Nobody likes wasting their time and college coaches are no exception. So when you start to contact college coaches, be sure that you are prepared. If nothing else, what sort of impression do you think you make when the coach has to inform you of basic facts regarding the school or finds out that you aren’t qualified to play on his team?
As you start the college baseball recruiting process, you need to know what you don’t know. And sometimes it feels like you would rather not know than try to make sense of all of the information out there. Not only is there so much information out there, so much seems contradictory. Since the recruiting process will be different for each family, you can’t necessarily make your plans based on what happened to someone else. Sometimes you just need a baseline to start with so that you can make sense of the rest of the information. So before drowning in Google search results, try these resources first.
It would be nice if there was a formula somewhere that high school players could use to calculate their odds of getting an athletic scholarship. All they would have to do is to enter their stats, maybe their high school or club teams, and the formula would tell them their chances and even indicate how much of a scholarship to expect! Wouldn’t that be nice?
Hopefully, the previous post demonstrated that the chances of getting a scholarship to play college baseball aren’t very good. Sometimes I think parents talk about the baseball scholarship as a way to justify the amount of time and money their family is spending on baseball. Claiming that it’s all to pay for college is an easy and obvious excuse.
(In 2023, two resources have disappeared from the list of Helpful Athletic Resumes and Player Profile Templates. Given the number of resources already on the list, I decided to just replace those that have disappeared. If you don’t like any of the samples you see here, you can easily find others on the web.) There are plenty of samples of athletic resumes or player templates on the internet. After all, it seems just about every recruiting website has one posted. It’s just tedious going through all the search results to find something useful. Well, I’ve just saved you the trouble–you can thank me later.
This is a basic introduction to the college recruiting landscape. I’m sure there will be many who will read this and think, “you’ve got to be kidding-how could you not know this?” Yet, you would be surprised at how many families don’t know that D3 schools don’t offer athletic scholarships or that some rules will depend on the college’s conference. Consider this a review of the basic college athletic terms that you need to know to even start the college recruiting process.
So far I’ve covered college recruiting mistakes concerning signs that you don’t understand the college athletic recruiting process and mistakes players and families make about their ability and what it means. Today, I’m going to cover mistakes related to finances when looking for athletic scholarships. If it’s really about using sports to help pay for college, you need to avoid the following college recruiting mistakes:
Many high school players and their families believe that being the best player on their teams is their ticket to playing at the college level. The truth is that star high school athletes are likely to make some assumptions about their ability that will undermine their chances of playing in college. Here are four college recruiting mistakes based on assumptions of talent that you must avoid.
If you spend any time on the internet or reading books on college athletic recruiting, you’ll see lists of common mistakes made by families during the recruiting process. The interesting thing is that there isn’t a lot of variation in the mistakes mentioned, it appears that people are making the same college recruiting mistakes over and over. You have to wonder since there are warnings about them everywhere.
