Interesting article and know it was discussed somewhere around here just can't find the thread (maybe in an obscure Conference Realignment thread.
http://touch.courant.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-78120678/
Full disclosure: I am a high school coach who has 37 seasons between football, basketball, and track & field. I am certainly biased when it comes to travel/premiere teams....in general, my comments represent my opinion of what I have observed the MAJORITY of the time, not 100% of the time. Having coached 2 sports that represent the largest teams (football and t&f), I have worked with around 1,000 athletes from the full spectrum: boys and girls; winless freshmen teams; undefeated varsity teams, multiple pro athletes, etc....the whole range of kids. My perspective is ultimately just my OPINION, but it does come with quite a bit of experience in this area.
I am a fan of kids playing sports & doing active things year-round, but I am NOT a fan of them
specializing in a sport year-round. From my experience, travel/premiere teams foster a sense of selfishness & delusion (in the kids themselves, but mostly in the parents who pay for their kids to be on these teams). Most of these leagues do not contain the talent pool that high school sports possess-that makes sense since these teams are very expensive to join in general. These teams give kids/parents a false sense of their abilities (I can't tell you how many girl soccer and hoop players I have coached in Track & Field whose parents are astounded that their little girl who scores all the time on their "travel" team just doesn't seem to have the same level of success on the high school team...."stupid high school coach doesn't know what he/she is doing....").
Having fewer practice sessions and just traveling from weekend tournament to weekend tournament skews the view of what it takes to be successful: less emphasis is placed on focused daily practices and the "grind" and more focus on traveling to cool locales for tournaments where the gear/swag the kids "earn" gets the same focus as the actual games. Many of these leagues are a complete joke and need to consolidate if they want to have some level of legitimacy: some of the leagues don't even have enough kids on a weekly basis to field teams so they end up "borrowing" players from the other team! When all kids do is play in tournaments, the focus is on winning the game right in front of you, rather than long-term skill development (I can get "just" high school kids to work on their off-hand in hoop in practice, but it is almost impossible to get the kid who plays on a travel team to work on their off-hand).
Games often lose their value because that is all the travel teams do-they don't learn to appreciate games the same way as "just" high school kids because the ratio of practice time to game time is
flipped from the way it should be IMHO. Since these travel teams don't place a premium on the value of practice, many of these same athletes avoid the "real" work of a weight room in favor of playing in these diluted weekend tournaments instead of joining their high school teammates in putting in some sweat equity.
Many wonderful kids and well-intentioned parents get involved in these leagues and have great experiences. Some of these travel coaches are very talented and have the kids best interest at heart....However, a (t00) large percentage of these coaches (relative to my experience with high school coaches) sacrifice development for just trying to win the immediate game that weekend, and many of them pressure kids to drop all other activities to be 'all in' for their one team. There is a high percentage of players and parents that I would classify as "selfish" in terms of sports where they are just obsessed with stats and their kid "getting theirs" as opposed to contributing in a meaningful way to the success of their town/school teams. Many of these families have delusions of grandeur that these leagues are the ticket to getting their kid a scholarship.
As one of the coaches mentioned in the article you linked-if you can play, colleges will find you. Kids who play on travel teams get plenty of schollies. From my experience, they didn't get these schollies BECAUSE of their travel teams, however. They would have gotten them anyway.
I have seen it over and over-kids who are willing to leave their town friends/teammates behind to join these travel teams tend to be more selfish than kids who either play exclusively on their high school team or limit their "travel" play to the summer and/or only do it for perhaps 1 season when they aren't playing on their HS team.