Travis Snider wants to change youth sports for the better.
As a former Major League Baseball player with the Blue Jays, Pirates and Orioles, Snider experienced the game at its highest level. But he also got to see firsthand the emotional costs that came with it.
Snider was bound for baseball stardom. He was the top Little Leaguer in the state while playing for Mill Creek Little League back in the late 1990s/early 2000s, and was one of the top-ranked high school players in the nation in 2006, when his Jackson High team won the Class 4A state title and Snider was picked No. 14 overall by the Blue Jays in the MLB draft.
But with all that success came a tremendous amount of pressure, which affected him in such profound ways that Snider was later diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
Now, Snider is trying to keep other kids from going through that same experience.
Alongside author, speaker and life coach Seth Taylor, Snider created a company called 3A Athletics, which seeks to help fix the culture of youth sports. The Seattle-based company offers resources to educate parents and coaches about how the intense and overbearing ways they interact with young athletes can negatively impact their mental and emotional health, and even hurt their success on the field.
Snider sees youth sports as a system that sets up kids for failure. When the only priority is success and intense training to play at a high level, it can lead to burnout or kids quitting before reaching their full potential.
Moments like the car ride home after a game or the reaction to an on-field mistake are crucial times in determining whether a child develops a love for the game or has a negative experience.
Through their resources, which include PDFs, workshops, guidebooks and videos on its website, 3A Athletics hopes to help parents, athletes and coaches learn how to approach sports in a more mentally healthy way.
“We really wanted to come alongside parents and help them start to understand how we’re really driving the industry, but also doing a lot of damage,” Snider said. “… It really starts with us as the parents, being willing to look in the mirror and become aware of these things that are happening on a daily basis in our interactions with our kids, with the organizations and teams, and coaches and umpires, and how that really impacts the overall experience and culture.”
An example of 3A Athletic’s teachings comes in a PDF on their website called, The car ride home and why it’s such a big deal.” Snider and Taylor emphasize turning these moments from an experience filled with critiques about a child’s performance into what they term a “sanctuary of love.”
“[Parents] can choose words and actions that prioritize their child’s well-being over their desire to coach or critique. Simple conversations can clarify that children often do not want postgame analysis and instead crave emotional support,” the PDF states.
Another says that young athletes “need coaches and parents who value effort over outcome and who understand that failure is part of growth — not something to be feared or avoided.”
• • •
Snider remembers how crushing the expectations could feel when he was young.
He was an All-Star for Mill Creek when he was 9, won two Little League state championships and pitched a no-hitter while hitting two homers in a state semifinal. His travel ball team won three national championships before winning the state title his senior year.
While the success was fun, the stress to keep winning was continuing to build and expectations for the team were sky-high.
“The general love for practicing and playing baseball was really cultivated and supported in that environment,” Snider said. “As we started to achieve more of these things, none of the parents or coaches had really experienced that kind of success and really understand, kind of, the nuances to how the identity formation is taking place in these 8-, 9-, 10-, 11-, 12-year-old years.”
In one big game when he was 11, Snider had an on-field panic attack when he was unable to throw a strike, one of two he’d have that weekend. In hindsight, he realizes that it was due to the pressure he felt to succeed, even at such a young age.
“It was really the first time I had experienced failure at that level, where you got thousands of people in the stands and the game just sped up,” Snider said. “My nervous system was not able to process it in that moment.”
While he never experienced that type of panic attack while playing again, he continued to battle many of the same emotional and identity issues during his 15-year professional career, in which his on-field successes didn’t live up to the hype that came with being a high first-round draft pick.
Snider spent eight seasons in the major leagues between 2008-15 and finished his career with a .244 average, 54 career homers and 212 RBI.
When he retired in 2022 after several years back in the minors, he underwent an identity crisis and has discussed going through therapy to work through the problems he faced since childhood.
“Our identity, what we’re known as, is the baseball player,” Snider said. “We get introduced in social circles and get into rooms that most people won’t get into because of what we do. So it becomes a very blurry line in terms of what makes me valuable.
“These are the kind of core points we’re hitting on with parents in those developmental years is, kids are looking for the things that say, ‘I’m safe and I’m loved and I’m valuable.’”
The A’s in 3A are Awareness, Activation and Achievement, the three pillar concepts of Snider’s mission. Awareness of the issues facing youth sports, activation of an athlete’s potential through supportive coaching and parenting practices, followed by achievement in their chosen field.
Some of 3A’s content is free, while the “premium content,” such as access to books and video workshops, requires a monthly subscription. The resources are limited to baseball, softball and soccer, but they plan to expand to other sports.
Through the resources that 3A has for parents and coaches, Snider hopes to teach those around youth sports that it’s OK to simply let the kids play for fun, without subjecting them to endless criticism and undue pressure.
3A Athletics has also partnered with local organizations like Driveline Academy to help spread their message through athlete training sessions and journaling.
Deven Morgan, Driveline’s director of youth baseball, has seen many parents act problematically during his time at the company and admits he was too intense about his teenage son’s on-field performance in the past.
He remembers one moment of intensity that caused him to reevaluate his approach.
“Something’s got to change, because I can’t be the reason that this kid doesn’t want to continue playing in this sport,” Morgan recalls thinking. “So I started to get my head screwed on straight.”
In Morgan’s mind, teaching athletes and their parents healthy coping skills and how to grow from their failures, rather than get angry about them, goes beyond just helping them figure out how to succeed in sports.
“I think that’s one of the ways where we can help all these kids get value out of the experience, in a way that informs the rest of the way that they approach their lives, right?” Morgan said. If you can provide context to failure, and you can actually get better from it and you can make adjustments to it, then that’s just like a life skill, that’s not a sports skill.”
With three kids of his own, Snider knows that all parents want their child to succeed.
But he stresses that parents placing too much importance on athletic accomplishments and trying to live their dreams through their child can be harmful.
“Ultimately we want the experience to be the kid’s experience,” Snider said. “Not the parents’ experience and not the coach’s experience, but the actual people who are on the field playing these sports. To really have a chance to experience and find out what they like, what they don’t like, and decide, ‘Is this what I want to pursue?’ and be able to help them build a healthy relationship with success and failure.”
© 2026 The Seattle Times. Visit www.seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
