Travel Baseball via Airplane

What to Pack, and Other Tips

Travel baseball can be fun and challenging! For some, travel can mean across town or a couple hours away. For others, it can mean hotels, long road trips, or air travel. I personally preferred the longer road trips, but we did quite a number of air travel tourneys, especially while living on the West Coast.

We lived in OR for about 4 years, and traveled to AZ, CA, and NV on several occasions. When traveling by air, you will need to consider some things that you don’t really think about when you can just load everything in the car, truck, or SUV.

What to Take?

Here’s a quick checklist, and how to pack for the plane . . . Conserving space is a necessity, unless you are not worried about the extra bag fees, and have a large enough rental car for all the bags.

1. Uniforms - need to be in the carry on. You can’t replace a uniform quickly if the checked baggage is delayed or lost. Always start from head to toe to ensure you have everything . . . hats, jerseys, belts, pants, and socks.

2. Shoes - we usually had our player wear turfs for the airport/plane and carry molded cleats. Metal cleats usually have to be checked.

3. Gloves - attached to carry on . . . Again, it’s really hard to break-in a new glove in that short of time. Assuming, you can find one.

4. Bats - checked - We used a catcher’s or duffel for bats and miscellaneous.

5. Chairs . . buy cheap ones at the destination or take a bleacher pad (or blanket)

6. Cooler - we used a grocery cooler bag. We could fold it and check it in the catcher bag. We always carried some ziplocks. Hotel ice in the ziplock and then in the grocery cold bag. Worked pretty well for waters and stuff.

7. Laundry supplies - checked bag - tried to share laundry service with other team members if possible, but I have washed stuff in the bathtub or sink.

8. Don’t forget sun screen . . . has to be checked

9. Umbrellas - in the catcher’s bag

10. Baseball backpack used as carry-on

11. Chargers and battery packs

12. Medication

13. Toiletries

14. Mini first aid kit (bandaids primarily)

I’m sure that you’ll have additions and changes that work for your family . . .

Other Miscellaneous Tips and Thoughts

• I prefer to stay as close to the venue as possible. For us, it was a “business trip.” Baseball was first, and entertainment was secondary. For some tournaments, the fields were a crapshoot, and could be over an hour away. For those, I tried to stay near a high restaurant concentration.

• I preferred to fly in the night before, but sometimes had to fly in that morning. If you typically play deep into tournaments, I tried to book flights the morning after any scheduled games. If we didn’t make it that far, I could try to move my flight up. I didn’t want to get caught trying to move a flight out. For hotels, it’s also easier to leave early than to extend. You usually know far enough in advance to cancel a night without penalty.

• TSA PreCheck is well worth the investment. Especially in the busier airports, like Vegas and LAX.

Hopefully, you’ll find some value in this. I’m sure I’ve missed some items. Feel free to add your tips in the comments. Travel ball for me was a great time, and while exhausting, it was well worth it. I plan to discuss the road trips in another post 🙂.