Harvard vs D3 options

2019, your assessment seems right on. I've also heard that Penn is making waves re: their recruitment classes coming up.  

Just met some Columbia players traveling for Thanksgiving.
Some very large boys, compared to players I met at top northeastern D3
schools.  My son is recruited at a top D3,
but I would find it hard to see him competing at Columbia.
We did not target D1 though some other ivies
expressed unsolicited interest at showcases, including Dartmouth.

My SS/RHP 2012 (9.0 PG) was recruited by all the Ivies and Patriot schools and had offers from all the major conferences except Pac12 and SEC.  He could have gone almost anywhere and with baseball scholarship $. He ended up at a Patriot school that he fell in love with.  He had guys on his team who were drafted out of high school and guys drafted from his college team every year. 

 

In my experience, the primary difference at these "high academic" conferences is the depth of pitching.  There is some position player batting depth shortcomings too, but that doesn't tend to manifest itself as much as pitching, particularly in 3 or 4 game series against a Top 25 team.  At D1, a school needs 12+ pitchers with the large # of games per week.  They can get by with 10 position players getting most of the at bats.  Once you get to pitcher 7 or 8, the drop off in talent seemed pretty large in my experience between Top 25 teams vs. high academic D1s. 

 

The Ivies and Patriot League and the Duke's, Villanova's, et.al., are all D1 baseball.  In my experience with both a 2012 and 2016, a "tweener" doesn't sneak into an Ivy and make the roster.  The player needs to be D1 caliber.

A related question: what would be considered as a "High Academic college for tweeners"?

 

How about mid-lower half of NESCAC (such as Williams, Bowdoin, Middlebury)? I read on another thread that Amherst can beat Dartmouth, so that's probably not for tweeners either.

 

How about mid-lower half of Centennial (such as Haverford and Swarthmore)? Or SCIAC colleges?

 

 

I think you answer your own question. I wouldn't take Amherst out of the equation just because they give Dartmouth's second stringers a run for their money every once in a while. You might add Wesleyan, Trinity (CT), and Hamilton to your list.

 

I concur:There are no tweeners on Ivy League teams

High academic for tweeners? 

 

The NESCAC and Centennial have strong baseball programs and great academic schools.  We've visited a lot of them with my 2016.  Many players on those rosters had D1 interest/offers so I guess in that context, they are tweeners.  

 

Since D1 Spring rosters have become limited to 35 players, the talent level has been increased / spread around to all divisions...including D3. 

 

My 2016 is interested in several schools in the Southern Athletic Association which is a very strong D3 conference.  We have posters on here with kids playing or who've played at Trinity, Amherst, Rhodes, Johns Hopkins, et.al.

 

We watched a D3 game in Minnesota last March.  Freezing cold of course.  Starting pitcher was sitting 88 and topping at 90.  He was the #1 starter.  But as with high academic D1's, the depth of pitching drops off.

 

Look at d3baseball.com    Trinity, Emory, Rhodes, MIT all were in the D3 2015 Top 25. A bunch of other schools, e.g., Wesleyan, RPI, Johns Hopkins, Amherst, Washington Univ., all received votes.  These are all schools that I would consider "high academic".

Certainly many of the SCIAC schools are high to very high academic.  How about UAA? Some very high academic schools there that don't get mentioned here often, like NYU and Case Western.   

I'm beginning to wish I'd never used the word tweener.  These posts and what I've seen at the show cases make it pretty clear to me that you're either div 1 or you're not Div. 1. 

Thanks JCG. I didn't even know UAA before your post. Some great schools in there, Washington U, Chicago, NYU, etc.

 

Question: the schools are so far apart in UAA; how do they play each other? Driving from NY to St. Luis? Why did Chicago has a 0-0 record last year?

 

It's a pity that Carnegie Mellon doesn't have baseball. It would have been a great engineering school for baseball players.

I think UAA plays all their league games in a spring break tournament in Florida.  I'm not sure how they line up opponents after that's over, but the UAA teams play a full schedule.  If you google UAA you'll find some really good info on the league.

This thread got me thinking, and I had a little time on my hands -- not a good combination -- so I did a little digging. Dartmouth has 32 players listed on its current roster. Here's what I found:

 

(1) Nine of the thirty-two players had a PG numerical grade. Of those nine players, seven of them had a PG grade of 9; the other two players had an 8.5 and an 8.

(2) Most of the players seemed to be labeled "High Follow" in the PG system. Some had numerical national rankings ("500" or "Top 1000").

 

I was really surprised that over 70% of their roster had not been to a PG showcase. OTOH, I don't have any reason to think that that 70% would have scored any lower, on average, than the nine players who did attend a PG showcase -- in other words, the talent level on average probably corresponds to a 9 PG grade, or maybe a tick below, like 8.5. I don't know enough about PG to know what that really means, or what a "tweener" would receive as a PG grade.

OK, same analysis for Amherst 2015 roster:

 

(1) Seven of the thirty-four players had a PG numerical grade. Of those seven players, there was one with a PG grade of 8.5, one with a PG grade of 8, one with a PG grade of 7.5, three with a PG grade of 7, and one with a PG grade of 6.5.

(2) Four of the thirty-four players were labeled as "High Follow" and four were labeled as "Follow."

 

Again, I don't know enough about PG to have a clue what the numerical grades really mean (other than higher is better).

2019, thanks for looking that stuff up.  It's very interesting.  I'm curious too about the difference between a 9 and an 8. I've just started using PG so I hope it will become clearer to me.

All the UAA schools get together during spring break for a conference tournament except for Chicago (independent) and Canegie Mellon (baseball is not a varsity sport). Case Western plays the rest of the season playing a strong schedule around ohio and the midwest. Other schools in the UAA have dual membership in other keagues. Rochester is in the liberty league, so that fills up a large part ofthe rest of their schedule.

The UAA does not have a pool A bid to the D3 regionals so they compete against all the other schools from pool b conferences, or a pool c bid.

 

Speaking of engineering, I think one strong school is often over looked. Rose-Hulman of the HCAC is a very strong engineering school. In fact I bet most of their athletes are engineers. In fact that is their mascot. Another good engineering and up and coming baseball school is Ohio Northern, of the OAC. 

I did similar research on a few Ivies and high academic D3s also, and it's similar result in each -- very few players have PG ratings. Not sure what's the recruiting path for the other players and caliber of player?

 

Also, I think if someone have "premium" access on PG, they can easily do a lookup from the reverse side -- which PG players commit to which Ivies (or other colleges.)

 

If PGStaff reading this thread -- maybe PG can publish a "yearly commit" report to save us some time.

I rather doubt that most players who are explicitly targeting either IVY league schools or high academic D3's would necessarily think of PG as the go to place for getting noticed by such schools. There are a fair number of showcases that are explicitly designed to bring strong students and high academic schools together.  And I suspect that they may be perceived to give the player and the school more bang for the buck when it comes to putting student and recruiter together. 

Slotty,

 

Actually, Amherst's beat down of Dartmouth last season(15-4) was against their starting lineup  Neither team pitched their top 3 starters.In fact,Amherst had four freshman playing in the game.Could we have beaten them in a 3 game series ? Maybe.Maybe not.I do like our chances though.

 

The Amherst players were looking forward to that game all season.They had something to prove and they were relentless in their offensive attack.I watched it online at our shop and it was awesome ! I wish I could have been there.My son liked the ballpark and facilities(except the turf field).Hopefully,Dartmouth will play us again in the future.They are not on our schedule this year though.I wonder why ? LOL

 

 

I thought I might hear from you, Bobby!  I realize that my post came off as kinda snarky; I apologize.

Amherst has a very good program and I didn't mean to disparage the players. I think in any given year Amherst would beat Dartmouth maybe 2-3 times out of 10.

Hi Scott,

 

No apologies needed. It's all good After the game, Coach Whalen of Dartmouth was screaming at his team.He let loose with this gem "I literally said no to every one of those guys and they came in here and kicked your ass" An epic blast that was repeated over and over by the Amherst team on the two hour bus ride back to Amherst.

 

 

Without a PG subscription, you can see which players commit to which college by year.  Go to the "HS" header then "College Commitments".

 

It is self reported, but you don't have to have a "grade" to report a commit.

Of those that don't have a PG rating - what states are they from?  And those with? Is there any correlation? From my perspective as a parent of a Centennial Conf player from NH - PG wasn't that important or relevant. The academics were #1, a bit of location #2, and being able to continue playing baseball - well priceless. My son realized early on he wasn't going to go to a D1 school, so is it "worth" going through whatever it takes to get a PG rating? Not trying to knock PG or anything, but he decided what/where to target and took it from there. Could he have got into any Ivy/NESCAC and be closer to home, sure. He felt though he wanted some distance between home and school. Worked out well I think - got to play baseball all 4 years, lived 350 miles from home, and now is a 1L at UNC Chapel Hill Law - which was his ultimate goal (get into a good law school).

Kudos to your son with his level of focus.  Assuming your son went to a HF, or Showball Camp, or directly to that colleges camp and coach's liked him?  

 

I've noticed a lot of kids on rosters of academic's and a lot of D3's don't have a PG grade; a number of them don't even have a PG profile.  Says a lot.  Your son had a plan and it worked for him.  

 

Well done.

 

Thanks... I know it doesn't work for everyone, but it can work. We paid for a couple Top96 "experiences"... Got one nibble from a D2 in VT, but wasn't expecting much other than being able to allow him to visually compare vs. others and get velocity numbers (pitcher). After that it was target to college camps, contacting coaches directly, create/send videos, visit, etc.  At visits, we let him to the talking, ask the questions, and all we did was provide support - all things I believe coaches do like when parents come along.  A helicopter parent at a visit is a helicopter parent for 4 years ;-).

I think you'd be surprised how many players don't have PG "ratings" on their profile page from all levels.  I spend way too much time on PGs site - just looking at recent commits - and many of the D1 commits have profiles but never attended a showcase so have no rating.  Most of the 2016 D1 commits from my area have profiles but no rating or grade.  It's not limited to academics or D3s.  On the first page now of recent commits there are players going to Fla State, Va Tech, West Va with no grades and I only pulled up a few.  

Great, this is much easier for us to analyze the caliber of commits for each college. Thanks for the info -- now I have things to do after the Black Friday.

I know of one Ivy coach where if he discovers a player he's recruiting is talking to ACC schools he drops his interest. Take that for what it's worth regarding studs chosing an Ivy or not. A baseball stud is more likely to chose UNC, Virginia or similar than an Ivy. A poster on this site has a son who chose an ACC over an Ivy. He was drafted high after junior year. A player isn't losing much (outside baseball) attending Vanderbilt or Stanford rather than an Ivy. They're gaining a lot in baseball circles.