SOUTH KINGSTOWN – A common trend emerged this summer in every youth baseball program in the local area.
Teams were regularly without their best players, even in state championship rounds, as AAU baseball and other developmental travel leagues took priority for the high-school age athletes. Teams in the community-based leagues of American Legion, Connie Mack and Little League worked around it, but local coaches have become increasingly frustrated.
“I don’t know that we’re teaching kids the right things about the game anymore,” said Mark Hutchins, longtime coach of South Kingstown Post 39 in the American Legion baseball league. “It’s really about the team, the pride, the country and loyalty to those around you, and so forth and so on. And I don’t think that’s being presented anymore.”
It’s not a new phenomenon, and it’s not just a Rhode Island controversy. All around the country, travel programs have become the new normal way for college baseball hopefuls to spend summers. It’s regarded as the best path to get noticed by collegiate and professional scouts. The programs started as a way to supplement the traditional summer leagues, but over the last decade, they’ve become the main draw.
The decline in local summer baseball is not the players’ fault. They’re simply following the path that’s developed in front of them.
“I just don’t want to see the players put in the middle of it,” said Frank Gallucci, who coaches the South Kingstown Little League Senior Division All-Stars. “I would like to see more of a commitment to the community baseball…. I’m not going to totally bash a program because it’s under the [travel baseball] umbrella, but we certainly did suffer, losing key players to different tournaments. It’s a bit frustrating, but you play with the cards you’re dealt.”
Coaches in the South County area say the rise in travel ball is killing local summer leagues. They allege the bigger problem is that the “community” aspect is disappearing, saying travel ball prioritizes individual development while local leagues are more about representing one’s hometown.
On the other hand, there’s clearly a demand for travel ball. In fact, so many independent programs exist that they’ve become hard to differentiate between one another.
Some of the top travel programs have name recognition in the community, such as the Ocean State Makos, the Rams and the Bandits. They exist and have grown because that’s what the recruiting landscape has necessitated.
“The recruiting world, now, has become so difficult that I think you kind of need some sort of vessel, which is what a travel ball organization really is,” said Jamie Degidio, co-founder of the Makos. “It’s a vessel to get kids in front of schools that they may not get in front of without playing in certain tournaments or doing certain events. That’s really the main difference. It’s really the recruiting and helping guide kids and parents through that recruiting process and through the development process. And I’m not saying that there aren’t Legion programs out there or other programs that don’t do a great job with that. I’m only speaking on us – we take development very seriously.”
Travel baseball, sometimes referred to as AAU – although not all programs play under that banner – are usually run as non-profit organizations. Teams are divided into age groups and play a tournament circuit, often at neutral locations.
Teams exist for young age groups, but they usually don’t interfere with the Little League All-Star tournaments for 10, 11 and 12 year olds. After that, the higher-level players often choose to play for their middle school and high school teams in the spring and spend the summer with their travel teams.
In some travel organizations, players sign contracts to follow a code of conduct, which are deemed necessary due to the high cost for each roster spot. It’s a pricey system, with individual costs in the thousands each year.
It’s a big commitment, and that’s why it’s prioritized.
American Legion especially suffered this summer. Around the turn of the century, Rhode Island’s Legion circuit featured upwards of 20 teams. This summer, there were only seven.
Players were in and out of South Kingstown Post 39’s lineup, but they and state-champion Upper Deck Post 14 were in noticeably better shape than the other five teams, which is where the real problem was. Aside from the two state final opponents, no other team finished with a record even close to above .500.
When Post 39 played a three-game regular-season series against the at-the-time third-place team, West Warwick Post 2, South Kingstown won the first game 24-0 in a fourth-inning mercy rule finish. They beat them again 3-0 before West Warwick showed up to Old Mountain Field for Game 3 with just eight players. Post 39’s Dawson Sweet volunteered to put on a spare gray Post 2 jersey and had one of his new team’s three hits during their 10-0 mercy rule loss.
Post 39 went undefeated in the regular season, but most games were low intensity compared to the ones against Upper Deck and out-of-state opponents. Hutchins’s squad emphasized tournament games in New Hampshire and New York against top Legion teams from other states. That was the time to get better – not against the teams in their own league.
Ironically, they became somewhat of a travel team out of necessity. The difference, according to Hutchins, is what the program represents.
American Legion itself – separate from baseball – is a war veterans organization. Different Legion posts around the country are represented through the baseball league, and the overall mission is more about the high-school age players developing leadership qualities and other skills than anything else.
“Your memories are with the kids you played with. If you’re jumping from team to team in AAU, your memories are pretty slim,” Hutchins said. “It’s too spread out. It’s too thin. I guess what I’m saying is AAU is a track, but there’s other tracks too.”
That’s one of the main disagreements between sides. Some view travel ball as being too individual-focused, while others think the team identity is still present.
“I think we do have a big team aspect, a team-oriented position that we try to take,” Degidio said. “I think that might be a little bit of a misconception.
“We want to do all the small things, we want to do the fundamentals correctly, we’re playing together as a team. Legion or other leagues, I would say it might seem like it’s a little bit different because they’re playing for their town, they’re playing with the same kids they’ve played with since they were eight years old…. I see the argument there, but we really do focus on a team aspect.”
As teams throughout Rhode Island’s Legion circuit struggled to fill rosters, the same happened in the state’s Connie Mack baseball league. Teams forfeited games, and some notable teams ceased to exist entirely.
The Narragansett/South Kingstown Lions, which won the league championship in both 2021 and 2022, struggled to find commitment from players in 2024 and forfeited over half its games. The team folded this summer, opting not to play at all rather than go through the same issues.
It made for a few awkward situations this summer, especially for Narragansett athletes. Post 39’s roster, limited to 18 players, was full, so Aidan Clancey pitched for Warwick PAL and helped them win the league championship. Zayden Kent, who recently committed to URI’s baseball program, played for Post 39’s juniors team and barely pitched, perhaps out of fairness to the younger opponents in the division. Others, such as Jackson Hohl and Riley Cronin, didn’t play at all after missing the cut for the Post 39 senior team.
Slocum, which is North Kingstown’s Connie Mack team, played every game but faced issues of players missing weekend games due to travel tournaments or being unable to pitch due to prioritizing their travel teams.
South Kingstown Little League’s Senior Division All-Stars won its fourth straight state championship this summer, but the team battled that issue to the extreme, missing top players in the state tournament. It made for fun stories where certain players stepped up and others played two games 300 miles apart in the same day, but it wasn’t an ideal situation, and yet it’s the new normal.
“I don’t want to say it’s anyone’s fault,” said Dave Andrews, who coaches Slocum and is an assistant on NKHS. “There are parents who push their kids to do more, there are kids who are kind of outgoing and probably see a travel team or AAU to be a more viable route to try and get on a college team or to try and get a scholarship. Obviously the more so-called elite team you play for is probably going to get you more notice. And I understand that.”
So, what is the solution?
Local coaches have floated the idea of playing games only on weekdays, since travel tournaments typically take place on weekends. It may not be optimal, but it may be necessary if trends continue.
It also wouldn’t solve everything. Players would still miss games, and a weekday-only schedule would be less appealing to players, coaches and parents.
A challenging but potentially better solution is to improve communication between travel and local teams. Coaches are often in the dark about a player’s status until the day of a game. It gets harder when you factor in pitch counts and the uncertainty of when a player might throw out of the bullpen. It becomes a health risk when pitchers are stretched to their absolute limit between leagues.
Both parties agree upon the need for better communication. However, that’s easier said than done.
“I see both sides of it,” Degidio said. “I think the issue, honestly, is that there’s so many teams. Trust me, on the other side of it, a lot of those teams do not allow their players to play other [leagues], they don’t let them go play Junior Legion, they don’t let them play Legion. I think if there was more of a collaboration between the programs, scheduling conflicts might be a lot easier.”
Both sides want to coexist. Travel ball isn’t going anywhere, and those programs benefit when their players get extra swings in the local leagues.
The problem is that if local leagues go away, no one will benefit.
“Some of these kids that are on the lower end, that may not have the money to go play [travel ball], they’re not going to have a place to play,” Hutchins said. “It’s not going to be there. It’s going to go away. And if it goes away, what do you do now?
“Odds are, the majority of kids that are looking for that place to play aren’t always the best guy on the field, but they may have some part of their game that helps a team win a game, a series, a title or whatever. And that’s the part that’s hard because you really lose those kids from baseball. They go on to something else because they’ve been isolated.”