This Map Shows Just How Much Youth Sports Parents Travel. It’s Ridiculous

If your kid plays club baseball or softball, you are likely familiar with how many long drives you have to make over the course of a season. But how many miles and hours are you actually logging every year? Gamechanger wanted to find out, so it logged data from 550,000 teams (excluding 2020, due to the pandemic) in order to discover how intense the life of club baseball and softball parents really is.

The data showed that the average club baseball or softball team travels 1,300 miles in a season, which means quite a few long road trips for players’ parents. According to the numbers, five percent of clubs traveled over 5,000 miles, with seven percent traveling at least 4,000.

Gamechanger even created a map based on the data, which showed how much club teams were traveling, and unsurprisingly, teams in sparsely populated areas were made to travel a lot more than teams in heavily populated areas. There appears to be a lack of baseball and softball clubs in the rocky mountain and pacific northwest regions especially, as Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, Washington, and Montana were the five states where teams traveled the most.

If your kid plays softball instead of baseball, chances are you are going to be forced to log more miles every season. The numbers showed that while a baseball club travels just under 1,100 miles on average, softball clubs travel an average of over 1,500 miles per season.

And as your kid gets older, you will be expected to travel more and more each year, as the numbers showed that clubs for kids under the age of 13 travel less than 1,000 miles each season but by the time they are 18 or older, that number is almost at 4,000. Thankfully, by then, they may be able to drive themselves rather than asking you for a ride.