I haven't been here for a while. Several of you have kindly asked about my son's status in private and offered encouraging words and suggestions. Now that my son's college application and baseball journey has come to an end, I'd like to post an update.
Last summer, right before his senior year, he went to a couple showcases that were highly recommended on this forum. He was not chased after by coaches, but he did get a few D3 coach's attention. When he prepared his college application list, he had two tracks -- one filled with big D1 Engineering universities with no chance of baseball, the other with small D3 colleges with baseball opportunities.
A couple ideal intersections were Caltech and Harvey Mudd, which offered excellent engineering plus baseball opportunities. Unfortunately, these colleges were extremely competitive, and he was rejected even with coach's support. His academic record is definitely within range of admitted students. I heard that coaches at these schools can only get their top 3 candidates through, so he probably didn't rank high enough on coach's board.
Meanwhile, he got some very good admission offers from prominent Engineering colleges, such as Georgia Tech, UCSD, Calpoly, USC, and UWashington. Colleges clearly value his potential as a engineer more than his potential as a baseball player. He did have options until the end. He got admissions from Swarthmore, Grinnell, and Whitman, where he would have been preferred walk-on. However, none of these colleges can compare to the other big universities in the major he wants to pursue. In the end, he decided to attend UW and gave up baseball, at least the varsity kind.
It's never easy to say goodbye to a sport that has been a significant part of his life, but he's handling it well. Instead of playing summer baseball, he's doing part time job and enrolled in a college class to jump ahead. He shared this podcast with me today (http://freakonomics.com/podcas...-upside-of-quitting/). It's part of the summer class, and it talks about economics of quitting. There is a baseball player's story (~5-20 min in the podcast). It's main takeaway is "don't fret the sunk cost and choose your best option for the future."
Anyway, just want to say thanks to all the knowledge and support I got from this forum. I did not grow up with baseball and I learned all about the sport from following my son's baseball career and this forum. Now I get to follow the Huskies (what a run in the CWS!) and the Mariners (how many more 1 run games can they win?) and this great sport called Baseball!
