Let me start by telling you that for position players the Stanford camp is the greatest thing since sliced bread. The camp starts with registration beginning at 10:00 am Wednesday morning. The kids check their paperwork and they get weighed, get their height measured (I don't know how many people I heard saying that there had to be something wrong with the measurements because their son was taller than they measured - mine was 6'2" and was measured 6'2" so I don't think there was anything wrong.) They get their hat and their jersey and then they get their picture taken. Then they head off for Sparq testing. You know, the stuff where the good athletes who have had specific training in how to do those particular exercises get the good scores. Then they feed the kids burgers and dogs. Then the kids who got there on time can go hit for while in the afternoon. Next comes the camp introduction and they get assigned to their dorms, etc. After that there are a couple motivational speakers in the evening. So far so good.
By the time they've reached camp all of the kids have been assigned to a team and have a college coach with only a couple exceptions where the coach is no longer a college coach. The camp begins in earnest on Thursday. About 3 hours are spent practicing, which consists of rotating between conditioning, fielding, and hitting. At some other point in the day the team will play a 9 inning game starting each batter with a 1-1 count. If a hitter walks a pinch runner is sent out to run and the hitter gets a 1-1 count again. I don't like the 1-1 count but I do like putting a runner on so that there's a penalty to the pitcher for walking someone. The games are played at about 6 different locations. 1 location is sunken diamond and every team plays 1 game at sunken diamond. There are a lot of college coaches there for each game at sunken diamond although there are more coaches at the late afternoon and the night games as the coaches who were running the practices can attend those games. The teams also play 2 games at other sites. Most of the sites are within a 5 to 10 minute drive of sunken diamond. However, they also play games at College of San Mateo which is about a 30 minute drive in traffic. Not surprisingly the coaches don't go there so the only coaches who are there are the two team coaches and two coaches who are there to evaluate the pitchers. I'm told that a few coaches go the other sites that are close by but I can't vouch for that because my son was at College of San Mateo on both Thursday and Friday. It really doesn't matter for position players because all of them get to show their wares in front of about 30 or 40 coaches at sunken diamond. You can't beat it. Unfortunately, only about 1/3 of the pitchers get to pitch at sunken diamond, so only about 1/3 of them get seen by a lot of coaches. Now the word was that who got to pitch at sunken diamond was random. Not so. My son heard one of the team coaches telling another coach that they were told by the "Stanford people" who would pitch at sunken diamond and it was pretty obvious that all the "name" pitchers and the kids with connections got to pitch at sunken diamond. It is possible that the kids are drawn at random and then the "Stanford people" pass that on to the coaches but I don't think that's the case.
To some degree my son was lucky. He pitched at College of San Mateo, but one of the coaches made a point of coming to see him throw for his first couple innings. He gunned him the first inning when CASon was only throwing 82-83. The next inning he threw consistently 84 but he wasn't gunning him. He dropped to 82 in his 3rd inning. I didn't ask what he threw his 4th inning but was told that his last pitch was at 86. Either his legs were a bit sore from conditioning in the morning and the previous afternoon, he didn't like the start at 1-1 format or he just didn't quite have his normal velocity as he seemed to be throwing about 1 mph less than at the PG showcase 3 weeks previously. Dave Nakama from Stanford was also there. The other team had some pretty good hitters, so my guess is that he was there to see some of them. There were no set rules and although CASon got to play his secondary position and hit also, there was at least one coach who didn't let his pitchers play in the field other than pitching and didn't let them hit at all.
So the moral of the story is that the Stanford camp is a great experience and a terrific value for a position player and for the pitchers who get to pitch at sunken diamond. BTW, there were some secondary position pitchers who got to pitch at sunken diamond meaning that less than 1/3 of the pitchers got to pitch there. However, I'm not sure how good of a deal it is for a pitcher who doesn't get to throw at sunken diamond. IMO, the whole purpose of the camp is to get the opportunity to play in front of a lot of coaches so they can see you play in person. That doesn't happen for the more than 2/3 of the pitchers who don't get to pitch at sunken diamond. They do fill out a detailed evaluation and that's available to all the coaches who are at the camp but there's no way to tell how many of them look in detail at those evaluations and if it is any different than going to a showcase. In my son's case, there were a dozen college coaches watching when he pitched at his last PG showcase while there were only 4 plus the coach who came specifically to watch him and Dave Nakama who I don't think was there to look at pitchers at College of San Mateo. On the other hand the coaches who did see him at CSM were probably a better fit for him than the ones at the PG showcase who were mostly mid to upper tier D1 coaches. He was also lucky because the coaches who were evaluating the pitchers at CSM told me they thought he could add a few mph very quickly. That interested CASon quite a deal and on Friday night when they gave all the players a chance to talk to the coaches he went and asked one of those two coaches what he could work on and the coach was very helpful.
Once the camp is done they take about 5 or 6 weeks to send out the evaluations so that they can get them all done and send them out at the same time.
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