Baseball Mom On A Budget

At the batting cages last night (because my kids live and breathe baseball 365 days of the year), we met a player and dad who were with the team my son, #7, will be joining next year. Serendipitous! The kid is also friends with someone who will be joining the team my other son, #9, is joining. Baseball is a SMALL world.

Anyway, the dad and I got into a conversation about the pros and cons of paid coaches versus volunteers, who are most often dads of a kid on the team. Dad coaches get a bad rap, but this parent had a really interesting perspective.

First, some background: established clubs generally have paid staff who work year-round. They run the indoor clinics, offer 1:1 and group lessons, and staff the facility so players can use the tunnels (for hitting and pitching practice) and weight room year-round. These staff members also run the winter practices and then coach the higher level teams (high school + AAA/majors teams for younger kids). Some clubs also run college-level summer teams, which have paid coaches as well.

The staff are typically people with playing experience at the college and/or pro level. That’s a key marketing tool: if you can advertise about where a person played you’ve got a great recruiting tool, tapping into the players’ and parents’ dreams of getting college scholarships and even getting drafted by a pro team. It’s so tempting, from the player and parent perspective, and I can tell you that although we have told both our kids the stats about how many high school players make it to college teams and then how many make it to the pros, our kids dream big (and their work ethic around practicing shows us they mean it). So being coached by someone who made it that far is a big draw for them.

For the record, Andrew Kerth did the numbers on this: “Out of roughly 472,598 high school baseball players in the United States in 2024-25, only about 5.6 percent will play at any college level (NCAA, NAIA, or JUCO), only 0.5 percent will ever be drafted by an MLB team, and only about 17 percent of those draftees will ever play a single inning in the major leagues.”

Andrew Kerth, May 23, 2026. “Odds of Making MLB: Real Numbers from Little League to Major Leagues.” Legion Report.

Then there are other teams—every rec league team, little league team, and some or most of the club teams—that are coached by parents. My kids’ first tee ball team was coached by their dad because literally no one else was willing, and he was either a head coach or assistant coach all throughout their rec league experience. Now he’s moved on to high school coaching, and the reasons we decided he shouldn’t coach his own kids may be the topic of another post. Stepping back has been good for him and our boys!

One team they played in that first year was coached by a mom, by the way, and I want to be clear that I’ve seen other women coaches at the club ball level and lots in this organizations—though they usually coach softball because that’s where girls like me were funneled pretty quickly as we rose up through the little league world. (I played varsity in high school and varsity at a D3 school in college.) So, when I talk about “dad coaches,” I don’t intend to exclude the moms who get involved and I’m actually super impressed by them because baseball is a pretty sexist world.

Anyway, dad coaches get a bad rap and I’ve see first-hand why that is. My own kids’ dad struggled when coaching his own kids because you can’t help but bring all the baggage of your relationship at home. Maybe you got frustrated with them at dinner because they horsed around and almost made you late for practice. It’s tough to filter that out when you get to the field and treat your kids the way you treat every other player. And some dads think their players are the best on the field, whether or not that matches reality, and so their player gets more time on the field or—as I’ve seen quite often—the kid ends up “owning” their preferred position so that no one else gets a chance there.

Conversely, some dad coaches over-compensate. In trying to avoid being criticized for preferential treatment, their kid ends up sitting on the bench more than others, even when that isn’t reflective of their skill level. The coach my kid, #7, will be joining next year told us that’s his toxic trait as a coach. (We’ll see, I guess.)

The result is that many parents and players are jockeying for offers with teams that have paid coaches, because the prevailing opinion is that a) those are better teams, and b) those coaches are better coaches.

But this dad last night said something that really made me think: he said in his experience, the paid coaches are just doing a job, and so they faithfully clock out at the stated time that practice is over and don’t always go above and beyond for the kids. On the other hand, the parents are there because of their own love of the game and because of their kids’ passion, and so they’re often the ones pouring extra time into the team. They may extend practice time, scrounge up teams to scrimmage on non-practice days, and even plan barbecues or other team-building activities. They’re in it not just for the player development, but because they want their kids to have fun.

I guess we’ll find out this year: #7 will play for a volunteer coach with a player on the team, while #9 is playing for a paid coach who was playing for a D1 school just a few years ago. I’ll report back as it unfolds, but in the meantime, I’d love to hear what your experience has been. Do dad coaches get a bad rap, or is it earned in your opinion?