to address each separately.

Best of the Rest Programs in NC

This past week we highlighted some of the top performances of the past year from some the best youth baseball programs in North Carolina. Today we wanted to highlight some of the other outstanding programs in North Carolina who did not quite make our top 10 ranking. These programs are from all over the state and represent some of the best teams and training environments for youth baseball players in North Carolina. 

Best Youth Baseball Programs in North Carolina 2017-2018

This past winter we published a list of some of the top programs in the state of North Carolina. With the action from this past year complete, we have put together a ranking of how the top programs in North Carolina performed in the Fall 2017 and Spring 2018.

Rankings Rationale 6/21/18

We’re going to be a bit more brief than usual in the rationale this week. There was a lot going on in North Carolina youth baseball this past weekend, and the upcoming weekend is no different. Here’s some brief reasoning behind the changes in the rankings this week.

Upcoming Format Changes

We’re going to be making some changes to the format of our recaps/previews. Over the past few weeks we have felt these posts have become a bit unwieldy, both to write and read with some going over 3000 words. We thinks this makes for an unpleasant experience for the reader, and makes the posts time consuming to write.

NC Teams Raise Over $30,000 for the Vs. Cancer Foundation

With all of the focus on who are the top teams in North Carolina and how are the teams performing on the field, it’s a real pleasure to hear news like we heard this week. For the past five years, the Vs. Cancer fund has held the North Wake Vs. Cancer Benefit Tournament in Wake Forest, NC. Participating teams set out to raise funds for the Vs. Cancer Foundation and pediatric oncology programs at the University of North Carolina’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. 

Coaches poll?

We’ve very much enjoyed getting the site up and running over the past 6-8 months. We’ve received lots of feedback from the North Carolina baseball community and we hope we’ve been able to provide a useful resource for the parents, coaches, and players that visit the site. One of the most enjoyable features and tasks has been to formulate rankings for each age group each week. We’ve learned that teams, coaches, players, and parents are very interested in these rankings and really do look to them to see not only where their own team stands, but also where there opponents rank.

Rankings Rationale 5/17/18

There were only a few ranked teams in action, and fortunately some of them went head-to-head. We made a few slight changes to the rankings this week, and we’ve summarized those below.