Congratulations to your son.
Question, do you believe the advisor from Elite Sports Marketing helped in the process?
I am a little gun shy; I suspect this will be controversial due to money, and I don’t really want to start anything problematic, but it might be fun so here goes. Long answer so if you’ve already nailed down an opinion on this, you may want to skip.
I really liked my dude—I’ll just call him “dude” as I don’t know if it’s ok to put his name here, but he was a young kid— 25-30ish, and had recently ended a pro career. His Dad coached D1 and he had a solid Rolodex. His head was in the game and he was making calls and being responsive. His ability to get coaches to respond was FAR better than what my son was getting before. To be fair, that could have been the timing of the recruitment. As many pointed out here, some schools were waiting to see the transfer portal/draft fall out before finishing up their 2024 push. The Dude had immediate responses from Alabama, Cincinnati, Coastal Carolina, the academies, Arizona State and several D2, D3’s that showed varying levels of interest.
Dude was good about judging true interest as distinguished from camp invites (that lacked interest, i realize some camp invites are truly interested). I think he generated a lot of interest to schools not on our radar. Now, these advisors charge real money—and that’s the rub. I think they are too expensive but it is an incredibly niche market, so they are, like true capitalists, using that as leverage for their price point. You may or may not want to spend that sort of money in this direction, depending on your financial situation. For us, it wasn’t going to hurt our family, I had the money, so I took the chance.
The question is really, could all this have ended up in the same place without him? The answer to that is unclear. My son had interest from Pepperdine before we hired Elite. He went to a camp there a year ago and made an impression. Then, they came out to WWBA last month and he showed out. It could be as simple as those two events (Camp/WWBA). However, the advisor was contacting them all along ensuring everyone was clear on location and any other relevant information. I did see Dude’s text string between the new HC at Alabama and one between him and Cincy (he sent a screen shot) and the ease with which the coaches were communicating and their responsiveness was like how normal humans interact. Meaning they were simply texting back and forth as opposed to the spotty texting/emailing/calls that were happening before between my son and coaches, often leaving my son a little confused on where he stood.
Biggest mistake I made as a Dad was not the advisor, it was in my recent attempt to get ahead of the Naval Academy situation. I’m retired USMC so thought I could really assist there and maybe could have, but not with baseball in the mix. Naval Academy showed initial interest and my son showed a lot of interest back to them, in large part because of our family history with the military. I thought he’d be a score for the naval academy so I started to assist him with the (very) detailed application. He secured a nomination, went to their one week summer seminar in Annapolis, went to Boys State in Austin (academies love that), and volunteered as a Son of the American Legion. He runs a 6 minute mile, has the test scores, crushed the Combat Fitness Assessment and seemed to be the ideal prospective Naval Officer. All that work was done, then, the Coaches came down to WWBA, saw two at bats (strike out, ground out) and told our advisor they were not interested. The rest of the tournament he did very well as i expressed earlier in this thread, but indeed, timing is everything.
It hurt when they passed, only because my son had Naval Academy as #1 on his list— and not just because of baseball. My mistake? Sending him to weeks of training, interviews, fitness assessments etc, prior to having more certainty on the baseball piece. They say to stay out of your kids way, but obviously, parents are a huge part of where, when, and how prepared the boys are to play.I should have steered clear of the academies based on what I observed. I found their communication to be really poor— whether with the advisor or my son. That really makes it tough when your son says it’s his #1 and you’re trying to impress them. Such a weird process, I cannot imagine Naval Academy being competitive with Pepperdine in baseball or any of the other schools recruiting my son—but nevertheless they passed. I don’t think they knew anything about his PG stuff, or anything else— it was a 30 minute observation in a game where my son went 1-3 and they missed the “1”.
They say the academies look at far more than baseball, but it seems my son had that other stuff in spades. It just reminded me of when I was in the Marine Corps and we often had difficulty retaining talent—we just weren’t good at seeing it—and I’m not talking baseball, I’m talking work ethic, integrity, physical/mental toughness,, etc. I think the Naval Academy missed it, but it’s my son, so they would immediately invalidate my opinion if I cared to share it with them. You can read all about the academies recruiting difficulties and, by extension the military in general. Maybe I saw a little bit of the reason why, not because they passed on him for baseball and my sour grapes, but because they didn’t look really hard at him, all while he’s doing far more than their average recruit. I still scratch my head at that one.
Bottom line, would I recommend an advisor? Depends on your son. If he is top level, blue chip you definitely do not need this. I’m sure the coaches are all over those types and it will just add an unnecessary layer. Conversely, if your kid doesn’t belong in a certain tier and you’re shopping in the wrong aisle, an advisor can talk you into reality. If you’re thinking an advisor will get your D3 kid to get a P5 scholarship, it ain’t going to happen. If you’re in a situation like ours, with a projectable kid who is not getting specific enough attention, and you do the due diligence to find an advisor with real connections, then I think it’s a great way to make use of them. And I can only say that my guy specifically was helpful, I cannot speak for their entire industry which is perhaps full of grifters “getting” unsuspecting parents the deal that they were going to get anyways. Even if that occurred in my case, his ability to communicate with the coaches from Alabama, Cincy and the others beyond Pepp at least gave us the confidence to make a better informed decision. His ability to help my son make this all important decision made him worth my hard earned dollars and if someone were in a situation like my son’s, I’d recommend him.
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