by Tim Covey
I recently sent out a survey via Facebook for travel ball parents. You may have participated! In fact, within the span of just a few hours I had 163 responses before I turned the survey off.
The open-ended questions had some passionate responses, and as one would expect the responses ranged from one end of the spectrum to the other.
Keep reading for an overview of the results.
8U: 2%
10U: 24%
12U: 20%
14U: 38%
16U: 12%
18U: 12%
Less than a year: 2%
1-2 Years: 18%
2-3 Years: 39%
4-5 Years: 20%
5+ Years: 21%
As you can see from the chart below, “Improve as a Player” had the highest score of nearly 4, followed by “Better Competition,” “Better Coaching,” “Chance for College Scholarships,” and “Social Reasons.”
You can see from this chart that it is only 100 respondents. The reason for this is that my survey maxes out at 100, which means the other 63 respondents filled out a copy of this survey. But the results for both groups were very similar on this question.
What stuck out to me is that “College Scholarships” was close to the bottom, and was only chosen as the top choice by 12% of the respondents.
In the open-ended responses, here were some common comments:
This was an open-ended question, but here are some of the most common responses. And there were A LOT of comments. Not anything earth-shattering. Everyone has a different experience, but the common themes (for good and bad) were parents, coaches, and player “drama”:
Best Things:
Most Challenging Things:
Those that chose “other” could write-in their responses. Common themes with these were “too soon to tell we just started,” “depends on time of year,” “2 tournaments per month max.”
What sticks out to me here is that over 1/4 of all respondents indicated that they would like “one-day” tournaments sprinkled into their tournament schedule.
When I pull out respondents from “warm-weather” regions (South, Southeast, etc.) where girls play year-round this number spikes to 42%.
Being a Floridian, and one that has coached many 16-18 year old players that lose some of the “fire in the belly” I’ve often wished more 1-day options were available to protect the players from burn-out and injury.
In the comments for this question, common themes were a desire for 1-day tournaments or more breaks for church-attendance, Monday being a school-day, family time, and preventing burn-out.
Once again, this graph is only 100 of the 163 respondents, but the results are similar across the board.
Using all the data, 37% responded “Worth the Value,” 14% “Too Expensive,” 44% “In the Middle,” and 8% “Other.”
This was open-ended, but here are some very common responses:
So there you have it! A brief synopsis of the survey results. While I would not make any sweeping generalizations from this small population of respondents, it certainly provides some good “food for thought.”
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Tim Covey
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