By Brittany Ghiroli / The Athletic
When Travis Snider was 11 years old, playing in the Little League Western Regional Tournament, he suddenly started hyperventilating. Snider had pitched a perfect first inning and hit a home run. Then, in the second inning, he couldn’t throw a strike. His heart rate shot up, and he started crying. He had to be taken out of the game. At the time, the incident was chalked up to sports-induced asthma.
Only much later would he be able to admit that it had been a panic attack.
Snider had been the best baseball player in the state of Washington since he was nine. He got to the majors on August 29, 2008, just two years after the Toronto Blue Jays made him the 14th overall pick out of Henry M. Jackson High School in Mill Creek. The 20-year-old Snider was the youngest position player in baseball and one of the game’s top prospects, touted as the Blue Jays’ next great hitter. A prodigy, praised by Toronto officials for his “maturity and presence.”
A can’t-miss player.
Until Snider missed. And missed. And missed.
He spent eight years scratching and clawing his way into a big-league lineup, playing more than 115 games in a season just once, in 2014. Snider was demoted to the minors. He lost his confidence. He was traded twice and designated for assignment. By 2016, he was out of the majors for good, playing with his fourth organization, Kansas City. Snider spent six years bouncing around different minor league teams, with a stint in independent ball, before he finally retired in 2022 with a career 3.3 fWAR.
When Snider looks back at his panic attack now, he can see that having the game feel like life or death from a young age was debilitating. That it left him unprepared to handle adversity or failure. And when he became a parent and a coach, he started to see the impact that kind of pressure can have on a young kid.
“You start to question your value as a human being,” said Snider, whose first demotion from the big leagues to Triple-A sent him into a tailspin. “You’re geared from such a young age to know your slash line, and that’s what you’re worth. You’re eight, nine years old and your whole identity is based off of achievements. You’re on the field to not just earn trophies, but to earn love.”
Snider, now a 36-year-old father of three, hopes to dedicate his post-playing career to breaking that cycle. Last spring he launched 3A Athletics, a company focused on fixing the broken culture of youth sports through a curriculum geared at helping parents, coaches, and athletes. Still in its early stages, 3A offers interactive guidebooks for baseball, softball and soccer, with other sports in the works. The company will also have athlete journals available later this month.
Baseball is grappling with unprecedented pitching injury rates trickling down to youth sports, but the rising number of 11 and 12-year-olds who are undergoing Tommy John ligament replacement surgery isn’t the sport’s only concern. A 2024 study by the American Association of Pediatrics found about 70 percent of participants drop out of youth sports by age 13, citing things like burnout and overtraining in addition to injuries.
“We’re so focused on performance, we’ve lost focus on allowing our kids to develop first as human beings, and I was a product of that,” Snider said.
“How we parent our kids in youth sports will have lasting effects on them.”
When Snider first retired, he put a few different jobs together. One of them was a 25-team baseball organization in which Snider served as director of player development starting in the summer of 2022. The kids who attended were 13 years old, practicing until 9:30 p.m on Friday nights, in the dead of winter — baseball’s offseason — in Washington state. It was dark and cold. Some would be crying on the field. Snider would interact with well-intentioned parents trying to keep up with their peers and wonder: How is this helping these kids?
Snider didn’t stay on at the baseball organization. He took a buyout roughly eight months later. He wanted to focus instead on why these toxic cycles start at such a young age, and work on ways to break them.
3A came out of Snider’s relationship with Seth Taylor, a life coach whose clients include professional athletes. Snider started seeing Taylor in 2021 on a recommendation from a friend a few months after Snider’s father, Denne, died. Most of his sessions centered on his unprocessed childhood trauma — having parents who were addicts, being evicted from his home, and how that all affected how he coped when baseball got difficult.
At times growing up, it felt like Snider was living two lives. In one, he was a high school football and baseball star, with great memories of his upbringing. His dad was president of Mill Creek Little League. His mom, Patty, would help sell t-shirts. In the other life, he remembers them both quietly struggling with addictions, going to AA and NA and trying to face their own demons. By the time Snider was a sophomore in high school, his mother had been in a coma due to pneumonia and liver failure brought on by alcoholism. His parents divorced during the two-year recovery. His grandparents, who were like a second set of parents to Snider, both passed away within a three-year span around that time. Snider began to go to anger-management classes.
When Snider came back from his first full season of pro ball in 2007, he still had a lot of anger toward Patty. They got into a fight, and he told her to leave the home he had bought for her. Patty got into a fatal car accident days later. Snider was 19.
“The narrative that I crafted for scouts was that all this (adversity) prepared me to go out and play pro baseball on my own at 18,” Snider said. “I thought I was mentally tough. But I was just suppressing a lot of this stuff. It would come back later (in my career), and I just wasn’t equipped to handle it.”
A few years before Taylor, the life coach, started seeing Snider, he worked with former Major League Soccer player Pat Ianni on several books aimed at changing the culture of youth soccer, released in 2018. While Ianni was passionate about the subject, only one team actually brought in the books, and he grew frustrated, eventually abandoning the effort. The books sat dormant for years on Amazon.
About a year into Snider’s sessions, Taylor mentioned the soccer books in passing. A few months later, Snider barged into his office and asked, “What are you doing with this now?” Taylor shrugged. “Nothing,” he said. So Snider bought out Ianni and started rebranding the soccer workbook for baseball. It became the book “Hero.”
“Travis sees it as a life mission,” said Taylor, who is now 3A’s Director of Content. “His career was a complete and total failure. He should have made millions and millions of dollars, but he didn’t, because of trauma. And he’s the perfect advocate for this because of that.”
Snider spoke on a panel for the MLB Players’ Alumni Association two years ago, and knows identity issues are common for guys whose days in pro ball are over. When he thought about these toxic cycles and how to best break them, it was a no-brainer to start with youth sports. That’s where the foundation is laid.
“We’ve gotten so intense with the younger age competition and wanting our kids to keep up with the development curve that we’ve lost track of how to parent our kids,” Snider said.
“I had a lot of friends I grew up with who were very talented and had dads or moms who were on them all the time, coaching them instead of parenting them. Most of them never even sniffed their potential. I have a few other buddies who OD’ed and died from drugs within a few years of graduating and playing college sports. It’s sad. You’re trying to figure out, ‘Who am I and what is my value outside of sports?’”
Both Snider and Taylor believe the best way to fix the culture is to target the two central figures in a young athlete’s life: parents and coaches.
Snider watched a coach recently adjust his son’s batting stance in-game and thought: I was an MLB player, I know how to teach my son to hit! He had to bite his tongue and remind himself: These kids are seven years old.
“From zero to nine, that’s a fragile time for identity,” Snider said. “It’s difficult to understand how sensitive our kids are at that age and how quickly we can shut them down. We want to help parents who are feeling that pressure understand that. We don’t have to throw our kids in organized sports at age 3. Take them to the park and play. Save yourself the money.”
Taylor has spent his life trying to help people change themselves. But changing a culture?
“It’s an enormous barrier,” Taylor said. “We are so resistant to change.”
A few months ago, Snider ran into an assistant general manager who still had Snider’s draft scouting report: He was seen as an impressive 80-plus makeup guy. When he was promoted to the Blue Jays, Snider was hailed as mature beyond his years. For years, he fought the label of being the total prospect package until he was saddled with a more unsavory one: bust.
Snider wonders now about the kids who play in the Little League World Series, who carry that label at the age of 12 and 13, many never sniffing a higher level.
When he dreams big, Snider thinks about 3A partnering with larger youth sports organizations. Snider hired a Chief Strategic Officer for 3A in January: Michael Nealy, a father of four whose eldest son, Colby, played four years in the Dodgers’ minor league system. Nearly all of the podcasts have been recorded. Snider envisions a small monthly subscription for additional resources down the road, and football, basketball and golf workbooks are coming soon.
“What’s exciting for me is to get kids, parents and coaches to understand what this is all about,” said Snider, “so we can have healthier, happier athletes, who have easier transitions than me and the people I played with.”
In August 2022, Snider was diagnosed with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He’s not shy about admitting he’s a work in progress, as a parent, as a husband, as a person. Snider is still a regular participant in therapy. But he has made peace with his career.
He now sees his struggles in the majors as a vessel to bring awareness to parents that even if your kid gets to the big-leagues or becomes a first-round pick, they can still be broken. Problems don’t disappear when you debut.
“Do we want to keep putting the idea of achievement on a pedestal without focusing on the life skills of how you act on the field and manage relationships and stress? I overlooked it,” Snider said. “You are chasing the carrot of making X amount of dollars and making an All-Star Game. I want my kids to learn to regulate their emotions and I don’t care what they want to do, as long as they know that’s not who they are.
“And if we can get more people to really understand and work on that, then we can really start to turn things around.”
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