Once again honesty is the best policy. When coaches ask what other schools are recruiting you, just name the schools. There are actually two ways to be dishonest in answering the question. The first is to not tell which schools are recruiting you and the second is to lie about which ones are. Understanding why you shouldn’t do the former explains why some are tempted to do the latter.
Athletics
Why Athletic Prospects need the Financial Aid Pre-Read
One third of colleges do not offer athletic scholarships. At institutions that do offer scholarships, most sports are equivalency sports meaning that athletes are likely to receive only partial scholarships. This means that the availability of non-athletic financial aid is an important consideration for most college athletes.
How to Find Student-Athlete Graduation Rates
The NCAA has a public service announcement stating that most of their athletes go pro in something other than sports. They actually provide a table with the probability of competing beyond high school and the percentage who actually make it to the professional level. Given this information, any sensible athlete should pay serious attention to the student part of “student-athletes.”
One thing prospective student-athletes should take a look at is the graduation rate for the schools they’re interested in and compare the graduation rate for their sport. It’s not hard to do.
Reality Check Part 2: Playing College Baseball
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.
What is a walk-on player in college sports?
College athletes without a scholarship that play on a team that offers scholarships are generally referred to as “walk-ons.” There are two types of walk-on players, the preferred walk-on or sometimes called recruited or invited, and just plain walk-ons. If you’re going to be a walk-on, “preferred” is definitely the way to go.
Can College Athletes Receive both Athletic and Academic Scholarships?
You would think this would be an easy question to answer. And it is for NCAA D3 schools since they aren’t allowed to offer any athletic scholarships so the answer is no. As for D1 or D2 schools, if you just stop and think about it a little, you would begin to realize that there’s no way it could possibly have a simple answer.
Baseball Camps and Prospect Showcases
This post has been updated. I’ve added some camps, updated links, and removed some that don’t seem to exist anymore. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. (I list specific camps by date below.)
If at all possible, you want the coaches from the college you are interested in to see you play. This is a qualified statement since some colleges will recruit players strictly off video. (In the time of COVID, a lot more coaches are recruiting off of video.) These tend to be smaller colleges or schools without any recruiting budget. Of course, all coaches would prefer to see you play and baseball camps can be a very effective way to get in front of several college coaches in a very short period of time.
3 Types of Players that Don’t get Recruited by Colleges
There are a lot of athletes and their families that are expecting to play their sport in college. And far too many of them are actually counting on an athletic scholarship as part of their plan to pay for college. Yet, the truth is that most of these players won’t be recruited to play in college, much less get a scholarship. If you’re one of the following types of players, chances are you won’t be playing in college.
8 Ways Showcase Camps Can Be a Waste of Money
Remember when camps were something you did for a week or two in the summer or maybe over a weekend with a scouting troop? High schoolers didn’t go to camps, they worked at them to save up money for college. Not anymore. At least not for high school athletes interested in playing at the college level.
Showcase camps are a convenient, although increasingly expensive, way to get recruited. Given that most college athletes don’t receive scholarships, it can be hard to see the ROI on attending showcase camps. It’s not that showcase camps are automatically a waste of money. But they’re certain to be if you make the following mistakes.