Cenla Baseball

Presents forming your own travel team

Travel ball or Select baseball is not new to Central Louisiana.  It has been played for the last few years but because the tournaments were normally so far away or didn’t make it has been very costly to play a higher level of baseball.  Our organization has taken the necessary steps to bring a higher level of competition to the local community.  The first thing you need to do is to establish your immediate goals.  If you want to ease into travel ball I recommend you build a team of 10 or 11 players.  You can have up to 18.  You can acquire these players thru newspaper ads, word of mouth, or as most teams do a tryout.  We will post to the website and help you get your ad together for the Alexandria Town Talk.   The players are not restricted by where they live.  The only restriction is age, the age of the player on May 1, 2007 is what division they will play.  Our tournaments will offer age divisions for 7U, 8U, 9U, 10U, 11U, 12U, 13U, & 14U.  The players will always play players of their age group unless you chose them to play up.   Many teams have a father as a coach but, many teams acquire coaches that have been associated with higher levels of baseball (high school coach, college coach, etc.)  This is up to the individual team.  You name your team and make your own schedule.  Most travel tournament other than World Series are all played on Saturday & Sunday.   You will normally be guaranteed 3 games, if you win you could play half of a season (local youth league) in 1 weekend.  Another main concern of many parents is the cost.  This can be handled many different ways.  Some teams will collect from each player the cost of the tournament.  Let’s say the fee is $250 and you have 10 players each player puts up $25.   It is very possible for there to be no cost to the players.  You can coordinate fundraisers, thru car washes, candy sales and other fundraisers.  Teams can acquire team sponsors or individual sponsors.    I truly believe that for a youngster to play better he must play against a higher level of player.  This is our goal.  Over time the players that come thru travel programs will have seen more plate time, field time and over all game experience.  It is inevitable that these players will ultimately be better players for playing travel ball and raise the level of baseball in Central Louisiana. If you have any questions please feel free to call Fred Ruggles 318-730-9690.   I appreciate you taking time out to review this and I hope to see you on the fields soon!!!

WHAT IS TRAVEL BALL