Misinformation
Over the years, a tremendous amount of false and misleading information has been thrown around to families in the Connetquot community about Little League. Below are some of the main ones.
- Little League is a term to describe all youth baseball or softball. This is absolutely NOT TRUE! Only sanctioned organizations can use the Little League name and are affiliated with Little League of Americas. Connetquot Little League is the ONLY such organization in the Connetquot community. Any other organization that tells you different is not being honest.
- Your child will suffer in Little League because the kids are not any good and they just are out there picking daisies. As horrible as this sounds, it has been said all the time. This is not true. Little League has kids of all different abilities, including elite players that will go on to play baseball professionally. This is about having fun and learning the game and about sportsmanship. It is also a chance to play with your friends and kids you will be in school with through high school. It is a community based program, for OUR community, Connetquot! There are competitive tournament teams that form after each spring season to compete in the Little League International and state tournaments. These are just as competitive as travel baseball tournaments and require kids to trout in order to be selected for these teams.
- Little League is dead, travel baseball is where all the kids are now. Not from where I am standing. We just had a team from Long Island make it all the way to the Little League World Series last year. The Massapequa Little League went all the way to Williamsport, PA to play for the championship, but came up short. Still, this is a clear indication that Little League is not dead. A good amount of those kids also play travel. You can do both, and you should do both if your child desires to. Any travel organization that forbids or punishes a kid for wanting to play Little League is all about making money off of kids and just winning as many championships as possible to further increase their enrollment. Organizations such as these should be avoided at all costs, it will wind up hurting your child in the long run. Statements such as these are often made by the same organizations to deceive you into spending thousands of dollars on travel baseball. All of our neighboring towns have strong Little League enrollment, we have not. We need to change that and ensure that all kids in Connetquot are playing official Little League baseball or softball.
- Little League has many rules that do not make sense and make a mockery of the game. Rules are enacted for a reason, to keep kids safe and prevent adults from manipulating children. Little League does in fact have many rules and many safeguards in place to keep all kids that participate safe. It is an internationally sanctioned body that oversees leagues around the world. Independant leagues and travel leagues have no such safeguards in place and no such affiliations.
- Little League uses bats that are dead. The USA bat standard was enacted to keep kids safe. Kids grow and mature at different levels. This should not prevent them from playing with their age level peers. The USA bat standard makes it safer by limited bats that are "juiced" or that are made of material that causes the ball the react off the bat harder and faster. Another angel of this is that kids need to learn how to hit the proper way. The proper way is to make good contact with the ball on the sweet part of the bat. A USA bat will not take a hit away from a kid who squares the ball up the proper way. On the contrary, it will continue to reinforce good hitting fundamentals that will last well past Little League and provide solid foundation for using BBCOR or wood bats later in a child's baseball career.