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Reply to "The 411 on helping your son play College Baseball"

I'm all in favor of having as many personal experiences available online as possible.  People who google "college baseball recruiting" will find your blog entry, will find this site, and will find many other things.  Many people (we were certainly among those) will not know anything about the subject, and won't know what to believe.

I think that the reason you are being criticized here is that your son is going to play at a D3 school, but you aren't transparent about that in your blog entry.  In fact, your title says "get a college baseball scholarship," but that doesn't, in fact, seem to be what your son has.  When we started, we had no idea what the different NCAA levels meant.  Over time we figured it out (with a lot of online reading).  Many who find your blog will not know this.  When you say "it doesn't matter what kind of money it is, academic or athletic" - that is entirely true from the point of view of a family's finances.  But, it is not necessarily true relative to how a player will be viewed by a coach at a D1 or D2 school.  That's what people here are trying to say - that your blog entry doesn't make that clear.

The most crucial part of your blog entry is where you say, "A recruiting service will provide an honest evaluation of your son's talent."  This is, indeed, extremely important to know.  Some posters here have jumped on you for that, and said that is the job of the travel coach.  That is also true.  Any of them will work fine if you are a D1-type player.  However, the fact is that neither a recruiting service nor a travel coach are necessarily going to provide an "honest evaluation," although they might provide a hopeful evaluation.  If you are a D3-type player, some travel organizations are not very good (or interested) at helping.  A recruiting service obviously worked for you - but, how did they evaluate your son?  You don't make that clear.  Any other ways of being recruited, of the kind suggested on hsbbw (going to appropriate showcases, sending emails to coaches, going to appropriate camps) would probably also have worked, too.  What you need to do is say, more clearly, "Our recruiting service told us that with his size and measurable numbers, our son was most likely a D3 player, and that with his grades and SAT, he could get an academic scholarship at XXX schools."   That is a piece of information that many people could use.

When we first started googling about baseball recruiting, we found HSBBW the main site.  I read some of the articles, and they were so out of date ("send a videocassette...") that I assumed that all the information was just something old.  I only found the forums when I googled something more specific.  Many times on this site, people have noted this, but the static pages have never (or rarely) been changed, I think.  A ton of links don't work.  New items, like this blog entry, seem fresher and more relevant to people who are googling.  I think that's why so many posters here are trying to point out some things about it that could be improved.

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