JUPITER, FL—Golf carts. That’s the first thing I noticed down here at the WWBA World Championship, where Perfect Game plays host to the top travel teams in the country and 700 MLB scouts and college coaches. There are at least 700 golf carts here, nearly all of them driven by baseball people with notepads, rosters, and radar guns. They weave around moms, dads, coaches and players under the hot, humid Florida sun to evaluate high school ballplayers competing on 13 fields at Roger Dean Chevrolet Stadium.
I recently started collaborating with a few brands, including Perfect Game, and their marketing team asked me to come down for the five-day event. I arrived Thursday night, and on the plane I sat next to two Padres scouts headed to the same place. We commiserated about the playoff loss to the Brewers, and they told me I was going to love the Jupiter event.
“There were more golf carts here last year, believe it or not,” said Matt Jervis, a coach for CBA Marucci, which has won this event the past two years. “It’s a lot of fun, man. I think 16- to 18-year-old young boys like to rise to the occasion and one of the things that’s cool about this event is all these kids know each other. They compete against each other in other PG events and the different showcase events out there.”
Some of it is familiar. The bathrooms aren’t great, some moms still wear Baseball Mom t-shirts, and the lawn chairs and wagons are everywhere. Little brothers and sisters are still hanging around. Behind the stands on Saturday, I spotted six boys in CBA jerseys bouncing a rubber ball back and forth. They told me they all had big brothers on the team. I told them my son plays for CBA Victus San Diego 13U, and that earned me some fist bumps.
I arrived thinking the parents wouldn’t be much different, but most of them surprised me. The stakes here are as high as they get in amateur baseball: college scholarships, draft position, signing bonuses. Yet the stands are calmer than any 10U tournament I’ve been to. Very few parents are coaching. Most sit like they’re in a museum. On Friday, in a 1-0 game I watched, a hard ground ball screamed down the first base line and the umpire called it fair. The home team’s coaches did not like the call. Out of at least three dozen parents, one dad yelled, “C’mon Blue, where are your eyes?!” The two dads next to me raised their eyebrows. That was it. Some parents here told me that restraint took years. Many learned the hard way, often in the car after games.
Michael Albee felt the calm. He’s been a Perfect Game scout for three years, and PG assigned one scout to each of the 13 fields here. I sat with him and a PG scorekeeper behind the backstop at an 8 a.m. game Saturday morning, with three other games going on around us.
Parents know the stakes, Albee said, especially at an event like this one. “There’s four games going on, and it sounds like there’s one.”
The parents know who’s in the golf carts, and if they don’t, the team hats and branded polos and t-shirts give it away. “These coaches, these scouts, they look at parents and the family situation, and how they act, just as much as the players on the field and how they play,” Albee said. “Every evaluation they turn in — makeup, the family — it’s looked at.”
College coaches do their homework too, and with so much talent, they don’t have to take chances.
“There’s a lot of guys that you get to choose from, and if it’s a bad apple, it’s just too much. We don’t need it. There’s other guys,” said Steve McKee, pitching coach at Florida Gulf Coast University. “You don’t just take the eye test. You’re gonna talk to the high school coach and talk to the travel coach.”
Not everyone gets the message. The game Albee and I watched wasn’t drama free. Late in the game, with two outs and runners on first and second, the catcher dropped strike three. Instead of throwing to first, he flipped the ball back to the mound, and his team started jogging off the field. The other team’s coaches yelled at their runners and the batter to go. They did, and the umpire ruled everyone safe. Instead of the inning ending, the bases were loaded.
The pitcher’s dad bristled. “C’mon Blue. Be better. That’s terrible!” Between innings, the plate umpire walked to the backstop where the dad stood and tried to smooth things over, but the dad wasn’t having it, even though the inning had ended without a run crossing the plate. When he finally walked away, the umpire looked over at us. “I’m a minor league umpire and he’s trying to tell me how to do my job.”
The scorekeeper’s story topped the one I witnessed. On Friday on a nearby field, he told us, a dad yelled at his son’s coach after the coach pulled the boy off the mound. “Why’d you pull him out?! He was pitching fine!”
“He was pitching terrible,” the scorekeeper said. “There were a ton of scouts there too, Florida State, Duke, UCF, and they all scratched the kid off their lists and left after the dad lost it.”
Albee shook his head. He wasn’t surprised. “I’ve seen it before. It’s not an uncommon thing,” he said. It’s rarer at an event like this one, he said, because “everyone knows they need to act right.”
An MLB scout, who asked not to be identified, sees it a little differently. Pro teams aren’t recruiting anymore, he said. “It’s a business now [at this point in the process]. We’re asset hunting and families have to decide if our price is right.” He puts parents in two camps and he said he just needs to know who he’s dealing with: old-school mom and dad who sit quietly and watch their kid, and helicopter and bulldozer parents who do everything they can to help their kid succeed. He’d prefer if every parent was old-school but times have changed, he said.
Several parents I talked to said they’re calmer now than they used to be. Scott Harris, from Montgomery, Texas, coached his son, Brady, until he was 12. “I was a total a-hole,” Harris said. “When I stopped coaching him is when he flourished. I got him around some good coaches who made him play the game the right way. That’s when our relationship started to repair. It still wasn’t great. But now our relationship is a lot better.” He doesn’t bring up anything negative about baseball anymore. In the car after the game, they talk about golf, movies, anything but baseball.
Kevin Dittert laughed while Harris talked. He recognized himself and his son, Gage, who goes to the same high school as Brady. “That’s how it was with me and mine,” Dittert said. “You only get one shot with your kids, right? Do you want to spend that time arguing with them, or having fun and watching them enjoy the game they love? So on the car ride home now, if he wants to talk baseball, he brings it up.”
Nicole LeRoy’s son, Cooper, is a 6-foot-5 junior from Gilbert, Arizona who plays for CBA Marucci and committed to Texas A&M a couple of weeks ago. Her husband, Adam, pitched in college, and he grew up with tough love. He tried that approach with Cooper. “We’ve gotten in the car and been like, ‘What did you do wrong?’ And it didn’t work,” she said. “It didn’t penetrate the brain the way it needed to.” So her husband changed the question: “Hey, you did this really good thing on the mound. How do we replicate that?”
“And my son, it kind of clicked for him,” she said. “It took my husband a little bit.”
She also noted high school parents are calmer than the rest of us baseball parents because somewhere along the way, the game became more about the kids on the field than the adults in the stands. That, she said, means there’s far less drama and cattiness between parents — the type of tension that usually only ends when a family leaves for another team.
Cooper’s mom and dad aren’t at every game anymore, and Nicole is OK with that. “My son did a lot of traveling this summer on his own, because we just couldn’t be there. But it also makes them grow,” she said. “They’re gonna be to the point where they’re in college, and we’re not gonna be there to hold them. But we’re still a phone call away. We’re still a FaceTime away.”
She said Cooper has had help with the game’s mental side. “We even had a mental health coach,” Nicole said. His high school team, Perry High, has one on campus every day, and every player meets with him once a week “just to work on the brain.”
Cooper’s evolution was most evident this summer at an All-Star event in Philadelphia. Bases were loaded and he was pitching while TV cameras captured the action. He hung his changeup, and the kid at the plate crushed it. Grand slam. Cooper tipped his cap and later told him, “Dude, great job.”
Prep Baseball has Cooper atop its 2028 player rankings in Arizona. Saturday he came out of the bullpen to throw two flawless innings against Mafia Boys United. He only had to toss 17 pitches.
Jazheel Rodriguez is 16, one of the youngest players in a tournament full of high school seniors. A month ago he moved from New Jersey to Boca Raton to attend Vaughn Sports Academy. His parents and his siblings didn’t join him. He told me he’s a Phillies fan, but he said he doesn’t really watch games for fun. “I just watch baseball games to study the players and get better.”
The car rides with his dad, Emmanuelle, are good ones. “My dad’s actually the opposite [of a lot of dads]. He doesn’t get mad,” Jazheel said. “Keep your head up, and next time, you got it.” He has seen it go the other way with other kids and their dads. “When they talk bad to you, it’s like you feel like they don’t believe in you, when they see you training a lot.”
Emmanuelle, 40, builds ships for the Navy. Jazheel’s mom is having a harder time with the move, he said, because Jazheel is the baby. His own view is simpler. “When you got a good opportunity, take it.”
Shannon Stepner, whose son, Jeremiah, plays first base for the San Diego Show, has learned to get out of his way. “It’s hard to watch when they’re struggling, but it’s growth for them,” she told me as the Show played one of the country’s top travel teams, USA Prime National/Detroit Tigers Scout Team.
“I don’t try to tell him what he did wrong, or what he needs to do differently. We let him figure it out. I think when they’re younger, you don’t want to see them struggle, so you’re always trying to step in to fix things for them. And as you get older you realize, no, they need to struggle, they need to go through this.”
Scott Harris told me his son asked him to play golf on Friday in Florida.
“I was like, ‘Let’s go!’”
He said those are the moments he would have missed if he didn’t fix things. They’re friends now, good ones, but it took a while to get there.
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