What’s Important to College Baseball Coaches

So why is a college baseball coach more likely to lose interest in a high school prospect, showing poor attitude at a game where the coach is watching or a poor high school season? If you said poor high school season, you’re wrong. Which would have a greater negative effect on the recruiting coach, seeing a game where the player had a poor performance or low grades? Obviously poor performance, right? Wrong. It’s low grades.

The people at College Baseball Profiles know this because they asked the college coaches. You can download a free copy of their survey results at their website.

Back to the original questions. If you think about it, the answers make sense. This goes back to something I’ve repeatedly talked about in this blog, coaches have no problem finding people who want to baseball for them. Therefore, non-baseball factors are important in the college baseball recruiting process. Stuff like attitude, grades, and test scores.

The coaches’ answers are actually pretty reassuring. High school players don’t have to obsess over a poor game. It ranked last in factors most likely to cause a coach to lose interest in a player. After all, coaches understand that overall performance isn’t measured by just one outing. They would be foolish to recruit just on the strength of performance at just one game. There are just too many variables that can affect one game.

But attitude is different. That’s something that is completely under a player’s control at all times. So it’s no surprise that poor attitude at just one game can make a difference. It isn’t as if he can’t find another player just as good as you with a better attitude.

This same principle applies to test scores and grades. In fact, according to College Baseball Profiles, “low grades continues to move up each year and almost overtook ‘poor attitude’ as the number one reason. It certainly was number one with D1 coaches.” Again, this makes sense since these are things where the player doesn’t have to rely on other players for his performance. He has plenty of time to recover from a poor test performance and it’s not like the SAT dates just randomly appear.

Ultimately, the college coaches are going to hold you more accountable for the things that you have control over rather than the randomness of baseball that makes 300 an impressive batting average. High school players have a lot more control over their chances of playing college baseball than they realize.