Low cost exposure

One avenue that is low cost is to attend any Major League tryout camps in your area as they are free of charge most of the time. There are usually several college coaches there as well as the ML scouts. Many ML scouts are willing to help a kid find a college if you ask them. They have connections everywhere. Just go to the MLB site for the next month or two and ML tryout camps will be listed under the Scouting Bureau section as well as individual teams.

Area Code tryouts are free, best value for the $$ anywhere. Find a scout to recommend him. National Team Identification Series is low cost also. He should be indentifying schools that he is interested in. Most schools have camps, but they will usually pro-rate the fee for one day. If they are interested in your son they can see him for one day and get a good idea about his skills. Many travel teams will "sponsor" a player for demonstrated need. At least he could play in their local games.

Three Bagger, I saw your post on MLB tryout camps and found one fairly close to us.

The only downside is I did not find any direct contact information. Trying to figure out if any college scouts would be there.

dazed,

I think we've attended about ten ML tryout camps over the last several years and everyone of them had at least a couple of college coaches there. The ones held in large cities with multiple nearby colleges usually attract more colleges of course. Of course to pinpoint certain colleges you'll probably have to attend their own showcase or one they advertise their attendance at and of course those involve monetary cost.

We found that when there was a college that was having a camp that we needed to go to - it was possible to attend 1 day and pay for only one day based upon our schedule conflicts. You might also get a multi-child discount in some cases. It does not hurt to ask.

I played division I baseball from 2005-2009 and experienced the full recruiting process, as well as got the opportunity to see everything from the perspective of a player.

Put simply money buys easy exposure. It allows you to go to showcases and travel across the country to go to School X's camp. That being said, there are many, cheaper ways, to get noticed. Like everything else though it takes a lot more effort.

I just came out with a book about playing college baseball and my marketing budget is very small. Like a recruit on a budget trying to find a school, you have to be very creative and be willing to take chances.

For starters, email AND call any coach you are interested in. I would tell them my schedule of where I would be playing and a little about myself. They get tons of emails and videos, so I would stay on top of them. Make sure they at least know who you are, even if just from a few phone calls. All of this is free.

From there get your high school coach to contact them and any other people who might be able to vouch for you. Of course there will come a time when they have to actually see you play but by doing all of this ahead of time you don't have to go to as many expensive events to get the initial notice.

There are plenty of low cost, local events where smaller schools attend. These coaches are much more willing to get to know their recruits as you are less of a number to them.

Without a large budget, I would explore the smaller schools who will have more to gain from a personal relationship with a recruit.

Hope this helped!

author of “Going with the Pitch: Adjusting to Baseball, School, and Life as a Division I College Athlete”