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.
I’ve already listed four of the nine things that you can do that will improve your chances of playing baseball at the college level in a previous post. These tips aren’t going to make a D2 player into a D1 player. They will give the D2 player a better chance at actually playing college baseball on a D2 team. These are the things you can do off the field that will set you apart from other players. It isn’t just about having the best skills; it’s about making it as easy as possible for coaches to know that you have the skills and choose you over another player.
Here are nine things that you can do that will improve your chances of playing college baseball. These aren’t about improving specific baseball skills, although that may happen. It’s about giving you the edge over another player who has the exact same stats and ability ratings as you do. In other words, these suggestions aren’t going to make a D2 player into a D1 player. It is about making it as easy as possible for a college coach to recruit you from the hundreds of other players that he has to choose from.
So your first question is what would a homeschool mom know about how to get recruited to play college baseball? Simple, it’s like everything else in homeschooling–once our son decided that he wanted to play baseball in college we realized that we would have to figure out the process ourselves. A lot of what we learned can be applied to anyone trying to play college sports but the specifics here will be on baseball.
It seems that weekly, if not daily, you’ll come across another story about how today’s generation has been coddled with self-esteem trophies since their first little league game and have been told that their clay pots are special no matter how lumpy and cracked. This has an especially insidious strain in high school sports that can undermine a player’s chances to get recruited to play college baseball.
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.
(Skip to the end of the post to see the list of all D2 Baseball Schools for 2023) NCAA Division 2 is the smallest for baseball colleges. It has only 265 members compared to 309 for D1 baseball and 390 for D3 baseball. However, unlike D3, D2 baseball schools offer scholarships although not the same amount as D1 schools. D1 schools are limited to 11.7 while D2 have a max of 9. However, an advantage Division 2 baseball colleges have over D1 schools is that they are allowed to have tryouts. What better way to find out where you stand with a coach than by having an actual tryout?
