Travel Ball Map in the news

The Wall Street Journal

By Harriet Ryan · October 3, 2026

Advanced Stats and $500 Bats: Why Baseball for 6-Year-Olds Is Breaking the Bank

The Journal's look at the rising cost of youth baseball and the club teams at the center of it cited James Colvin, a Florida software engineer and baseball dad, who used AI to map club teams and organizations. His first pass across seven states (Alabama, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas) found 10,260 organizations fielding at least one team.

That map is Travel Ball Map. The online article links here; the print edition doesn't include the web address, so if you read it on paper and searched your way in: welcome. It has grown since, to 25,000+ programs in 25 states.

Read the article (subscription required).

What Travel Ball Map is

Picking a travel team usually means asking around at the ballpark, scrolling Facebook groups and digging through tournament sites one at a time. Travel Ball Map pulls those sources together onto one map:

25,000+ baseball and softball programs across 25 states, from Florida and Texas to California, New York and New England.
Records, age groups and locations from USSSA, Perfect Game, GameChanger, 2D Sports, FieldLevel and regional leagues.
Ranked your way. Weigh distance, winning, coaching and fundamentals, and the list re-sorts.
Maintained by parents. Families add missing teams, fix details and rate programs they know.
Free. No account needed to search. Free for families, and it's staying that way.

Who built it

I'm James Colvin, a software engineer and travel ball dad in the Florida panhandle. My son and I started it to pick his own team, and it grew from there. If your club is missing or something about it is wrong, open it on the map and use "Suggest a correction", or add it yourself.

— James, Travel Ball Map

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What Travel Ball Map is

Who built it