6 Essential Items Baseball Players Must Have on Their Athletic Profile

There are a variety of ways to format an athletic profile for baseball. And, yes, you want to have an athletic profile, also called a player or baseball profile, you can print out or email to coaches. Having a baseball profile in PDF form is very handy to attached to an email or text to a coach, especially if the college doesn’t have an online recruiting form. Just be sure to compress it as small as possible before sending.

Download the College Recruiting Toolkit NOW!

Baseball profiles are also nice to have when you go on campus visits and meet the coach. Depending on the situation, you can give him a copy during the meeting or mail him a copy as a follow-up. (If you’re trying to figure out which college coaches to contact see The DIY College Rankings Baseball Spreadsheet.)

Ultimately, you’ll want to design your player profile to best present you which means that no two profiles will look alike. In fact, consider your athletic profile a way to introduce yourself in the best light. You can customize your profile to highlight your strengths to make a good first impression. At some point you may have to complete an online questionnaire for schools that includes fields that wouldn’t place you in the top of the pile of candidates.

Think about this for a minute. Completing an online questionnaire allows coaches to search and rank prospects by any of the fields. Are there any fields that might cause you to rank lower than other prospects? By contacting the coach first and sending your custom player profile, you have the opportunity to highlight your abilities and how you can contribute to the team. Taking the initiative will be one of the positives the coach will remember.

For some ideas of what a profile should look like, check out 15 Sample Athletic Resumes and Letters. Regardless of what format you choose, your baseball profile must include the following six elements.

Baseball Player Athletic Profile Elements

1. Graduating Year

College coaches recruit by class year. Your graduating class year should be prominent on your player profile and in close proximity to your name. (I’m assuming that including your name is a given.) Get into the habit of including it on the subject line of any emails you send. It’s just one more thing to help a coach recruit you.

2. Contact Information

This includes your street address, email, and phone number. Coaches use a variety of means of contacting you. Make sure your email isn’t anything that reduces your chances of being recruited. In other words, if your email is [email protected], get another one.

And yes, be prepared to deal with email–not everything will be done via messaging. The fact is that different generations are adopting technology at different paces. And unless you’re confident any coach that really wants you will simply use your preferred way of communicating, you need to be prepared to check your email.

One way to manage the college admissions process is to get a separate email for everything college related. Assuming that your parents are an asset to you in the process, share your email information with them to make sure you don’t miss anything important.

You can easily set up the account so that everything gets forwarded to you and your parents. Better yet, you could actually have emails forwarded to you as a text message. Check out Auto-forward important mail to your phone as a text message and How To Forward Email to your Phone as a Text Message for the information you need to bridge this digital divide.

Yet, coaches are adapting at different rates. In my recent review of college recruiting forms, I found one college that made the cell phone required and the email optional. One even asked for your Skype handle. Remember, the goal is to make it as easy as possible for a coach to contact you.

3. NCAA ID and/or NAIA ID

If you’re aiming for an athletic scholarship, you’ll need to register with the NCAA or NAIA to meet eligibility requirements. You can register as a junior. Including the information on your athletic profile shows the coach that you are aware of the requirements for recruitment. It can also be a way for coaches and organizations to contact you with information about their programs.

4. Player Summary

For baseball the basics are right or left-handed for batting and throwing and the positions you want to be recruited for. Other information can be added as relevant but are not absolutely necessary. This information, like your class year, should be prominent on your athletic profile and close to your name.

Save the more detailed information for the supplemental information page discussed below. Do you really want to change your profile with every stat improvement? And if you don’t, then you’re providing coaches with old information and may not have a chance to correct it.

5. Experience/Team Summary

This is the list of teams that you have played on. Minimally, it should include the year and season, team name, jersey number, and positions played. If possible, the coaches’ email and phone number for every team should be included as well.

However, this isn’t always possible. Sometimes you just don’t have the information and the team wasn’t an essential part of your development as a baseball player. You include it on the athletic profile to show that you were playing during that time.

Then there are the times when it wasn’t a great experience and for whatever reasons, you would really rather not have the coach contacted. Again, you include the basic information to show that you played that summer or fall but you don’t include the coaches’ contact information because you don’t want to encourage the college coach to contact this team’s coach.

6. Academic Information

You need to provide your GPA, class rank, and SAT or ACT scores. Yes, even if the NCAA is on the verge of eliminating testing requirements, schools are still asking. If you don’t have those scores yet, put down the date you’re registered to take the test. And if you are at the point of putting together a player profile, you are at the point of knowing when you will take the test. If your scores are less than stellar to the point of causing problems in recruiting, include the date on which you plan to retake the test.

Baseball players should take the ACT or SAT no later than in the fall of their junior year. (See How to Get Recruited to Play College Baseball: Timelines for a complete timeline of what you should do when.) You don’t want to have to take the test during your season and taking it any later leaves the college coaches with a big question mark until they see your scores. Especially if you are looking at D1 programs, take the tests earlier rather than later.

Another thing to be prepared for is that eight of the ten schools I checked on this year had fields where you can upload your test scores and transcripts. Coaches will expect to see your academic qualifications before seriously recruiting you.

Supplemental Information

This information also will be useful when completing recruiting forms for individual colleges. When I initially wrote this post, I went through the recruiting forms for a week’s top 15 D2 baseball teams and five of the eight teams in the College World Series. This year I’ve done a check on five D2 and D1 Baseball Teams. Based on the requested information, it can be really useful for athletes to create a supplemental information page.

What should go on a supplemental information page? Well, the higher ranked the school, apparently the closer they are to crossing the line from recruiting to stalking players and their families. Some schools are asking for parents’ occupations, Alma Maters, business phone, cell phone, and home phone along with all the social media contacts you can think of. Siblings’ names, ages, and colleges were asked for more than once.

One asked for the high school coach’s home phone, I guess they really don’t get paid enough. Then there are requests for the athlete’s non-athletic honors, hobbies, and religious affiliation (no request for attendance records.) Players should also have a list of all their social media handles available if requested because more coaches are requesting. This is a good place to list all tournaments/camps attended, various measurements such as times for the 60-yard dash, and player statistics such as homeruns and RBIs.

The point I’m trying to make is that this is information that you don’t necessarily need on your player profile but will want handy when you’re completing online recruiting forms. When asking for information from non-family members, try to get as much information as they feel comfortable providing. You don’t want to have to go back and ask again. And remember, most of these fields are not required. So if the coach doesn’t want to give out his home number, players shouldn’t stress out about not providing it in the form.