I Founded Hustle Ball Because Little League Is Dying

Little League registration in Warner Robins, Georgia went from 1,000 kids in 2008 to 524 in 2019. In Indianapolis, one league went from 500 to 110. Nationally, participation among kids aged 6 to 12 fell from 16.5% to 12.4% between 2008 and 2016, and Little League itself has been shrinking 1.5% to 3% a year since its peak in the late nineties, when three million kids played.

I've coached youth baseball for most of my adult life. None of those numbers surprised me.

What surprises me is how few people are trying anything different.

The two things a kid is offered

If you are eight years old and you want to play baseball, you get handed one of two options.

Little League. Volunteer-run, cheap, local, and — in most towns — running on the fumes of whichever three parents haven't burned out yet. Kid pitch. Which in practice means a nine-year-old with no command throwing to a nine-year-old who is terrified, four walks an inning, and everybody's parents on a folding chair watching nothing happen for two hours.

Travel ball. Expensive, sanctioned, structured, and built around tournaments. Better coaching, usually. But it siphons the best athletes off at younger and younger ages, and it teaches a specific lesson: baseball is a weekend, baseball is pressure, and baseball is three at-bats between long stretches of standing in the outfield.

Neither one is designed around the thing that actually keeps a kid in the sport, which is simple: did you get to play, and was it fun?

What I built instead

Hustle Ball is a coach-pitch, live-play class. I built it at MADE Baseball and I run it in Central Florida.

The coach pitches. That single decision fixes most of what's broken. Games stay close because I control the pace. I can throw a better pitch to a better hitter and take something off for the kid who is still figuring it out, and the eleven-year-old and the eight-year-old can share a field without it being unfair to either of them.

Teams form on-site. Players rotate through positions. Everybody hits, a lot — not three lonely at-bats on a Saturday, but swings all afternoon. Hustle is a rule rather than a slogan: you sprint through first, you don't walk on or off the field, you don't argue. There's a Player of the Game and a short recap at the end so the lesson has somewhere to land.

Ninety minutes to two hours. It looks like the sandlot and it runs like a class.

Why "replace" and not "add"

I want to be honest about the word, because I use it deliberately and I know how it sounds.

I don't think Hustle Ball should delete Little League. I think it should replace kid pitch as the default way a young kid experiences a baseball game — and that Little League is the organization best positioned to adopt it, if it wanted to.

The case is not complicated. Little League's problem is that it's losing kids. Kids leave sports for boredom and for cost, in that order. Hustle Ball is cheaper than travel ball and dramatically less boring than a four-walk inning. It requires no tournament infrastructure, no travel, and no sanctioning body. It requires one adult who can throw strikes and hold a standard.

That last part is the actual bottleneck, and I'd rather say it plainly than pretend otherwise: this format is only as good as the coach running it. Kid pitch at least distributes the incompetence evenly. Coach pitch concentrates all of it in one person. If that person can't manage a matchup or won't enforce a hustle rule, Hustle Ball is just a scrimmage, and a scrimmage is not what I'm describing.

Which is why the format alone isn't the answer. Someone has to train the coaches.

The part I got wrong for years

I spent a long time thinking the problem with youth baseball was the parents. Too intense, too invested, too willing to pay for a tournament team at nine years old.

It isn't the parents. Parents are responding rationally to the options in front of them. If your two choices are a dying volunteer league where your kid watches walks, or a structured program that costs four thousand dollars, and you can afford the second one, you pick the second one. You're not a villain. You're a customer with a bad menu.

The problem is the menu. Somebody has to build the third option.

What I'm actually claiming

I am not claiming that I've solved youth baseball, or that a format I run in one state is a national movement. It isn't. It's a class, in Central Florida, that I built and that works.

What I'm claiming is narrower and I think defensible: the default youth baseball game is badly designed, the decline in participation is what a badly designed product looks like from the outside, and coach-pitch live play is a better design. I've run it for years. Kids who come to it come back. That's the whole evidence base, and I'd rather state its size honestly than dress it up.

If you coach and you want to try it, the how-to is written up on CageList: how to run a Hustle Ball class covers pitch control, keeping games close, rotations, and how to teach without killing the energy. The parent's version is here. Current classes and pricing live at madebaseball.com.

Take it and run it. I'd rather it spread than stay mine.