Recent studies by the Aspen Institute’s “Project Play” have highlighted declining participation and retention rates in baseball, signaling a troubling future for our sport. And while nearly all youth team sports had a decline in participation rates from 2019-2022, baseball experienced the steepest drop among all major sports.
So what is it about the current configuration of youth baseball that’s got fewer players wanting to play? What is the cause of the disproportionate number of players leaving the game?
Solving these problems starts with a change on behalf of the people who have the most control over the entire ecosystem of youth baseball: coaches and parents and parents who coach. I believe the change that all of us need to make is a simple, but substantial one.
Given that youth baseball is the lowest level of competition, and it should be the lowest level of consequence, centering the intention around fun, development and engagement seems obvious. It affords us the opportunity to make creating competitive baseball players the objective, which then frames the youth baseball experience as merely a stop on the journey instead of the ultimate destination. At present, lacking this agreement, youth baseball has veered from one storm to another like a ship in a storm without its rudder.
Skills That Scale: The Complete Youth Baseball Training Manual unpacks the fundamental abilities that aid a baseball player’s transition from the small fields to the big ones, helping meet the increased demand for skill paired with output in this larger play space.
To that end, the games, practices and system of coaching in the Skills That Scale curriculum revolve around two simple but related ideas:
1. The skills you use more frequently are more important than the skills you use less frequently.
2. Putting a majority of our focus into the development of these skills will compound their value over time.
Most of the action in our game revolves around hitting and throwing. Youth players will start on fields that are generally around 50,000 square feet in total, but will need to make the inevitable transition to full-sized playing fields with double the square footage. This evolution requires both skill and output—on the small field, this pairing may not be necessary due to “hot” youth bats, disproportionate growth spurts, and other factors.
Baseball is a challenging game, especially for players who are trying to learn our game at the same time as they are learning how to control their bodies. When the dimensions of the field suddenly get bigger—before many players’ bodies are ready—and players have to graduate from lighter and hotter bats to BBCOR or wood, the challenge compounds.
Our response to this evaluation of the youth baseball landscape is to prioritize the development of two of the primary tools for success in the game—hitting and throwing—based on their importance.
Having this focus doesn’t mean that we ignore other aspects of developing young players, or that we otherwise neglect to teach the game of baseball. A best-case scenario implementation of the Skills That Scale doesn’t turn baseball into a carnival game, where the only thing that matters is the equivalent of ringing the bell on a strongman station. Instead, it simply means you spend most of your practice time on the skills that will have the most impact on a player’s ability to compete in the game today, tomorrow, and every day that follows.
For the last 14 years, other than my wife and two children, my life has revolved around nothing but youth baseball. After starting my coaching “career” like every other recreational baseball coach—the league asked for help and I answered—volunteering in youth baseball managed to turn into a career. I started work at Driveline in 2018, and once I became the Director of Youth Baseball and Founder of our Driveline Academy team program in 2020, we’ve worked diligently to put together this book for youth coaches (just like me!) in an attempt to aggregate everything I wish I knew when I first started coaching.
While the book details our work with Driveline Academy teams and Academy Online players in terms of skill development, the thing I hope that readers will pay the most attention to is the why. Most critically, why player development, fun and engagement in youth baseball matters more than anything else.
The day I wrote this, my son was less than a month away from his first high school baseball tryout. I was most confident he had the skills to be competitive on a 90-foot baseball field, I was most happy that his time in youth baseball served to continue his love for this game, and that we/I didn’t ruin it for him.
I often think that it’s silly to devote so much time to something so trivial as baseball. It is just a game as they say, but at the same time…I disagree. I wasn’t a very good baseball player, but I’m thankful that I at least played the game long enough to learn the very specific type of resilience that baseball can teach. My son is now learning the same thing, only because he’s stayed in the game long enough to learn it.
No matter how far he goes in this game I am confident that the resilience he’s learning will pay dividends for the rest of his life, far beyond whenever he decides to hang up his cleats.
Deven Morgan is the Director of Youth Baseball at Driveline and the founder of the Driveline Academy. Since then, he has created the Youth Baseball Development certification course, the Skills That Scale Training Manual, and founded the Driveline Academy team program, which distills its advanced player development model into an appropriate and applicable offering for youth and adolescent players. It integrates individual skills, general athletic development, nutrition guidance, and physical therapy along with team/tournament play into a single service program. Driveline Academy also includes mandatory Positive Coaching Alliance courses for all coaches and parents to ensure everything is carried out positively necessary for enjoyable youth sports experiences.