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Reply to "Your Son's College Baseball Freshman Experience"

The D1 recruiting experience is seductive. It creates the illusion that players are really wanted -when in reality only 50% (or less) of every recruiting class is wanted. The school just wants 90 days to figure out which 50% they want to keep around. The unwanted half is summarily dismissed one way or another at semester or at end of freshmen year. And hardly any of them seem to understand this reality the first day they set foot on campus.

At Thanksgiving and the following summer after freshman year my son said asking former travel teammates how it’s going could be like tossing a grenade into the conversation. Fourteen of sixteen from his class went major conference. Seven transferred after the first year as they realized they had made the wrong choice. One kid said by October it was as if he didn’t exist. An eighth transferred despite getting playing time. He was too wowed by being offered by a top program and completely ignored the culture so far from home.

There was a poster on this board with a stud kid from a high school baseball hotbed state. The kid headed off for a top ranked program. He got redshirted. He got ignored. He left after a year. He went home and played JuCo. He was so disillusioned by the recruiting process he quit playing rather than go through the process again.

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