Little League
With 7,123 leagues and 2,168,850 players around the world Little League is one of the largest youth sports organization on the globe. With coverage of regional and world series tournaments on ESPN Little League baseball has widespread following.
But the number of players has decreased in recent years even with the skyrocket in TV exposure. Many avid Little League supporters blame this decline on on the rise of travel ball. Those that are involved in travel ball believe that Little League has created the beast that is now AAU Baseball. They believe that the overly strict rules and safety regulation causes the better players to leave Little League to play “real baseball” against better competition.
Personally I have been on both Little League and travel teams. From my experience the reason I decided to quit Little League was not because of the ridiculous safety regulation. (When you turn 13 parents and umpires seem to not care about safety as much since the players are not children anymore.) For me I could not continue playing Little League because of the level of commitment I had to have for the school ball team. And that is why I believe Little League numbers will continue to drop with the increasing demand of commitment for players towards a single team.
