When Travis Snyder was 11 years old, he was playing in the Little League Western Regional Tournament when he suddenly started hyperventilating. Snyder pitched the first inning perfectly and hit a home run. And he couldn’t throw a strike in the second inning. His heart rate increased and he started crying. He had to be removed from the match. At the time, the incident was thought to be sports-induced asthma.
It wasn’t until much later that he was able to admit it was a panic attack.
Snyder has been the best baseball player in Washington State since he was 9 years old. He entered the majors on August 29, 2008, just two years after being drafted 14th overall by the Toronto Blue Jays out of Henry M. Jackson High School in Mill Creek. At 20 years old, Snyder was the youngest position player in baseball and was one of baseball’s top prospects, touted as the Blue Jays’ next great hitter. He is a genius player who is praised by Toronto officials for his “maturity and presence.”
A player you can’t miss.
Until Snyder missed. And he missed. And he missed.
He struggled his way up to the big league lineup over eight years, appearing in more than 115 games in a season only once, in 2014. Snyder was demoted to the minor leagues. He lost his confidence. He was traded and drafted twice. He left the majors for good by 2016, playing for his fourth organization, Kansas City. Snyder bounced around various minor league teams for six years, including a stint in independent ball, but ultimately retired in 2022 with a career fWAR of 3.3.
When Snyder looks back on his panic attacks now, he realizes that the life-or-death feeling the game gave him from an early age was debilitating. This left him unprepared to deal with adversity and failure. And when he became a parent and a coach, he began to see the effect that kind of pressure had on young kids.
“You start to question your worth as a human being,” said Snyder, who was forced to move from the major leagues to Triple-A for the first time. “You’re trained from an early age to know your slash line, and that’s your value. You’re eight or nine years old, and your entire identity is based on your accomplishments. You’re on the field not just to win, but to win love.”
Snyder, now 36 and a father of three, wants to dedicate his post-playing career to breaking that cycle. Last spring, he launched 3A Athletics, a company focused on repairing the broken culture of youth sports through curriculum aimed at supporting parents, coaches, and athletes. 3A is still in its early stages, offering interactive guidebooks for baseball, softball, and soccer, with other sports in development. The company also plans to publish a journal for athletes later this month.
Baseball has been plagued by unprecedented rates of pitching injuries that have spilled over into youth sports, but only the growing number of 11- and 12-year-olds undergoing Tommy John ligament replacement surgery It’s not a concern. A 2024 study by the American Academy of Pediatrics found that approximately 70% of participants dropped out of youth sports by age 13 due to burnout and overtraining, in addition to injury.
“We were so focused on performance that we didn’t focus on helping our kids grow as people first, and I was a product of that,” Snyder said.
“How we raise our kids in youth sports is going to have a lasting impact on them.”
When Mr. Snyder first retired, he wrapped up several different jobs. One of those is the 25-team baseball organization, where Snyder has served as director of player development since the summer of 2022. The children who participated were 13 years old and practiced until 9:30 p.m. on a Friday night in the middle of winter. — Baseball offseason — in Washington state. It was dark and cold. Some people may be crying on the field. As Snyder interacted with well-meaning parents trying to keep up with his peers, he wondered: How will this help these children?
Snyder didn’t stay in the baseball organization. He made the acquisition about eight months later. He instead wanted to focus on why such a harmful cycle begins at an early age and work on how to break it.
3A was born out of Snyder’s relationship with Seth Taylor, a life coach whose clients include professional athletes. Snyder began seeing Taylor in 2021 at the urging of a friend, months after Snyder’s father, Deng, passed away. Most of his sessions focused on his unprocessed childhood, having drug-addicted parents and being kicked out of his home, and how all of that affected the way he coped when baseball became difficult. focused on trauma.
Growing up, Snyder sometimes felt like he was living two lives. For one, he was a star high school football and baseball player and had great memories of his early life. His father was president of Mill Creek Little League. His mother, Patti, helped sell T-shirts. In another life, he remembers the two quietly struggling with addiction, attending AA and NA and trying to confront their own demons. By the time Snyder was a sophomore in high school, his mother was in a coma due to pneumonia and liver failure caused by alcoholism. His parents divorced during his two years of recovery. Snyder’s grandparents, who were like second parents to him, both died within three years of each other. Snyder started taking anger management classes.
When Snyder returned from his first full season as a pro in 2007, he still harbored a lot of anger towards Patty. They got into a fight and he told her to move out of her house, which he had bought for her. A few days later, Patty was in a fatal accident. Snyder was 19 years old.
“The story I created for the scouts was that all of this (adversity) prepared me to start playing professional baseball at 18,” Snyder said. “I thought I was mentally tough. But I was just repressing a lot of this stuff. It would come back later[in my career]but I didn’t know how to deal with it.” I just didn’t have the ability to do it.”
Years before Life Coach Taylor began meeting with Snyder, he collaborated with former Major League Soccer player Pat Ianni to write several books aimed at changing the culture of youth soccer. Published in 2018. Although Ianni was passionate about the subject and the team did bring the book to him, he became frustrated and ultimately abandoned the effort. These books have been sitting on Amazon for years.
About a year into Snyder’s sessions, Taylor then mentioned the football book. A few months later, Mr. Snyder burst into his office and asked, “What are you doing with this now?” Taylor shrugged. “Nothing,” he said. So Snyder acquired Ianni and began rebranding the football workbook for baseball. That turned into a book called “Hero.”
“Travis considers it his life’s mission,” said Taylor, who is now 3A’s content director. “His career was a complete and utter failure. He was supposed to make millions of dollars, but he didn’t because of the trauma. So he’s the perfect advocate for this issue.”
Snyder spoke on a panel at the MLB Player Alumni Association two years ago and said he knows identity issues are common for players whose professional baseball days are over. When thinking about these harmful cycles and how best to break them, it made sense to start with youth sports. The foundation is laid there.
“We’ve become so competitive at younger ages and we’re so demanding that kids keep up with their development curves that we’ve lost sight of how to raise them,” Snyder said.
“I have a lot of friends I grew up with who are very talented, and their fathers and mothers were always there for them, guiding them rather than their parents. Most of them could smell their potential. I’ve had other friends who OD’d and died from drugs within a few years of graduating and playing sports in college. “I’m trying to figure out what my value is outside of sports.”
Both Snyder and Taylor believe the best way to fix this culture is to target the central figures in young athletes’ lives: their parents and coaches.
Snyder recently watched his coach adjust his son’s batting stance during a game and thought to himself: I was an MLB player, so I know how to teach my son to hit. He had to bite his tongue and say to himself, “These kids are seven years old.”
“Between ages 0 and 9 is a fragile period for identity,” Snyder said. “It’s hard to understand how sensitive kids are at that age and how quickly they can shut it down. We want parents who are feeling that pressure to understand that. You don’t have to take your kids to organized sports after they turn 3. Take them to the park and save money.
Taylor has spent her life trying to help people change themselves. But to change the culture?
“That’s a big barrier,” Taylor said. “We are very resistant to change.”
A few months ago, Snyder ran into an assistant general manager who still had Snyder’s draft scouting report. He was seen as a striking 80+ make-up man. When he was promoted to the Blue Jays, Snyder was praised for being mature beyond his years. For years, he has battled the label of being a total package prospect, only to be given a more unpleasant label. bust.
Snyder now wonders about the kids who play in the Little League World Series. They get that label at 12 and 13-year-olds, but many of them have never even sniffed a high level.
When Snyder dreams big, he thinks about 3A partnering with larger youth sports organizations. Snyder hired Michael Neely, 3A’s chief strategy officer, in January. Michael Neely is a father of four, and his oldest son, Colby, played four years in the Dodgers’ minor league system. Almost all podcasts are recorded. Snyder plans on a small monthly subscription for additional resources in the future, with workbooks for football, basketball, and golf coming soon.
“What I’m excited about is getting kids, parents and coaches to understand what this is all about, so they can make the transition easier than it was for me and the people I played with. It creates healthier, happier athletes,” Snyder said.
In August 2022, Mr. Snyder was diagnosed with Complex post-traumatic stress disorder. He is not shy in admitting that he is a work in progress as a parent, his husband, and a human being. Snyder still attends therapy sessions regularly. However, he made peace with his career.
He now uses his struggles in the majors to remind parents that even if their child makes it to the major leagues or becomes a first-round pick, he can still be defeated. I think that it is a vessel for. Even after his debut, his troubles don’t go away.
“Do we want to keep putting the idea of achievement on a pedestal instead of focusing on the life skills of how to conduct ourselves on the field, how to manage relationships and stress? We’ve overlooked it.” said Snyder. “You’re chasing the carrot of making X amount of dollars and going to the All-Star Game.” I want kids to learn to control their emotions. I don’t care what they want to do as long as they are.
“And the more people we can get to really understand that and work on it, the more we can really turn things around.”
(Top photo: Jim McIsaac / Getty Images)