Joe Favorito welcomes Travis Snider, former MLB outfielder and co-founder of 3A Athletics, to discuss his 15-year professional baseball career, the mental and emotional challenges that followed, and the youth sports crisis he is now working to address. Snider traces his path from being a first-round draft pick to the Toronto Blue Jays and making his MLB debut at 20, through years of ups and downs across multiple organizations, to the identity crisis he faced at the end of his playing career. He shares how working with executive life coach Seth Taylor helped him understand how childhood experiences shaped him as a player, husband, and father, and how that led to the founding of 3A Athletics, a platform offering parent education courses and coach certifications designed to bring mental and emotional awareness back to youth sports. The conversation covers the $40 billion youth sports industry and why Snider believes the professionalization of children’s athletics is robbing kids of joy, creating burnout, and building identities too fragile to survive failure.

Connect with Travis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/travis-snider23/

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The CUSP Show is hosted by Joe Favorito (@Joefav) and Tom Richardson (@ConvergenceTR) and produced by Sam Henry (@s_henry11), LJ Holmgren (@LJ_Holmgren), and Danny Hagenlocher (@DhColumbiaSPS), with social media efforts led by Lissa Ruiz and Sydney Cristall.

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