Do you sometimes wonder what life would feel like if you were a travel softball player?
Travel ball is softball, but you travel place to place and experience playing different teams in different town or different states. Travel Softball is expensive, but it depends on the team. According to the Web, travel softball is between $500 to $5,000 per year with an average of about $2,000. Some teams include bags and softball uniforms, and some don’t. Families can pay monthly, so it’s not all at once.
Travel ball is all about being competitive and coming together as a family to fight and win. One thing that most softball teams do is team bonding. This could include a Christmas party, Thanksgiving get togethers, or going bowling or doing something that is fun.
Softball teams go out and do stuff for the community, and this could be either cleaning the environment or going to events to support people in need and sometimes softball teams do cancer awareness games where the team wears pink things like belts or socks.
One big thing about travel ball is fundraisers, with fundraisers helping the coach pay for the tournaments that we can participate in. The fundraisers could be like raffling an Xbox or for the adults raffling a Yeti full of alcoholic drinks.
Usually, softball tournaments are on Saturdays and Sundays, and sometimes they can be through the week to. On Saturdays usually there will be three games to play and they are timed games, 75 minutes sometimes or drop dead scoring with the team ahead winning. Depending on how you do, Saturday is where you get placed in the bracket.
Sunday is usually single elimination games, so if you win your first game on Sunday, you go on, and if you lose, you go home. The goal is to get to the championship and to win the championship. Depending on what tournament you’re in, you can get rings for first, and sometimes for second place too, or for first place you can get medals, again depending on what tournament you are in.
In Colorado there is a lot of travel ball teams according to Field Level. There are 132 teams in Colorado, and some of those teams are Batbusters, Prodigy, Altitude, American freedom, Azteca, Firecrackers, Slammers, Outlaws, Hype, Force and Royals and many more.
Travel ball practices are usually outdoors, but if it snows or there is bad weather, some teams have an indoor facility, or they just go to rent some D-bats cages.
Coming from a spectators’ point of view, softball travel can be both exciting but sometimes very time consuming. There are a lot of different things that could happen. I’ve seen windows get smashed, and bats get cracked, and so many exciting things that could happen in the blink of an eye.
Depending on how much you understand it, you can see what they are about to throw or if someone is about to steal. Playing on a travel team is more skilled. You have to go through cuts and most likely another round and then have to fight to play a position.
