coach2709 posted:hsbaseball101 posted:It's hard to win in high school unless you break nearly all the rules. In CIF-SS, we aren't allowed to directly "recruit" anyone. Even trying to convince one of our students to try out for baseball is a violation. You can passively tell someone that tryouts begin when and where. You can't go up to a kid every day and tell him he should join the baseball team. I drive around other high schools and see kids practicing baseball when official practice doesn't even start for another 3 months. And those are schools with winning cultures while the losing culture schools would have 3 players show up for practice. So you basically have to move mountains. I think winning coaches fail much more than they succeed when they try to take on a losing team.
So if you have a stud athlete in your 3rd period class that you've got to know over the school year or semester it's a violation to look at him and say "hey man you should try out for baseball - I think I turn you into a great shortstop"? That's crazy and just an illustration of how out of touch state associations are with the realities of dealing with kids.
You can suggest a student try out for a sport, but if he doesn't show up you can't keep pestering him about it. Of course any decent coach is going to recruit his own student body. CIF just wants high school to be academics first. Our track coach was fired after 20 years for having students train during the dead period. He wasn't there to train them on those days, but I doubt the athletes all got together and said we need to get some work in during the summer. A football coach got his team penalized by being the head speaker at an open house which had nothing to do with football. CIF viewed that as recruitment.