smokeminside posted:JCG posted:2019&21 Dad posted:Would it make sense for a 2019 to attend this year or wait til next year? We are on East Coast, so not a quick, cheap trip in addition to the camp fee. Expensive proposition and thinking there may be more affordable, closer high academic options. 2019's PSAT's were in the National Merit Semifinalist range and he's interested in engineering. Thanks - love the info sharing on this board!
Gonna disagree, very mildly, with Gov. It really depends on the player and the family's situation. Stanford is a great experience, and you can't have too many of those, but compared to HeadFirst, you don't get as a many eyes on a kid at Stanford. It sounds like your son is an elite student. If he's an elite player as well, you're going to want to get him in front of Ivies, Patriots, and maybe above. You can get in front of those without the expense of a CA trip if that's an issue. If he's more likely to be a D3 type player, then you should hold off a year anyway. D3's pay little attention to players until the summer before their senior year.
Just one opinion....
If you, and I hope others will chime in, had to do it all over again, and you KNEW your kid was a D3 level player, would you be willing to roll the dice, wait until the summer before senior year, and attend only ONE event where you knew there would be an excellent variety of D3 choices?
(I do not mean this as a challenge. I'm being sincere: Could one camp/showcase be enough?)
I am going to jump in on this thread and go back to this post and give some perspective about possibly attending only one academic showcase - mostly because I've considered this several times since we went through the process. We were lucky enough not to have spent a ton of money on other showcases - our 2016 attended one PG showcase (and didn't do great) the summer between Soph-Jr year and then attended HF on Long Island in Aug before his Sr. year. He attended several one day prospect camps at local Northeast D1s but no other high priced one/two day showcases.
I think that one of the problems with this premise - attending only one showcase and focusing on D3s - is that from our experience most of these players are still holding out hope for D1 interest and offers all through the summer between Jr.-Sr. year. And in the northeast that's really when all the offers come through. There are very few early commits. All of the D1 players we know from his class received their offers after being seen at tournaments or other events that summer. Even the very highly ranked players are finalizing things that summer in our area (we do have 2 very highly ranked 2018 players from our area who have already committed but they are outlyers).
Even at HF our 2016s focus wasn't so much on getting D3 interest - it was just getting interest from one or more of the schools on his list - either D3 or D1. And it just so happened that all the interest came from D3 schools. Was attending just that one event enough? Yes. All of the interest he received - which was offers from D3 schools in the Midwest Conference, Liberty League, UAA Conference and three schools in the Centennial Conference - came from the one event at HF on Long Island. The Centennial Conference school he ended up at did see him earlier in the summer at a tournament but he was not seen by any of those schools at other events (that we are aware of).
If we had to do it over again I don't think we would have just attended HF - he probably would have played on a different travel team that was more competitive and hopefully played in front of more schools at different events (his exposure was very limited over the summer because his team was horrible) and he probably still would have done the local D1 camps - and then we may have had him do two HF camps (I know and spend more money). All of the schools he wanted to attend were there, I think expanding the number of schools that could see him live (on the first day) would have been good. Either way it worked out.
Keep in mind that he is a PO and there is a lot of focus on pitchers at HF - and he also pitched very well at that camp. It would really stink to put all your focus on HF in Aug heading into your Sr. year and then not pitch well. The rules at HF are also slightly skewed towards pitchers (starting at a 1-1 count) with umps calling balls and strikes from behind the mound - so I don't think this idea works as well for position players. Sorry for the long post.