If you’re not a parent, then the concept of “travel ball” is maybe foreign to you. If you’re not a parent, you can probably stop reading about this vehicle, as it’s not for you. Even if you are a parent, travel ball might not be for you. It’s sure as hell not for me.
For those who are unaware, travel ball is a form of youth sports that forces parents, willingly or unwillingly, to spend an inordinate amount of time and money taking their kid to play basketball, or baseball, or hockey, or whatever. This is little league on steroids (hopefully not literally) and exists because most kids playing, say, t-ball, are liable to spend most of the time in the outfield looking at planes. Those kids don’t need more reps.
Some kids do, and those kids all typically get put on one team that goes and plays the best players from somewhere else. That somewhere else could be 200 hundred miles away, which means that travel ball parents have to get up at some ungodly hour on a Saturday so they can sit around and wait for a game to start.
I have a friend who is a travel ball dad, and when soccer is in season, I barely see him. This doesn’t sound that much fun to me, and I feel pretty grateful that my daughter is not a southpaw, as I’d have probably pushed her more into softball. She is doing competition dance next year, and that’s already a lot, but it’s just once every three months.
If she were super into lacrosse and needed me to schlep out to New Hampshire every Friday night, I would do it. I would do it every weekend, even though I don’t care at all about the sport. I love my daughter very much, and I want to give her what she needs. Most kids want and, really, need some kind of thing that makes them feel good, that they can work hard at, that can teach them important lessons about life and teamwork and all that.
For me, it was theater, which was convenient for my parents, because they didn’t have to go anywhere, though I’m sure they would have if I’d have asked them. I had a cousin who was a travel ball softball player and her parents always seemed to be caught between being grateful to be a part of their kid’s life and a little overwhelmed by it all.
A key part of travel ball seems to be having the appropriate gear, because there’s a lot of gear. There’s everything your kid needs–bags, gear, clothes, snacks–and then usually another kid in tow who needs their own entertainment, clothes, snacks, et cetera. There’s often a large cooler to carry all the food, countless water bottles, and then chairs. So many chairs. I’ve seen a parent roll out what looked like an entire living room set, a la The Price is Right, at a softball game.
If you have the gear, you need the car, and for most of my youth, that was either a big old van or an eight-passenger mega SUV like a Suburban or Excursion. Vans have fallen out of fashion, and not everyone wants a truck-based mega SUV as a daily driver, or at least, not everyone wants to pay for one. This is why the large, three-row crossover has come to dominate.
Swapping from a Tahoe to a Traverse is a logical move, and you get nearly as much space in a package that’s a little easier to live with most of the time. It’s also a lot cheaper, and you’re going to need that money if you’ve got a travel ball kid.
The Basics
Engine: 2.5-liter turbocharged inline-four
Transmission: 8-speed automatic
Drive: all-wheel drive
Output: 328 horsepower, 326 lb-ft of torque
Fuel Economy: 24 mpg hwy, 19 mpg city, 21 mpg combined
Base Price: $44,795 FWD LT
Price As-Tested: $61,290 RS AWD (including $1,895 destination charge)
Why Does This Exist?
It’s fairly well established that I’m a fan of the Chevy Tahoe. It is a vehicle that works quite well in specific situations. Transporting an entire family out and back to places is one of those, although this is not necessarily an efficient operation. Even with the 3.0-liter diesel, a Tahoe is expensive to get from one place to another. It’s also just plain expensive.
Minivans are having a bit of a comeback now, but in the waning days of the Bush Administration, they were suddenly uncool. With the exception of the Warner Brothers Edition Chevy Venture, none of the GM vans were particularly good or cool. Remember, GM went bankrupt after abandoning the cool dustbuster vans and putting out a quarter-assed replacement. Think about it.
Rather than failing at building another minivan, the Lambda platform arrived to give Chevy, Cadillac, GMC, Buick, and even Saturn a vehicle that could be a little more efficient than your average SUV without sacrificing size. We’re now in the third generation of the Traverse, and it’s more Tahoe-like than ever before.
How Does It Look?
The Tahoe-ness of the Traverse is immediately obvious when you look dead front at it. This era of GM vehicles has embraced the massive grille, in many cases offset from the rest of the vehicle with black paint. What’s amusing is that a lot of this grille isn’t even necessarily open as that isn’t required for cooling and harms the car’s aerodynamic profile. It’s just there to look cool.
Does it look cool? I’m not sure it looks cool. It looks big, and maybe tough. Dead-on, it looks like a Tahoe. In fact, the most obvious difference between this and a Suburban or similar is that it has the little swoop feature over the C-Pillar. This is what lets you know this is a unibody and not a ladder-frame vehicle.
It does a credible job of distinguishing the Traverse, I suppose, but it’s not a feature I love.
What’s It Like On The Inside?
In RS trim, the Chevy Traverse gets these nice little red accents on the seats, dash, and doors. That’s fun. Otherwise, this is pretty standard for modern GM products. There’s some harder plastic on the places you’re not going to touch, softer stuff for the places you will fondle often, and glossy bits elsewhere.
Every new GM vehicle seems to be embracing the large infotainment screen that blends into the gauge cluster, and I like this way more than the big screen just tacked somewhere in the middle of the dash. It’s a little more elegant and more usable. Here, the huge 17.7-inch screen provides a map large enough to help Robert Peary find the North Pole.
I tend to be a give me as many seats as possible kinda guy, but this thing is so large that I actually prefer the two captain’s chairs (two captains, what is this, Star Trek: Generations?). The back seat is also large enough that I, as an adult, didn’t hate being back there. Unlike the Outlander, you might actually put someone you don’t despise back here.
It’s Big
I don’t know if it’s obvious in this wide-angle shot, but the front captain’s chairs are up! Using the wide angle does exaggerate the space a bit, but not by much. You might be able to fit an entire hockey team’s bags back here.
With all the seats up, there’s 98 cubic feet of space. That’s huge. By comparison, a Toyota Sienna minivan has like 75.2 cubic feet of space with the third row down. I don’t know how many ways to say this, but … car big. The only other vehicle in this class that feels quite this cavernous is the Toyota Grand Highlander.
This is what you’re paying for, ultimately. You’re paying for a lot of space in a thing that looks nice in the Dairy Queen parking lot on the way to the Sheboygan Ice Hutch.
How Does It Drive?
Yeah, you’re not paying for how it drives. It certainly drives better than an old Suburban, or probably a Pontiac Montana. It’s impressive that Chevy managed to squeeze this much reliable power out of a four-cylinder motor, but the result seems to be a little bit of harshness. If you’re carrying a 12-year-old hyped up after getting three sacks, you may not notice the noise. In the rare quiet moments, though, it’s there.
Having driven a lot of these three-row SUVs lately, I wouldn’t say most of them handle particularly well. What I like about minivans is that the low center of gravity tends to make them a little extra fun. The upright, heavy Traverse imparts no joy. You have the kids for the joy, and you have the car to move the kids.
Hewing to historical precedent, the Traverse does have a rather cushy ride. In this way it reminds me of the Pontiac Aztek we owned, and only this way.
How Does It Drive Itself?
For about $61,000 delivered, the Traverse is a somewhat cheap way to get a big vehicle with three years of Super Cruise. This is a good deal. If you are engaged in travel ball and covering huge tracts of land, you’re not going to want to do all that driving yourself.
I’ve used an average radar cruise control with lane-keep assist to drive from one end of the country to another, and it’s better than going without (which I’ve also done). The best version of ADAS, in my mind, is Super Cruise. While some may swear by FSD, I don’t yet entirely trust it. Super Cruise works well on most highways and, even better, communicates clearly when it’s deciding to disengage.
At this point, trust is the most important thing to me. Raising a kid is a huge emotional and financial investment. I am not putting that investment in the hands of FSD.
What’s The Punctum Of Chevy Traverse?
It looks like a big thing, drives like a slightly less big thing, and doesn’t require signing of as big a check as a Tahoe. By comparison, a similarly spec’d Tahoe is $86,000+ out of the door. That’s a $24,000 premium.
Most people should probably not be driving Tahoes, especially absolutely blasted from standing out in the sun all day watching U10 soccer. Sometimes being a parent means finding the thing that makes your life at least 5% better without sacrificing your duty as a parent, and while there are nicer and faster and more efficient vehicles in this class, they’re not quite this big or, if they are, not quite this affordable.
Also, it’s a good color. Splurge for the good color.
All Photos: Matt Hardigree
I haven’t driven one of the new ones, but I generally like how my 21 drives (except for the sway bar linkages that break all the time for now reason), but only in AWD mode. In FWD mode, it drives like a dog. In AWD, the throttle is mapped very nicely, the steering wheel more or less communicates and feels good, with car-like turning, and the transmission shifts well. It has a ton of power that it puts down predictable. The leather seats are nice and soft, too.
I doubt the turbo 4 does that. I think all but the high country trim rock pleather now, and I wonder how the new 8 speed transmission compares to the 9 speed in the 21…
The 21 certainly isn’t as nice inside as the Korean cars, but I like it a lot more than my in law’s 19 Highlander that is similarly-spec’ed.
Unless you’re routinely transporting 8 people, definitely get the captains chairs on a car this size. The floor space between the kids is key for road trips, not just to separate them, but because you store all the kid stuff on that floor space, where they can access it but it’s not on the seat and in the way.
These are shockingly expensive to me. I’ve seen Acadia Denalis stickering for $68k. I guess they really consider the $80-100k Tahoe and Yukon their competition?
Personally, I’m comparing it to other CUVs and minivans. If you can deal with a slightly smaller SUV, the Pilot Elite is going for $51k after discounts. Same with an Odyssey if you do need the space.
The 22 mpg Grand Highlander is nearly the same size, and the non-hybrid Platinum model is actually cheaper by a few thousand. Or get the hybrids for $57-60k (or Sienna) and save a few bucks on gas.
The Palisade Calligraphy non-hybrid is going for $55k easy these days. Hybrid is $61k sticker and starting to be discounted. Not sure I’d rank Chevy as a cut above Hyundai for quality.
I do like the idea of Super Cruise, but it wouldn’t get me to spend thousands more than these other options.
Grand Highlander, you’re not going to get without a big markup and big financing. Palisade is also going to have a big markup.
This is exactly what they’re for. Can’t afford a Tahoe or Yukon? Here’s the 7/8ths version for $20k less. GM believes for some reason that nobody cross shops their products with any other brands
If I’m spending $61,290 on a CUV like this, I would expect it to either be a BEV, a hybrid or plug-in hybrid.
Also, I would not get any trim level that has those low-profile tires.
Low profile tires are a great way to make the ride worse, tire replacements more expensive and damaged wheels more likely.
No thanks.
That thing would probably ride better with some smaller wheels/bigger tires. Those things look pretty thin in the side profile and not even in a way that makes it look cool. That trend needs to go away.
200 miles? If I couldn’t walk there is wasn’t happening. If he couldn’t bike there it wasn’t happening for my kid. I was on the “traveling” soccer team in Jr High and I’m pretty sure the longest trip was 45 minutes in the school’s short bus.
If my kid said “I’m on a team and you have to drive me 45 miles to a game” he would 100% get the JK Simmons laughing “you’re serious?” response.
“Travel ball” is the one I grab for my dogs to go for a car ride to the park. I like my version better.
Not only no kids, I don’t even have a dog (allergic). Checkmate, I like my version best.
Probably not the hot take but here goes: This is what happens when kids who got participation trophies became parents and then enable their children in nonsensical ways. Spending every weekend, $$$$ and seat time where everyone is looking at screens to get somewhere to play a game of kids sports is such a waste. $62,000 for a cave of black plastic and a droning 4cyl motor that gets Model T gas mileage is also a waste.
I wish people would cool it with the JUST BUY A MINIVAN stuff. And I say that as someone who owns a minivan. It’s not some kind of moral failing to buy a 3-row crossover or whatever. Buy what you want for whatever dumb reasons you want.
100% this! I have been in some recent minivans and these larger 3 row vehicles. Once you hit the Traverse/Grand Highlander/Atlas size, you can do it all too. And, you likely have one less seat in the car vs a minivan which is actually a plus because it means I don’t have to cart around even more other small neighborhood kids.
Hello! I’m the official JUST BUY A MINIVAN guy. I was made president by the JBAM (we like to call it J-BAM, because that’s fun to say) just this past March. My competition was a guy who was found to be secretly schlepping his family around in a Pilot, and boy oh boy did that tar and feathering from the last meeting look painful. Turns out, tar is really hot and burns! If you change your stance, we’re always recruiting!
In all seriousness, I think the vibes (including from myself) promoting the minivan and discouraging the 3-row SUV is rooted in the frustration that comes from the minivan being an outcast vehicle. Nobody needs to be convinced to buy a 3-row SUV, they’re freaking EVERYWHERE. But the humble van needs weirdos to promote it, at least to a certain extent. I know plenty of people with 3-row SUVs and a number of them give me all sorts of shit, and even weird looks for embracing the practicality of van. At some point, I need to give it back a little.
I would like to come to the next J-BAM meeting, where do I sign up?
Me too!
I have been informed that in the by-laws, much like fight club, you don’t talk about J-BAM. So I too have been tarred and feathered.
For now we meet on every Autopian post that involves a vehicle with 3 rows, every post that involves a truck hauling something that shouldn’t get wet, and every deep dive of the Mazda 5/MPV (so we can bask in their glory).
“Buy what you want for whatever dumb reasons you want.”
… sure… as long as you JUST BUY A MINIVAN!!!!
LOL
If you need a big box for things, this is indeed a big box for things. Beyond that, I’m not sure what the hook is. Brand loyalty. Not-a-minivan. The RS image speaks to you for some unknown reason. Not a very fun way to torch off a bunch of money.
$60K?? I must be taking crazy pills.
I remember the travel ball days – we did that with a FWD Ford Freestyle. I think we paid something around $20k for it new in 2005. Even with inflation, that’s around $33k now. I know there’s more stuff on a base car now than then, but $11k?
$20k in January 2005 is $34,926 today.
A Freestyle is way closer to a Equinox or Blazer, which start at $29k and $34k respectively. So, pretty much what you paid back then.
This is a lot bigger, and far from the base trim $41k price.
I see no valid complaint here.
Neither equinox or blazer have a 3rd row and Freestyle was only about 4″ shorter than the new Traverse. Ultimately the better vehicle for this kind of service would have been the Windstar that we traded in, but it was very tired and needed a head gasket at that point.
I did mine with a 2007 Sienna. I think it was $27k out the door, which is $43k today. We had room for the entire team on sort runs from one field to the other when there was a mix up on which field we were playing on.
Yeah let’s stop normalizing $60k unibodies.
I was browsing Ram Trucks website yesterday and saw that the absolute, bottom of the line Ram Tradesman started at $42k. Ford and Chevy are barely better at $39k and $38k, respectively.
I threw up in my mouth a bit.
The travel ball guys I know are often the anti-EV, anti-minivan guys I know.
I did Travel Soccer. We ALL had minivans. I’ve been keeping up with several of the parents and those that didn’t go bankrupt did end up with hybrids and EVs more than normal.
Only one parent had a pickup. Spent every game bitching about how their son should have put their talent into playing baseball instead of soccer.
SIXTY THOUSAND DOLLARS? A fully loaded new Sienna is in the low $50k range.
Sienna Platinum fully loaded comes out in the low sixties.
The $52k Siena comes spec’d similar to the $60k Traverse RS and the $58 Sienna includes features that bring you to $62k+ on the Traverse. To top it all off, the Sienna gets 12mpg better on the highway making it the better travel ball vehicle.
Cool, but my point was that a fully loaded Sienna is low sixties, correcting the claim that it was low fifties.
You might want to check that. Show me a $52k Sienna that comes with AWD, self driving, cooled seats, auto dimming mirrors, 360 cam, trailer hitch, etc. I recently picked a Sienna over a Traverse, it certainly wasn’t because it compares well on a spec sheet; it largely doesn’t. The Sienna does not look good on a spec sheet. A $50k XSE or $52k Woodlands doesn’t even have memory seats for Christ’s sake and is one of the big reasons why we had to step up to a $54k Limited (plus mandatory accessories and addons). Chevy on the other hand is gonna be super flexible and give you a fat stack of cash on the hood at the same time.
I totally get why people get these, they do have a ton of features, are fairly nice, look pretty sharp (for a 3 row crossover) and readily available without any hassle. Some people would rather have that than deal with crappy Toyota dealers only to be told to wait and then fight to get a tiny discount. You’ll just pay for it in terms of depreciation and additional gas costs; which again is fine if you’re with it enough to know it’s coming.
Yep… For that amount of money, it should be a hybrid or plug-in hybrid at the very least.
Otherwise, people looking at this thing SHOULD JUST BUY A MINIVAN.
lol
“That somewhere else could be 200 hundred miles away,”.
So parents are traveling 20,000 miles on a Saturday for travel ball? That’s commitment.
Two of my nephews play on select teams – some of the stuff they get put through makes 20k mile distances sound downright reasonable.
Put over 20k a year on my minivan back in the day.
I thought having multiple sons playing travel soccer and baseball (yay, year-round!) was challenging enough, but then had a coworker who’s grandson played travel hockey living in one of the Dakotas – good lord, they traveled all over the Midwest just for weekly league games, and to New England for tournaments. My peak 25k miles a year paled in comparison.
Can kids just go back to being kids instead of being micromanaged for their whole life.
Also can GM make a vehicle where an I4 gets better gas mileage than my 20 year old V8 which sits at 22mpg combined in real world driving? Guess not.
No, you must helicopter the shit out of their schedules so you can feel like you’ve given them all the opportunities, temporarily staving off the society-induced parental guilt that says “everything is still not enough”. Temporarily.
Kids need downtime for creativity and they need less time being hovered over by adults so they can learn interpersonal interactions.
Ergo, be a better parent. Don’t buy a Chevy Traverse RS.
This! Unless my kid specifically asks to do things like this, I’m not forcing them to spend almost all of their free time on a sport
I get this rationale, but unfortunately we’ve (the US) designed a world that’s pretty fucking terrible for raising kids. Kids are hardly ever allowed to exist out in the public world (like they used to), which has resulted in a whole lot of pretty inactive children. You want your kids to get exercise? Unfortunately sports (often the only programs available involve some sort of travel) is one of the only ways to ensure that happens. I have two, and I’ll tell you what, it’s not as simple as having a conference call with an entire generation to roll things back to the 80s/90s.
That and you have the problem of sports becoming quickly inaccessible to kids who haven’t been holding a ball/stick/etc. since they were 3.
For the record I think all of it is ridiculous, but this is a “don’t hate the player, hate the game” situation.
I could see that yea, especially if you only have one kid. I have 3 and all they do is chase each other and play. I haven’t had CPS called on me for letting them play outside so crossing my fingers.
When you live in a rural enough place, all ball ends up being travel ball, lol.
And as usual my advice is to just get the fucking van.
Can confirm. I live in Kansas. Not just that, the western, even more rural part. We have to travel for rec stuff even. So jumping up to travel ball is basically the same thing here, but maybe bumped up a slight degree. Our HS conference games can be 3 hours away. Good times.
Yeah I’m no where near that rural, but even the young kids who play sports are frequently traveling an hour to play whatever they’re playing. These aren’t high end clubs.
If you’re not a parent, then the concept of “travel ball” is maybe foreign to you. If you’re not a parent, you can probably stop
You couldn’t have put the entire sentence on the home page so I wouldn’t have to click? Rolling my eyes man. (Joking, I inferred the rest.)
Cautionary tale about travel ball: My 10-year old niece traveled from SoCal to Arizona for a tournament. When another girl tripped her for the second time my niece came up swinging and decked her. She was disqualified from the rest of the tournament and her team didn’t have a replacement so an entire expensive weekend trip for maybe a dozen people was wasted.
Well, shit .gif
Well, maybe not a complete waste. She did learn to stand up to bullies.
Sounds like a reasonable trade-off to me.
The officiating crews in travel ball are “questionable”. If you don’t do travel ball, you know how there is always a ref/umpire that acts like they are God’s Gift to the sport and that they’re talents are being wasted not being at the World Series or World Cup (Soccer) or NBA Finals (Basketball)?
Those pricks are the exact guys that show up to ref travel tournaments many times. There are some excellent ones that love the game and want to see it played well and fair, but there are also those ones that want to make the game about themselves, or want to make sure the local team has a chance or…
Oh, and the officials are not normally the biggest problem. You know the parents that think their kids is the next <fill-in-the-blank> and act like <fill-in-the-blank> ? Take those people, add $20k of expenses and a 2 hour drive with a kid that doesn’t want to play, and put them in the stands with officials that aren’t big league quality.
It’s an “experience”.
I walked out of one of my brother’s fifth grade basketball games because of this. A ref blatantly missed a call (I think he called a shot a 3 when the kid was multiple feet inside the 3 point line), and all the parents on our team lost their minds.
Granted, it was a truly awful call, but it was also a fifth grade basketball game in rural Wisconsin. None of these kids are going pro, and the outcome of this game matters not at all in the grand scheme of things. However, the example you just set for your kids by screaming like a banshee at this ref does matter.
And that’s not even the most embarrassing thing I saw done at one of their games. Don’t get me started on the time their a-hole JV coach decided to run up the score on a team who had just lost two of their best players to a car accident…
My favorite story is about a T ball game. I think it was 10-2 or something and about to be called on the Mercy Rule. I forget who was winning.
There was a kid on 2nd and the father of the Shortstop was still taking it seriously and told his son “Make sure he doesn’t get to 3rd.”
A hit was sent up the 1st base line and all the kids started running around and chasing each other like any good T ball game. The 3rd base coach started yelling at the kid on 2nd to run to 3rd, which the kid started doing.
And that’s when all hell broke loose. As the kid ran past the shortstop (who was standing there picking his nose), the shortstop did what daddy told him to do and tripped the kid running past.
Thie caused the 3rd base coach to absolutely lose his mind. He was screaming about “He Tripped him Ump, He TRIPPED HIM!” and literally crying with tears pouring down his face. As he was hopping around, screaming and crying, he landed wrong on the base and there was an audible POP followed by a lot more screaming and crying, but now with some words that shouldn’t be said (but commonly are) in front of 4-5 year olds on a Tee-ball field.
The game was called while we waited for the ambulance. The ump did give the kid from 2nd credit for getting home, even though he never made it because he was tripped. I can’t remember if the score ended up being 11-2 or 10-3, but regardless, it is all you need to know about youth sports in a nutshell.
Those bases are dangerous. I had a doctor tell me once (while I was getting a sprained ankle evaluated) that the worst ankle injuries come from baseball and softball, not football or basketball like you might think.
Yup. My son was stretching to beat out an infield hit in a preseason game and rolled his ankle on the edge of 1st base, horrible POP! and much screaming until the ambo arrived. The doc said it would have been less damage had the bone broke instead of everything tearing apart. Leg was purple toes to knee and he lost his entire freshman season. Ugh, ‘not a contact sport’ indeed.
Be careful with ankles. I tore up my ankle in the mid 80s playing touch football. The X-rays at the time showed no break, but it never healed fully and was weak.
Then in my 50s, I rolled it again and something felt really bad when it happened (not a normal roll feeling). Ended up, I had actually broken a small bone in my ankle back in the 80s and had been walking around on a broken ankle for decades. If I had gone to an ankle specialist back then, they could have spotted it with a simple test, but since I just saw people in the ER it was missed. Because of this, my ankle needed a LOT of surgery to remove 30 years of scar tissue in it.
The issue is that the ankle has redundancies. Sort of. If a ligament is strained or missing or ripped off the bone, the tendons in your foot can keep it stable and allow you to still walk around…at a price. These tendons pull on places they aren’t designed for and cause cramps, foot problems, and even can break bones in your feet. I lived a normal life for 30 years with a broken bone in my ankle until I couldn’t and then it was a lot to fix it properly.
When I played T ball the league didn’t keep score. They just let us play and try to complete some innings and then we’d get a free Shasta or RC Cola. The parents kept score though and were assholes to each other, so that’s a long held tradition at this point.
It sounds vaguely analogous to “Waiting for Guffman” or “Best of Show”. I’d love the movie version, but Catherine O’Hara is very sadly gone.
Ran my county travel baseball league for about 8 years, it just got so tiring having to police parents and coaches bad behavior. Never really had any significant problems with the kids themselves, always the adults. Tragic, really, since banning parents or coaches inevitably also indirectly affected the kids.
There were basically two types of adults I dealt with: 1) the ones who called me afterwards horrified at their own behavior and super apologetic once they cooled down (so many “I don’t know what came over me, that’s not me and I’ll never do that again”), and 2) ones that were oblivious and blameless, because I hadn’t seen the blatant missed call the ump in Johnny’s 12u game made that warranted the parking lot death threats. And then watching year after year those #2 type parents drag their kids from team to team as they burned through everyone’s good will because Johnny needed to get the right exposure if he is going to get to the right college program (pro hint: they won’t since they will lose interest regardless of their talent because of the shenanigans, and drop out and take up skateboarding instead).
Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for all the many great life lessons and diverse friends my athletic kids got from their sports endeavors (like goal setting, value of hard work, working with others, time management, responsibility, perspective, dealing with disappointment with grace, and learning to not be a jerk via watching Johnny’s parents up close, etc), and all the time it afforded us together, I still treasure. But I wish all the adults would have acted like… adults. More ‘for the love of the game’ and less ‘I coulda been something, so my kid will by God!’ please. SMH.
“huge tracts of land”
https://youtu.be/GPX-mW4l1rU?si=43SiAJWSHt2pQu3V
I had a Holy Grail computer game in the 90s and I can’t remember the context, but there was one point where the game would juts keep saying “Huge tracts of land!” if you hovered or clicked. I think I entertained myself for at least one complete evening with that.
Lol, should have guessed you’d have figured that one out.
No one expects the Arch Duke Maxyenko Monty Python knowledge inquisition!