That’s awesome!
Congratulations to your son! Fantastic news, now on to what’s next in parental stressors… Lol, congrats to mom and dad too, the achievement take a lot of support!
Congrats to your son + the family!
Congrats, and thanks for posting the whole story!
Congratulations to your son.
Question, do you believe the advisor from Elite Sports Marketing helped in the process?
Congratulations! How exciting.
Congrats to your son!! I know the process has been taking longer for lots of 2024s and 25s.
Giff;
Great school history, beautiful field. View of the Pacific Ocean. Will your son major in film production.
Dave Gorrie, Pepperdine former Coach was one of our American Team Coaches and a friend.
Bob
@TPM posted:Congratulations to your son.
Question, do you believe the advisor from Elite Sports Marketing helped in the process?
This is a great question. I am hearing more and more about Sports Marketing promotors in high school sports, and I am curious about their effectiveness. They seem to be willing to take the roll of promoting players (that pay them money) that travel ball coaches use to serve in years past.
Yes Bob but it is even cooler when the ARMY pays for it! GO WAVES!!
@TPM posted: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.
@Giff posted: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.
This is one of the most detailed, well-written, and heartfelt postings I have seen on this forum. Thanks for sharing!
@Giff posted: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.
Thank you for this response. It seems to me that perhaps the advisor fulfilled what you and all of us hoped that travel ball coaches would fulfill in the recruiting process. My son and I put in a ton of work with emails, edited film, more emails, and then emails again, in hopes of getting my son on someone's radar. I don't really know how much effort our travel ball coaches and directors played in that process. Were they calling coaches on my son's behalf? I don't know the answer to that. I do know that the school that offered and committed my son didn't speak to travel ball coaches until they were made aware of my son via his own efforts to reach out to them. So, would I have paid for someone with connections to do all of that work for us? yes, I would have.
I have found that the problem with the military academies, sometimes, is they are not good at jumping on the ones that want to be there and spend time chasing the ones who they have to convince to be there. That comes from being good friends with one of the RC of one of the military academies and having dealt with 2 others in the recruitment of my son and another player. I gave the guy a player who wanted to go to the academy but he wanted to spend all his time chasing the one who did not want to be there and then missed out on the one who did.
Did he just date himself? Adbono. There are some young guys on here that are truly wondering what that is.
adbono just look it up on the interweb!
@Good Knight posted:adbono just look it up on the interweb!
I just asked Siri , “what is a Rolodex?”
Response was, “Okay Boomer”
Great post Giff and congrats to you and your son for his commitment to Pepperdine. Typically, I'm of the mind set that potential recruits can and should do this on their own given enough time and planning. I don't know your exact situation but it seems like your son was running out of time and you decided to do something about it. Fair enough. Many of us may have done the same.
Every personal conversation about recruiting I've had on this website has examples of RCs or HCs passing on a recruit who would be a perfect fit at their school. It always comes up. I look at it this way....you did everything you possibly could do to put him in a winning position with the Naval Academy. Based on everything you've shared, he would have been ideal for Navy. Bottom line is your son only gets one chance at this (freshman) recruiting thing and it didn't work out. You'll never know why, and that is the part that eats away at people. Something similar happened to my son. He had the added benefit of playing against a certain team (that passed on him) every year in conference. He loved pitching against them! Once your son is on-campus and fighting for playing time, all of this "why didn't they recruit me" will go away. He'll have bigger fish to fry, and he'll realize this is where he belongs.
JMO and Good luck!
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Congratulations and really appreciated the detail of your post. USNA missed a good one, but everything works out in the long run. Good luck.
@adbono posted:
I thought someone might pick up on that. 😂 if you don’t know, I’m not sure how to explain it, sort of like when i tried to explain a rotary phone to my kids, I just leave it to them to research the history of outdated office supplies.
@PitchingFan posted:Did he just date himself? Adbono. There are some young guys on here that are truly wondering what that is.
They’re called “Contact Managers” now. We tracked everything and scheduled next actions ona contact manager when my kids went through recruiting. I adapted “Act” I used for work to handle recruiting.
@Giff regarding USNA - I don't know much about the services academy but I get the impression that there's a lot of prep work needed just to be in a position to be considered for admission. If you didn't do all that you did, and the USNA coach showed interest, would the USNA opp be put at risk bec you and your son didn't do any of the stuff you did? That would have been a big regret if that happened. The irony is that the more we expend a lot of effort to prepare and put ourselves in the best position for an opportunity, the more painful and frustrating it is when the opportunity do not materialize. But that doesn't mean we should not have done the preparation.
The part about their interest going away bec they saw your son go 0-2 was very interesting bec I've always been told that the coaches do not care about the result. When they watch you play, they care more about your mechanics and not the result. And if they already know what you can do, they actually want to see you fail (go 0-2) so that they can see your character and how you respond to adversity. Is this all a myth of what good college coaches should do but it is not the reality most of the time anymore now?
Giff … todays post is a fantastic, honest reflection and assessment of the journey. As I’ve always told posters, if you’re kid wants it badly enough he’ll get it.
A story on not getting your HA first choice …
My son’s objective was a couple of Ivies. He got injured. He needed baseball for acceptance to any Ivy. He ended up at a Big 10. His injury gave him five years to play four. He left with a great baseball experience, a BA and an MBA.
A couple of years ago I asked my son if he had any regrets on how things worked out. He didn’t. He got to attend a top twenty MBA program just by already being there for baseball. He figures he would be in the same or similar place career wise regardless.
Best of luck to your son’s baseball and academic career.
Congratulations!! I gotta say though, I think he's really gonna struggle with that decision. No way in &e(( he will be able to focus on playing ball with the constant pull to look West. 
.
Unbelievable spot to play and practice baseball... and the travel locations don't suck either.
Congratulations @Giff. Great, reflective post as well. And you probably dodged a bullet with the USNA. If they walked away that quickly they didn't appreciate what they had in the first place..!!
Malibu, CA, is gorgeous- I spent many summers there at swim camps. I've enjoyed reading through this thread. Big congratulations 
Congratulations, @Giff!