The thing I get asked a lot is "Why did he verbally commit so soon? It was a full year before NLI day."
For us, it came down to this:
He really liked the school, campus, and course offerings. He loved the coach and program. And, it was a very significant offer that they made him.
Then we started doing the homework. My son is not a P5 or a HA. So, we crossed all those schools off the list.
He didn't want to go to a school with a huge campus or an extremely large student body. So, we crossed them off the list.
He didn't want to go somewhere that didn't offer his major. So, we crossed them off the list.
He didn't want to spend the last 4 years of his baseball career losing all the time. So, any historically weaker programs got crossed off the list.
Then we started looking at what was left. We saw a bunch of schools that had not rostered a kid from our state in the last 5 years. Knowing that it was highly doubtful that my kid would be the first time they did in forever, we crossed those schools off the list.
With all that crossing off, there were just a few schools left in play. And, were they going to check all the boxes and make a great offer too? Would it be a better offer? Probably not...so, why wait and lose the offer? It was an easy decision to commit at that time once you looked at everything in context.