Tagged With "FieldLevel"
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Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
My son's high school coach suggested we sign up for it, and it of course has a free option, and then more expensive options to see matching schools, etc. Anyone have any experience with it and thoughts on whether it's worthwhile? Feel free to PM me if you prefer.
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Re: Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
The good thing about FieldLevel is that a coach has to verify your son and his abilities. You can have more than one do the verification, which should be an added benefit. We had both HS coach and Travel coach "endorse" my son. You can add transcripts, videos and write a player synopsis, all without paying out of pocket. Can only help get more exposure as far as I can tell.
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Re: Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
It is what my son's juco used for recruiting. He set each soph with an account.
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Re: Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
My son signed up when he was a freshman because a local D1 used it instead of recruiting questionnaires. The Varsity baseball coach liked it so much he had all the varsity kids create profiles. He's pretty good about updating his assessment of players a few times a year. Like someone said above, you can be linked to more than one coach and all coaches can provide an assessment. The coaching assessments cannot be seen by the player. My son has a few college coaches following him and he's a...
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Re: Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
How do I find out which college coaches are using this service? Just like showcases, I want to see that the colleges that son is targeting are using this site for finding players. Another question: I don't see our HS or club team on there. How hard would it be to ask HS and club coaches to start using this site? Will they hate the idea of writing evaluation for players?
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Re: Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
Site shows use broke down by division or type: D1 286, D2 241, D3 329, NAIA 202 & JC 442 schools respectively. I would imagine it would be hard to approach a coach and tell them that they need to use the site. Most would try to get on board once they know about it though, I believe. I am sure that it is hard for them to write the type of glowing evaluation that we all want for our child, but I'm sure that they do the best they can given the circumstances. The thing is though, the coaches...
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Re: Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
Evaluation is blind, so we can't see it, which makes me feel like it's pretty honest. Coach is the one who told us about the program. I'm trying to decide if it's worth upgrading to see matches between my son and colleges. You can pay $19 a month or $30 or $50 I think. At each level, you get more access. Not sure that's worth it?
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Re: Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
Asked my son's travel coach. The club has actually been on there for a few years. Here's his complete reply: "We have done it for 3 years. Had some interest and communication but not worth the money ... Ive only kept the account for email connections. They upsell kids and parents. Let you know theres interest but u have to pay them to see who it is. We had our best player sign up and pay and another not pay. Same amount of contacts."
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Re: Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
I'm not sure I would pay for the upgraded access. If a college coach is interested, they can contact the player's coach for more info or contact the player directly if they are of age. I think it's definitely a useful tool, but I don't think it's the only thing people need to be doing. I can see a lot of activity over the last few weeks, based on my son's activity feed. For example, in the last week, several JCs and D2s have been using the site to search and their searches have identified...
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Re: Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
Field Level has been the best and most active site of any that my son used. He had profiles on NCSA, BeRecruited and CaptainU. By far, Field Level was the best. We didn't pay for it but you do get a good idea of which level of colleges are looking at your profile.
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Re: Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
Our son signed up for this service when he went to a summer tournament after his junior year. You could see who was looking. He had more playing time with summer team, than school team at second base and pitcher, just closing pitcher for school team. So not many schools really interested. He received an email, from Lyon college, a private Naia in Arkansas interested in having him visit. We applied to the school, went in for a visit and they offered him a scholarship. Because of his ACT...
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Re: Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
Our experience was that FieldLevel was the best compared to CaptainU and Berecruited. 2 of the 5 schools that had the most interest found him on FieldLevel.
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Re: Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
We found it helpful. My son made a number of contacts via FL. You coach can "promote" you to your preferred colleges, and we saw a pretty good rate of "views/follows" from those schools. Some coaches got my son's contact info and began conversations (email and then phone). There really isn't all that much reason (other than it's fun) to upgrade. We did upgrade for the one month before my son committed (just last week) when he was seeing a lot of activity and we wanted to know the schools who...
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Re: Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
Bumping this one up. Anyone have any recent feedback on this service that they would be willing to share?
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Re: Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
Just one more tool to use, especially if you want to include a link in your e-mail you send to coaches. I wouldn't pay for it though unless you see a bunch of hits and it drives you nuts wanting to know who they are. Use the free portion of it and see what kind of traffic you get for a while. Over time you will see it doesn't warrant paying for it. This was my plan for my son and what really made it easy was I could actually see who did view his profile. It would say (just as it does today),...
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Re: Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
There are a ton of threads on here about recruiting services. The general consensus is that they may work for a handful of people to help get noticed by smaller schools with smaller budgets, but they really aren't good for much else. Not just this service, but all of them. Without trying to turn this into a big thing - they're almost never worth the money and paying somebody who has never seen you play to help you get recruited probably isn't a great idea. Bottom line - they provide a...
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Re: Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
It doesn't hurt. I know we did it by paying the minimum to see what schools were viewing during my son's senior year. We had a handful of teams contact my son, mainly D3 and NAIA. My son eventually signed with a mid major D1 last year, but it wasn't because of FieldLevel. I agree with above poster as well. Depends on where you're at in the process. Mine had an injury Junior year and had a lack of exposure. Flatground wasn't known, but I would suggest them for free.
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Re: Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
Our school offered it for free to the players and it wasn't helpful. We got hits from schools that were not anywhere close to the criteria we had entered into the profile. Most were just trolling for campers. They hyped the views bit a lot of time, I think they created things so they could try to get you to pay for a higher level of service. I agree with the others, set up a YouTube channel for your son and post videos (edited as best you can so they aren't too long) and when your son emails...
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Re: Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
What position is your son? We did free through High School and had some interactions and interest, but everything my son did with his Travel Ball teams (Summer/Fall), Perfect Game events, and Twitter (@Flatgroundapp) were all way more productive and effective. There are PLENTY of free resources available online. Bookworm Ballplayers, Mound Prospects, others for catchers too, Flatgroundapp (for pitchers) and flatgroundbats (for fielder/hitters). READ THE RULES and what you can post for the...
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Re: Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
Back in the day I had a conversation with one of the founders of this service. The concept was basically social networking between COACHES in which the coach of the HS player is quasi-vetted to be a "real" coach with "real" knowledge of the player's skills and who could "verify" the player to college coaches. The thought process here was "coaches trust coaches" and as long as all coaches were being honest and forthright in their assessment of players, well its utopia, cats and dogs can live...
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Re: Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
Travel team used it some hits. That may have panned out if we pursued but it wasn't a good fit. Younger sons Juco coach used it too. He already had a network D1 -D3 and NAIA but used it for more exposure. Son got offers from NAIA and D2 low level. Guys looking for catchers. These coaches were new and didn't have "feeders" themselves. Best offers came from trusted JUCO and trusted local HS coach. If you dont have a HS coach placing players contact others who do and see if they can help. That...
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Re: Field Level Follow
Similar thing has happened to my son. My son created a free NCSA profile and he's now got 7 D1 schools following him. At some point NCSA had an open window where we could actually see who's following him. They were all super expensive private schools he'snot interested in. They've never reached out and he regularly updates his profile. That's just his experience. He also has a field level profile. He's had less interest on that one.
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Until people start reaching out or getting back to him it is nothing. Harsh but true. Can't think of how much time we had spent thinking about this school coming to watch or that school following on social media. It was all a waste of time and effort. They were either having conversations about him playing at their school or they weren't. By the time the second came around there was no sweat because you know what's real and what's not. Until there are conversations about financial aid,...
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Yup. This is the second one but first one was in the depths of Covid hell so hard to use that experience at all. Appreciate it.
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Good point on the D1 committ vs. player. I've seen that, too, with a lot of local kids that have committed to high and mid-level DI and either don't play at all or transfer out. Forgot about the camp "invites." That's a good point also. Thanks for the reminder that some of this is about cashola.
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Field Level Follow
Hey all. My youngest son (just turned 16 in April/class of 2025) and he's just dipping his toes in the recruiting/self-promotion process. One of the first things we did was get him started on FieldLevel so he had a place to put videos and share them on Twitter. To my shock, he was followed by a mid-major DI who requested his contact info from his high school coach. There are at least 6 videos of him hitting on his profile, for context. I was very, very surprised and I am still kind of...
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Re: Field Level Follow
Same thing with my son a couple years ago, his travel team set up his Field Level account and we posted some stuff. Anyway, he got a couple D1 follows. I believe schools put in certain criteria and if you pop into that search they can decide to follow. Ie, the school might search for Pitchers, put in Height filter, etc. area of the country, etc. and then follow the lot. He also had a follow from an ACC school that had a clear tie to the travel program owner, and I often wondered if that...
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Re: Field Level Follow
Re committing to,D1 versus playing D1 I was at a state high school championship game this week. I watched part of the game with the AD and head coach of the host college. The host college is a repeatedly ranked D3 program. I asked if they had any commits on the field. They said both shortstops. All three pitchers were D1 commits. One was a Top 50 program. The other two were lesser D1 conferences. The coach added experience says at least one of three will finish their college baseball careers...
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Re: Field Level Follow
My son graduated HS in 2015. The minute we started using Field Level (probably at 14u or so) he started getting camp invites from anyone and everyone. You mention they requested contact info from the HS coach? Was that it? Just contact info? If so I'd expect to see a camp invite soon. If he is hitting against D1 commits I assume that means he played varsity this past Spring (so at least a rising sophomore?) If so I wouldn't be afraid to hit up a showcase....though with the new rules with...
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Re: Field Level Follow
“Following” on social media could mean they plan to invite him to a camp. A player is being recruited when they start getting repeated phone calls from coaches and offers. Anything else prior to that is just noise. Try to take it with a grain of salt until insider Baseball people or D1 coaches tell him that he’s a potential D1 player My D3 kid had all kinds of great games against “D1 commit pitchers” in travel ball. It never meant anything other than building his confidence as a hitter. Most...
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Re: Field Level Follow
Understand completely, and I didn't mean to give him an ad. Should have left that link out, but my copy and paste skills are limited. I did think the article was worth the read to explain how many PSA's go through the meat grinder. As a D3 coach, I get the remnants of the D1, D2 cast-offs. Most of which should start at D3 and transfer up when ready.
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Re: Field Level Follow
Hi, I’m not wading into any of this stuff but I will say I don’t like being pitched on this site at all. I know of Coach Mazz. No issue with him but it’s disappointing for this site. This has always been a pretty open and straightforward forum between parents and other baseball folks. Not a lead generation tool.
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Re: Field Level Follow
All I can say is, it ain't easy. The competition is fierce, the funding is terrible, and the kids are smarter than the coaches. There are way more average teams than top end programs. The object is not to produce pro players, but to produce amazing young men and Coach Mazz has always done the latter.
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How come the recruiting expert has only been able to recruit well enough to have 3 winning seasons in his nearly 20 years with his current program?
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I don’t know if the “Half the players” comment is valid, but I would say more than half the freshman players (college & HS) and their parent’s expectations verses reality are vastly different. For many, tossing the expectations and getting busy is what seems to differentiate those that have a good experience from those that don’t – regardless of results. @Ozone , The cool thing is that you have a lot of strong opinions on this platform, and many come from subject matter experts with...
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Re: Field Level Follow
This post was information until the link at the end. At that point it became spam.
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This article by my friend and fellow coach, Wayne Mazzoni, may explain the recruiting process in a real way. It starts with thousands of PSA's per school. Times that by the number of schools ...... it's a grind for coaches and PSA's alike While some of the numbers varies sport by sport, this should give you an idea of how drastic the recruiting funnel is for most college coaches. Coaches will mail or email somewhere in the range of 10,000 players per recruiting class. They get these lists...
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Re: Field Level Follow
IMO scouting services (PG, PBR, VTool, etc.) are largely responsible for kids having their sights set too high. Countless tweets by non-baseball people declaring that kids are D1 players (when they aren’t qualified to make that determination) inflate the egos of both players and parents. It serves no helpful purpose whatsoever other than to feed the delusion. I cant substantiate what I’m about to say with empirical data, but it seems to me that close to half the players that enter college...
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Re: Field Level Follow
You, sir ... are on the money. There are very few Blue Chippers with an easy path. Anyone worth their salt will open the conversation with some great D3 opportunities. Then, after putting that out to the player and getting his input, may work up the ladder. I never listen to a parent, and I never listen to a player that quotes them. I like to talk to kids they play with or against and umpires that see them often. It tells a bigger story.
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Re: Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
Can you tell people which levels it is most useful for? D1, D2, D3, NAIA?
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Re: Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
Just to update this thread for anyone else who might be considering the service, we have found FieldLevel to be useful too. We started with free accounts on three of the major services FieldLevel, SportsRecruits and NCSA. For us, the biggest advantage on FieldLevel is that it accepts YouTube "clips" for video--the other two do not. (They have to be full videos, otherwise they are not accepted as valid YouTube URLs.) Maybe because of those extra highlights we have been able to post on it,...
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Re: Anyone familiar with FieldLevel?
Hi, AP, I am guessing that the only tier of players who do not "need" these platforms are DI power conference talents (I wouldn't personally know--but following the cliche that those types of talents/athletes 'will be found'). I am also guessing, though, that that pool is shrinking and being pressured by the transfer portal and NIL. My 2025 son is most talking to D3 HAs, but I cannot see why most boys could not benefit from the free tier of at least one of these platforms, if nothing else...