Video footage as an effective recruiting tool

As I mentioned previously, the one recruiting site we used was www.be.recruited.com.  One of the benefits of this site was it allowed us to upload video and provided a specific URL I could include in our emails to various coaches and they could view all the videos I had uploaded to the site.  

Video was key in getting coaches a chance to see my son in action. All of the schools we targeted were out of state and so the only way they could see my son skills were through video. Here is the link to the videos of my son on his Berecruited.com profile  http://video.berecruited.com/videos/athletes/612206

 In creating video I followed these guidelines:

1. Keep each video short 2 to 3 minutes max.

2. avoid adding background music and a bunch of visual effects.

3. When making a highlight video of game footage, try to edit out unnecessary footage. example if you are capturing 3 at bat from a single game. Edit the tape to capture the hit and maybe a few other pitches in the at bat the demonstrate pitch selection.

4. Keep each video specific to one area of your son's game. don't mix live at bat with pitching and/or defense in the same video.

5. include some video of drills. batting drills, defense, pitching. Again keep each video specific to a particular position.

If you end up not using a recruiting site; you can upload videos to youtube or attach videos in emails and send them directly to the coaches.  However, on the occasions in which I emailed video directly to the coaches it was always after I had already communicated with the coach. in most cases we had sent out an initial email expressing our interest in the school and gave a brief background of my son. If the coach responded, I sent a reply asking if he'd like to some video. We would send 2 or 3 short video files and as part of  the email, we'd ask if he would like us to send more video as the season progressed.  A good piece of advice is not send video to frequently. Maybe 2 more times over the season and maybe once or twice over the summer.  The emailing of video in this fashion also gives you a good gauge on interest. The coaches that had the most interest in my son would reply back after they took a look at the video and provide feedback or at the very least ask how his season was going and to stay in touch,

If you are casting wide net in your college search as we did; the effective use of video is essential.  When I started taking video, I had no experience on editing. I started with the Windows movie maker software on my PC. Through trial and error I became proficient enough to where I could take an hour of footage and edit it down to 2 to 3 minutes of good footage. Again, like everything else in the recruiting process it takes time.

Please take look at the URL I provided and take a look at footage I had put together.

Thanks

Creating a plan. Where to start?

Where to start?  That is the big question.  I began with trying to honestly evaluate my son’s talent and where he projected.  I was fortunate enough to coach little league all-stars and travel ball as my son grew up. Living in Arizona where youth baseball is very competitive, I had an idea early on that my son was very good player but physically and athletically lacking. As he got into high school, I followed a lot of players and watched what opportunities they had. I tried to honestly analyze how he would project. During his sophomore year I started looking at where local seniors were ending up. I went to college games at various levels and looking at how the teams were made up. I could definitely see the size and skills difference at the various levels. Keep in mind that we never attended a showcase, so all of this work was necessary.  As I mentioned before, I am not against attending a showcase. If I had to do it again I would have my son attend one between his sophomore and junior year.  If you want to research what showcase is right for you, I suggest visiting www.hsbaseballweb.com on the message board there is a section on showcases. It is the best resource I have seen in getting advice on showcases.

Once you have a good idea of what your son’s skill level is you can start planning your recruiting strategy.  Let’s start with potential schools. First thing I recommend is creating a list of thing s that are most important to you and your son.

Our list looked a lot like this and is ranked in order:

1.     Academic fit. Does the school have programs that my son is interested in.

2.     Would my son stay at the school if he wasn’t playing baseball

3.     Size of school. My son was more interested in attending a smaller school

4.     Coaching staff. Do they seem to be the right fit for my son?

5.     Playing time.  Will he have an opportunity to play or will he more than likely sit on the bench for 4 years. We never considered the potential to go pro in our search for the right fit.

6.     Cost

7.     Distance

As you see baseball doesn’t even come in play until number 4.  I truly believe you have to find a school that is the right fit if he stopped playing. As far as baseball our priorities were about the coaching staff and playing time. We weren’t concerned about the prestige of being a D1 player. I am pretty sure if you talk to a player who went to D1 and sat on the bench for 4 years, he probably would have went to a smaller school where he had the opportunity to play.  Cost was low on our list as I knew the academics would take care of a good portion of the costs. Low on our list was distance. I made sure my son was willing to go almost anywhere to play and it help as we were able to cast a wider net. In the end the kid from the Phoenix metro area ended up in a small town in eastern Nebraska.

In summary the best place to start is to evaluate your son’s talents. Be as honest as you can and try and be conservative. If he turns out to better than you thought, it will be recognized when you start communicating with coaches.

Spent a lot of time talking with your son about what you both are looking for in a college and prioritize. You can waste a lot of time if you aren’t honest with your priorities.

Question 5 How do I get the financial aid required to make this happen?

This is the question that as a parent I stressed about the most.  For the purpose of this post, I am going to exclude discussing athletic scholarship money. I approached the question of financial aid without taking athletic money into consideration and I really feel it served us well. My goal was to find as much aid as possible and have the athletic money be icing on the cake.

My approach was to look at three different types of aid; federal loans/grants,  scholarship money from the colleges, and outside scholarships.

First I'll share my experiences with federal loans/grants.  I would recommend starting at www.studentaid.ed.gov which is the government website that talks about to complete FAFSA, Pell grants, and student loans programs. If you go the tools and resources link there is link called FAFSA4caster. This allows you to fill out some basic information long before the actual FAFSA is completed to give you an idea as to what type of aid you qualify for.  In our case we found out that our income exceeded the limit to be Pell grant eligible. I anticipated that would be the case. However, as I will explain later the not being Pell grant eligible eliminated the ability to apply for some scholarships.

One more thought on federal aid. My son intends on becoming a teacher. As a result he qualified for an additional grant and may quality for a student loan forgiveness program.  If you son has an idea as to what he wants to major in, it would be good idea to do some research to see if there any government programs offer grants or student loan forgiveness programs.

 Scholarship money from the school was the biggest form of aid we received.  Once you start looking at schools, pay special attention to the scholarships the school offers.  In almost all cases visiting the school's website is the best place to go. In most cases they have link for prospective students.  Some schools give detail with scholarship award levels and what is needed to qualify and maintain the scholarship.  They all are based on GPA, ACT/SAT test scores and class rank. Many of the higher award amounts can include an interview process as well. I will share information about college entrance tests in a future post. Most schools offer additional money based on religious affiliation, parent's education level, specific area of study, and other criteria.  In fact some of the schools we visited offered small grants if visited the campus before a certain date. examples were 500/yr, and one even had a 2000/yr. scholarship if we were an out of state resident who visited the campus before march of my son's senior year.

The last area I want to discuss is outside scholarship money. This is where the work comes in. We completed about 100-150 scholarship applications.  We ended up receiving 3 outside scholarship totaling 2500/yr. A good place to start is your employer. In my case My employer had a scholarship program for children of employees that ranged from 1000-5000/yr. for 4 years. Another good lead is checking with your high school counselor. I made sure I began communicating with the high school counselor at the end of my son's sophomore year. I was very persistent in asking for any updates on scholarships and deadlines. My advice is to reach out to the counselor frequently now later than the beginning of your son's junior year. There are bunch of websites that allow you to search scholarships and links to apply.  Some are better than others. One tip I recommend is creating an email address as I learned quickly that my inbox received a lot of spam regarding scholarship opportunities.  Once I established an email account that I only provided to these websites, I was more likely to go take some time and go through the emails.  I will speak more in this when I get to organizing developing a plan.

Going through the process, I learned that this was more work than I anticipated. I spent 10-20 hours a week searching for money to pay for college. It was also a chore getting my son to write essays and complete scholarship applications.  We ended up with 6500/yr for 4 years. So it was definitely worth the effort.

My next post will discuss NCAA and NAIA entrance requirements that will also touch on college entrance exam tips.

Thanks for reading and your feedback is always appreciated.

Question 4 Is your son doing what he needs to do in the classroom and on the field to maximize his opportunities?

Question four is really the temperature gauge in the whole process. If you are just beginning the process you will see that it will take more effort from both you and your son than you probably anticipated.

During the recruiting process there are two things your son can absolutely control. The first one is making progress from a baseball standpoint. What I mean is that a player can control the effort he is putting into practice, games, training, eating habits, etc. It is important for the athlete to maximize the results through maximum effort. In my son's case, he wasn't very committed to nutrition and working out to get stronger and faster. He was however a cage rat and was always staying after practice working on his game. His labrum injury was a blessing in that he had to rehab hard and focus on his overall nutrition. He now spends significant time in the gym and it has shown with 15-20 lbs of solid weight since August. My advice to high school players is not to wait for an injury to happen before you take nutrition and working out seriously.

The second thing is academics. I am ABSOLUTELY sure that if my son didn't have a strong academic record he wouldn't be on a college roster today.  I want to share my son's academic accomplishments, not to brag, but to show you how it benefited him and helped get him to where he is today.

My son attends a small liberal arts school in the mid-west. The yearly cost is just over $31,000 which includes tuition, room, meal plan, and books.  Here is a breakdown of what he receives in aid:

Academic scholarship    $9000/yr

Baseball scholarship       $2500/yr

Misc. scholarships          $2500/yr

Academic Grant             $4000/yr

TOTAL                         $18,000/yr

He is also getting $5500 this year from student loans. He is majoring in Math and Physics and wants to teach. If he decides to do this there is potential that he could quality for a federal student loan forgiveness program. Currently our yearly out of pocket expenses are about $7500/ year. Less if you factor in the federal tax credit.

As you see, the baseball scholarship was a very small part of the scholarship package. In the case of another freshman at the school my son attends, that player received a total package less than what my son received but almost 80% was baseball money. In most cases when it comes to offers they look at the combined amount of all scholarship monies.

You may be asking then why is the academic achievement of my son so important if they end up getting close to the same money.

Let me use NAIA guideline as an example.  For baseball the NAIA has a 12 "full scholarship" limit that includes all "countable aid". Countable aid is defined as ANY and ALL aid that is institutionally controlled. 

Also under NAIA guidelines there is an academic exemption and it reads as follows:

Academically gifted students will be exempted from the aid counted by use of the following criteria.
1. Aid to continuing students with a 3.60 cumulative GPA or top 10% of class will not count against the limits.
2. Only one-half of the aid to continuing students with a 3.30 - 3.59 cumulative GPA or upper 11%-25% class ranking will count
against the limits.
3. Aid to entering freshmen will be exempted upon achievement of minimum SAT/ACT scores (1050/23=half exemption,
1200/27=full exemption) or cumulative high school GPA (3.50-3.74=half exemption, 3.75-4.0=full exemption) or high school
class rank (top 11%-25%=half exemption, top 10%=full exemption).

As you see a recruit with high test scores, GPA and class rank would get an exemption from the 12 scholarship limit.  Put yourself in the shoes of a college coach. If you came across a decent player that shows some potential, plus he has a very good academic record. Would you be more likely to recruit that player knowing he isn't going to count against your 12 scholarship limit???

In my son's case he had a high school GPA of 3.78, scored 28 on his ACT and was ranked 8th in his class. He was also part of student government, NHS, and some other clubs.  All of these activities really helped with getting some outside scholarship money from local community organizations.

Question 3 What is my financial budget to help him get the exposure needed?

In many ways my son had the easy job. All he had to do was work hard in the classroom and on the field. My job was to figure out which summer/fall team was the best fit, and which, if any showcases to attend and how many events to attend.  I had to figure out if any of the recruiting services had value.  Aside from being honest with myself as far as my son's talent; the hardest thing was figuring out how I was going to pay all the potential costs associated. Unless your son is a top 500 prospect it is going to cost you some money to get your son the exposure he needs. And if you haven't gone through the process there are plenty of people that will line up and try and take your money.  I want to talk about three main areas of this process; showcases, recruiting services, and summer/fall teams. Keep in mind that as I am sharing my opinion, I am doing so from the perspective of a parent with a son that was a slightly above average high school player that attended a small rural high school.

There are plenty of recruiting services that claim to have contacts with college baseball programs. They have an option to set up a personal profile to upload stats and videos. Some even offer to do an evaluation of your son and they all claim to be able to market your son in a way that will assure him scholarship offers. I've seen some of these services cost as much at $1500-$2000.  From my experience the best site is www.berecruited.com.  I suggest spending the $60.00 for the premium service.  Basically what this site does is allow you to create a profil,e upload video, stats, high school and summer/fall team coaches contact info. You can search their database and get some basic information on all of the colleges at all of the levels. There is a feature to invite coaches from specific colleges to view your profile and it has a tracking feature to see who, when and how often your profile was viewed. There are some other site similar to this, but from my research this one is the best.  I will cover how I used the site along with other methods in future posts.

The next issue we faced was whether to attend a showcase and which one. I can not stress enough to be careful with the showcases. The spring of my son's sophomore year he received a letter stating he could be the next Under Armour All-American and to be considered all we had to do was attend a showcase and if he was selected he would move to a regional showcase. As I recall each showcase had a cost of over $400.  Now as a sophomore my son batted .285 batting in the 8 hole on his JV team. I asked myself how does Under Armour know anything about my son? The simple answer is they didn't. From the research I have done there are so many showcases that are just money makers trying to take advantage of the dream of playing college baseball.

There are, however, some very reputable showcases that will give honest evaluations. PerfectGame is one of the top showcases and from what I heard their evaluations are reliable.  Having said that I chose not to have my son attend any of these events. I considered it between my son's sophomore and junior year which is probably the ideal time to attend.  The reason I chose not to have my son attend the PerfectGame or any showcase was that I was afraid of the rating.  At that time my son was 5'5" tall and weighed 135 lbs. He had below average speed, his arm strength for a catcher was average at best. He was a good contact hitter but had very little power. In my opinion he would have probably not rated very well and I wanted to protect him from the negative feedback. After his Junior year, he was 5'11' and 180 lbs. He had above average arm strength and stated to develop some power. However, by that time we already had some strong interest from a number of D3 and NAIA schools. We dedicated our financial resources to visiting these colleges rather then spending money on showcases that probably wouldn't have given him any better opportunities.  I also want to mention two other showcases that I have seen nothing but positive feedback on. They are the Stanford University camp and the HeadFirst showcases. They are very well attended by smaller colleges that have a strong emphasis on academics.  

The issue is fall/summer teams. Again, you have to do your homework. In Arizona the scout teams seem to be the big attraction and they typically attract the top talent. There are some other teams that get Div.1 type of players. In our case we attended some of those tryouts and were offered spots on some of the lower level teams within the various programs. In some cases we were asked to pay $1250- $1500 to be on a team of 20-30 players to play for 2 or 3 months. In our case that was not in the budget and if it was I didn't see the value in that he was probably going to play only 1/2 the time.  I did have my son attend as many of these tryouts as we could. In most cases they didn't cost anything and you usually get 1-2 days of tryouts with very good players. It was a lost cost opportunity to get in some good practice. 

My son did play fall/summer ball.  In the fall we found a team that had a good coach, the team only had 12-15 players. We didn't play in any of the big tournaments. But we played may of the high profile teams in scrimmages and played in leagues made up of players from their high schools. The cost was $100-$150 per month. My son was able to play significant innings against very good high school talent. In the summer he played on a team made up of kids from his high school and 2 neighboring schools. One year they played American Legion, which is not very strong in Arizona. The next year the team played in a Connie Mack league against some of the  top summer teams. In both cases the team wasn't very good and lost most of the games. However, my son often faced top pitching and, after all, summer/fall is about getting better and he definitely did that.

One last thought on baseball showcases, recruiting services, and fall/summer teams There is a website called www.hsbaseballweb.com. The message board is second to none!  It is a national message board and there are thousands of people that have shared their experiences. I learned so much from that site and it is 100% free.

In my next blog I will discus question 4. Get ready for a discussion on the most important thing, ACADEMICS!!!!

Question 2 Is your son willing to go anywhere to keep playing?

Is your son willing to go anywhere to keep playing? This is also a very important question as to how serious you and your son are about playing college baseball.  It also opens up a significant number of opportunities with over 1600 colleges that have baseball programs. This includes NCAA div. 1,2,3,  NAIA, and NJCAA.

I revert back to our situation. Being an Arizona high school baseball player, there are limitations as to the choices of 4-year in state colleges that have a baseball program. In fact, in Arizona there are only four 4-year colleges that have baseball programs. Arizona State and University of Arizona at the D1 level, Grand Canyon at the D2 level and Arizona Christian at the NAIA level. The JUCO programs are strong in numbers and level of play. But, our focus was on a good academic 4-year school. Like in many areas the JUCOS in Arizona are very competitive. I've heard of 70-80 kids showing up in fall hoping to make the summer roster. You also see mid term transfers from D1s show up on a JUCO campus in January.  

In our case, my son knew he wanted to play college baseball. We were honest with ourselves on his level of talent. He wasn't going to be drafted out of high school and he wasn't going to a top D1 school.  Once I knew he wanted to go a 4-year school and that it could be potentially anywhere in the US if it was the right fit, all of sudden this looked like an attainable goal.

We targeted the Midwest because my wife had family there and if we were sending junior off to college we wanted some support system in place. I also looked at the number of colleges that played baseball compared to the overall population. I will use the state of Nebraska for example. There are 13 four year colleges that have baseball programs at various levels. If you consider the  small population of the state as a whole, along with the fact that most high schools outside of the Lincoln and Omaha area don't even play high school baseball, it seemed like a good place to start.

If your answer to this question is a 100% yes, you have a significant number of opportunities. The next step is to identify your geographic limitations, while keeping in mind the wider net you cast the more choices you will have.

If the answer to this question is NO. Then you really need to consider what your limitations are and look how your son's academic and athletic ability fit within those limitations. The answer may be that your son will not likely being playing after high school.

Again thanks for reading!!! I will post my next blog about my question #3.

QUESTION 1 DOES MY SON TRULY WANT TO KEEP PLAYING AFTER HIGH SCHOOL?

As I mentioned, I tried to base our entire college search and recruiting efforts on these five questions.

I also mentioned that I began this crusade after my son's freshman year. I think some may ask why did I start this early when I stated in a previous post that he was undersized and probably just an average player.  The answer is that the kid still had the passion for the game. The love he had when he started at 8, many kids lose when they hit those teenage years. This leads me to Question 1.

Question 1: Does my son truly want to keep playing after high school?  That answer was 100% yes!!! When he was in Jr. High he had a dream of playing at Stanford. I knew as a freshman that the chances of him playing at Stanford were not likely. But, I also knew that if I kept that dream alive to a certain extent, it would motivate him to take the right classes academically and try to meet the academic requirements of Stanford. In the long run that meant more financial aid.

Academics are probably the MOST important thing for a player who wants to play college baseball. My son ended up with a 3.8 GPA taking mostly AP and honors classes. He ended up with a 28 on his ACT. He was part of student council, National Honor Society, and an engineering club. Without these academic accomplishments, I am not sure he would have gotten the opportunities he had available when it came time to look at potential schools.

From a college baseball coach's perspective, the rigorous academic load along with some other extracurricular activities while being a high school athlete says a lot about a players ability to handle the schedule of a college baseball player.  The coaches that ended up recruiting my son seriously, said that the one thing they were impressed the most about was his workload in high school and that they felt he would transition into college life rather easily. They often said they know they can coach a kid up and get the best out of them on the field.  The big question in  recruiting a player is how will they handle the academics and college work load. Things a baseball coach might not be as involved in on a daily basis.

You may be reading this and thinking my son isn't quite achieving at a high level academically or taking multiple honors and AP classes.  I'd say you need to get a plan together regarding academics. Have a clear understanding of college requirements and what academic aid is available.  I will go into more detail on this topic in future blogs.

This question is important to continually ask and analyze where you player and family are throughout this process.  Aside from academics, is your player doing the things he needs to do on the field. Is he eating relatively healthy for a teenage boy? Is he working out? Is he doing things to improve his game?   

Playing college baseball at any level takes dedication. The level of dedication I think most college freshman aren't prepared for. In talking with my son over the past few months, I hear the fatigue in his voice almost every time I speak with him.  His daily schedule often includes 5:30 or 6:00 am workouts in the gym, classes start at 8:00 go to late morning or early afternoon (depending on the day), he will have hitting or bullpen sessions certain days before or after practice, then the team practice which can go 3-5 hours. On the weekends he commented that he  often had conditioning from 6:00-7:30 am, hitting from 10:30-11:30, practice from 2:00-6:00 pm and then a bullpen session from 8:00-9:00pm.  If you happen to attend a college in a cold weather climate, don't be surprised if practice is indoors late at night. My son typically practices in their field house from 8:00-11:30pm during the week.

In summary, high school players need to understand the commitment it takes to play in college. Our approach was to try and prepare for that during high school as much as possible.

Thanks for reading! I will speak about question 2 in my next blog.

Some background on my son

Currently my son is a Freshman at a top 30 NAIA school in the Midwest. He had 6 offers to play college baseball. 1 D3 and 5 NAIA, all in the Midwest.  He was recruited as a catcher and tore his Labrum 2 weeks after he graduated during a tryout for a summer team. He had surgery on June 30th and is still in the process of completing his throwing program after having 2 setbacks. He earned a spot on the travel squad and will likely get some at bats pinch hitting and DHing.  He is now 6'1" and 210lbs. (as you continue reading, this may not have been expected).

Below are the experiences that led him to where he is now.

YOUTH BASEBALL

My son played little league, did all stars and started playing club ball at age 10 up until age 13. During these years we lived in Gilbert, Arizona and he played with and against a significant number of kids that are playing after high school.

He was always one of the smaller players but had very good fundamentals. The best way I can say this is that he was always a starter but he never had a starting position. He usually started where the pitcher would normally play when he wasn't pitching and was a bottom half of the order hitter.

He always had a good swing, lots of contact, not a lot of power. He rarely struck out. I think the one thing that he was exceptional at was his ability to hit the ball the other way, hit a fly ball when needed, or put down a bunt. Stuff that doesn't impress people in little league all stars or travel ball. He was an excellent defensive catcher but a below average arm.  In short he was the youth version of Craig Counsell at the plate and in the field and Greg Maddux on the mound.

HIGH SCHOOL

We moved away from Gilbert, where he would have gone to one of the top big school programs in the state. Instead he ended up at a small school that had a top 10 program in their division.

He entered his Freshman baseball season at a strapping 5' 3" 125 lbs. and didn't really grow until the his Junior year.  He played on the freshman team as a freshman, JV team as a sophomore. He was the starting catcher and pitched a bit. At the plate, he was a bottom of the order guy.

His junior year he stayed on JV and ended up playing mostly with Varsity. He batted .250 with 6 hits in 24 at bats with 1 double and 2 RBIs.

His senior year he played 1st base and batted .337 with 30 hits in 89 at bats with 9 doubles, 1 home run, and 25 RBIs. I also want to mention at the start of his senior year he grew to 5'11 and 185 lbs.

FALL/SUMMER BALL

In the summer he played with a team made up of his high school team mates. They played American legion one year and low level Connie Mack the other year. The team didn't play in any showcase events or big tournaments.

In the fall he played on some decent teams but they didn't play in any of the showcase events or against any of the scouts teams. The closet thing to a showcase league/event was a 4 week league in which he hurt his wrist the 2nd weekend and couldn't play. When he did play, we signed up as a catcher and he played 3 games in right field.