Recruiting Profiles

What state do you live in?

Connecticut 

On the Home page go to the very top, above the HSBaseballWeb logo & you will see the Search function.  Type in NCSA, then click Search.  Data from 10+ years will appear right before your eyes.  Almost enough to spend the entire day reading!

www.recruitmenow.org is a low cost website and has a national database of coaches and you can send up to 20 emails with one template to schools of interest. They have form letters, and every email has your son's page link attached. You can also build a profile with awards, stats, profile bio and add videos for those coaches to watch. If the school or a coach clicks your link as a result of your email, and visits your page they are logged via their IP address and you can see how many times they visit and how many pages they view. Great tool at a bargain price of $49 annually and it will augment what you do independently to land your kid a scholarship. By the way, they won't try to "sell" you scouting services etc. I used this after talking with several friends and it helped us get my son a D1 offer and he accepted. If there is one thing i learned form this process is to be patient and work you tail off for you son because no one else will. It just so happens the school who looked at his profile the most is who landed him. Good luck!

Warriorbaseball, welcome to this site.  I can't really speak to your specific question about a recruiting service as we did not use one.  I have read some that highly recommend it and others that say it is a waste of money.  My best piece of advice to you is what I received when we started this journey.  It is vitally important that you determine what level player you are.  There are many ways to accomplish this.  Showcases, independent evaluations by experienced baseball people, etc.  In general, if you have typically been the best or one of the top 2 or 3 players on each team you have played on, then I would generally say you have the tools to play at the next level.  So much of that obviously depends on the quality of competition you compete against and play with.  In my opinion, find the most talented travel team in your area and get a try out.  I think you will find out where you stand and it will not cost you significant money.  I think most people, in their gut, really have a pretty good idea where they stack up.  It doesn't take a baseball expert to recognize talent.  It stands out like a sore thumb.  I certainly do not consider myself an expert, but I have watched a LOT of baseball games in the past 13 years since my son started at age 5.  I can watch teams throwing in warm ups and pretty much pick out the top 2 or 3 players, just by how they handle themselves.  My wife never could understand this.  She often questioned, my when my son was younger and I helped coach his teams, why we didn't give other kids a chance to play certain positions.  I explained to her that I could watch a kid walking from the parking lot and tell you if they had any athletic ability.  That may be a broad brush, but I was right far more often than wrong.  Bottom line, get on the best travel team that you will get playing time.  Often when you are an "outsider" you have to earn your spot, but even better.  That is exactly how its gonna be for the rest of your playing career.  I think you are getting to an important timeline in your career.  The 15-16 age is when you want to start generating interest.  Playing for a competitive travel team that plays in quality events and consistently gets out of pool play into the championship bracket play will give you plenty of exposure.  You don't need to spend additional money on recruiting sites if you are able to accomplish this.  I also think an individual showcase at this point in your career can help you see how big a pond you are truly swimming in.  There are a LOT of very talented players when you start comparing yourself to the national talent pool.  It can be very humbling and eye opening, but how else are you to know unless you get yourself into that environment.

Warriorbaseball16, I would highly recommend NCSA. MY family purchased the deluxe account and it has been worth every penny. If you don't have plans on attending any big showcases then NCSA will help out a lot with exposure. They wont do the work for you, but what they will do is send alerts to coaches about your profile matching the type of player that you are looking for. Along with this they offer webinar classes for the parents and athletes to take in order to help better understand the recruiting process.  

Let me add something so as not to present the position that a $49 website got my kid a D1 scholarship. He played/plays in the major PG events in Atlanta, went to Ft Myers Underclass last year, and we stayed on top of all the coaches/schools aligned with his interests. We have never attended a showcase. We also attended 2 targeted camps and they both wanted him. He received 8 D1 offers in total and ended up really fortunate &  where i/he believes he was destined to be. Lots of hard work and time spent promoting etc. If you have that kind of time, then i say do it yourself, if you want to spend that $$ at camps (like us) then do it yourself. If time or money is no object, go with NCSA or another service.

Regarding NCSA, i started to set up a profile and got that call to set up an appointment with "mom' or both parents with a lead NCSA scout so they could "close the deal". Felt used car salesmen-ish so I never completed that profile and cancelled that call. I do believe NCSA is great for people outside of the metropolitan areas etc where the showcases arent as convenient or frequent enough to be effective without spending mucho dinero to get there and be seen.

"So much of that obviously depends on the quality of competition you compete against and play with.  In my opinion, find the most talented travel team in your area and get a try out"

In our case, we live in a smaller town so you may have to expand your geographical area to find a more talented team. You may find that you that you may struggle to compete on the new team and then again, you may continue to excel.

RedFish, the same is true in our case.  My son has to drive 3 hours each way to play with his travel team.  He lived in Atlanta all summer with one of the kids on the team.  I think it is much more difficult when you live in rural USA, but to me it's the only way to truly know if your kid has the tools.  Obviously this is not practical for a 15 year old.  I will say it helped my son "grow up" and I hope it will give him a small advantage when it comes to entering college next year from the standpoint that he has spent a significant amount of time away from home taking care of baseball business on his own.

YG, it will sure be a change next year but probably more so for Mom and Dad as opposed to son but we will see. I think that both our sons "grew up" a lot this Summer.

I'm betting without the website your son would still be playing D1. A website doesn't make a D1 player. I'm betting he attended all the right events and followed up appropriately. The question is how much did the website help your son in the process. I'm not a believer in these websites. I believe in maintaining all the control and doing the work yourself. But it's been six and eleven years since I've been through the process.

Yep, RJM....i think he had a shot. The website only served as a repository for intial email addresses of coaches, videos, stats etc and his schedule,. Once we had their email in our inbox on yahoo, we handled it from there. I agree the website was convenient and helpful....but we did alot of work selling the kid so we could confirm is the right guys saw him pitch. There were plenty that said "yes, i will be there" and had other things come up, part of the game, right?

Everything changed when he hit 90-93. I will fall on the sword here, he really did all the heavy-lifting, i did bang on the keys for him and birdog camps, coaches etc but he is the one who got it done. He really deserves all the credit. I got caught up a bit sharing with the group and once i read the string, i needed to add that point. 

I have a 2016 who found a website builder that isn't hard to use and gives a very professional appearance and its free!  It isn't connected to a coaching database or anything like that, like NCSA, Berecruited, PrepHero is etc but he has liked it.  If you are looking to be able to send a link to coaches then you may want to consider Wordpress.com.  They have lots of free templates that will work well.  It may take you a little while to figure it out, if you haven't maintained a website before but honestly, its not difficult.  My son has been able to link his PG profile, add his transcript (and password protect that page), contact info, link newspaper articles, etc (he has a separate tab for bio, stats, video, contact info, transcript, and spring schedule.

When my son makes an initial contact he includes that link.  Its free and it looks professional.  When you do the free version it has to have wordpress.com in the name of the site so as example you could setup a site www.yourson'sname.wordpress.com

and send that to coaches.  When you do the free version and use them to host the site, you can't put google analytics on it (which will track who is accessing the site) but you can build the site and then pay to host it somewhere else and add the analytics later. 

Just a thought