5 Ways to Get Smart About College Baseball Recruiting

player sliding into base representing ways to get smart about college baseball recruiting

player sliding into base representing ways to get smart about college baseball recruitingAs 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.

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How to Get Recruited to Play College Baseball

player sliding into base representing How to Get Recruited to Play College Baseball

player sliding into base representing how to get recruited to play college baseballSo 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.

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9 Steps to Figure Out Your Chances of Getting a College Athletic Scholarship

Student in front of chalkboard with equations representing how to estimate odds of an athletic scholarship

girl with equation to calculate chances of getting a college athletic scholarshipIt 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?

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3 Reasons Why Your Kid’s Good Grades Won’t Pay for College

apple and black board representing why good grades get academic scholarships to pay for college

apple and chalkboard representing good grades won't get you a great scholarshipMost people know that good grades will get you into college. And maybe if they’re good enough (along with an appropriate essay and the right extracurriculars and recommendations), they might get you into your dream or reach college. But while good grades may get you into your dream college, chances are they won’t pay for it with academic scholarships. This often comes as a surprise to students and their families but it really shouldn’t. There are 3 common situations where students aren’t going to qualify for enough academic scholarships to pay for college.

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Reality Check Part 2: What to do to Play College Baseball

baseball on field representing what you need to do to play college baseball

baseball on field representing actions required to play 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.

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The Complete Scholarship Guide: Everything You Need to Know

head of woman looking at scholarship written on a black board representing what are scholarships

head of woman looking at scholarship written on blackboard representing what are scholarships

Paying college with scholarships isn’t as simple as it sounds.

Let’s start with the definition, scholarships are simply free money for students to spend on their education. This basic definition includes scholarships awarded for pre-schools, dance classes, camps, and, of course, colleges. When you start asking what are scholarships in terms of paying for college, things don’t seem as simple any more. Now you have athletic scholarships, academic scholarships, and other various merit scholarships. And scholarships are just one kind of financial aid available for college so you probably need to have some understanding of how it differs from grants, loans, and work-study.  However, even as you wade through various definitions, essentially a scholarship is free money for students to spend on their education.

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11.7 Reality Check: College Baseball Scholarships

player sliding into base representing college baseball scholarship chances

Baseball player sliding representing 11.7 Baseball ScholarshipsAt the end of my son’s last high school summer baseball season, I was struck by the number of players who had graduated and didn’t know yet where they were going to attend college. I heard a lot of talk from parents about “maybe walking on” to various teams and see what happens. These were good players, the majority better than my son who did know where he was going.

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You Can’t Get Merit Scholarships From a College You Never Apply To

hand blocking bag of money representing not applying to colleges offering merit scholarships

hand rejecting bag of money representing applying to colleges without generous merit scholarships.In a previous post, I defined Expected Family Contribution (EFC), how it works theoretically, and what happens in the real world. For many families, the difference between theory and practice is irrelevant since their EFC (with changes to financial aid, soon to become the Student Aid Index) is much higher than their actual ability to pay. There are steps that you can take to reduce your EFC, and you should definitely do so if you have the opportunity. However, the fact is that you’re likely to do more to cut the cost of college by targeting the right schools for merit scholarships than by trying to rearrange your finances.

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Why Your EFC Should be how you Start Your College Search

playing pieces at start representing using efc to search for colleges

getting started game piecesWhat is EFC? To start your college search, you need to be able to answer this question. If you’re like most parents starting the college search process, you don’t have a clue what EFC means. In fact, most parents don’t understand until they are well into the college application process which is not a good thing.

So what is EFC? EFC stands for “Expected Family Contribution” and is the term used by the Federal Government and colleges to state how much parents are expected to pay for their child’s college education. (EFC is being renamed the “Student Aid Index” for the 24-25 award year but it will still function the same as EFC.)

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