Reference letters

When making my son's video, we taped his coaches making a brief speech about him - and then added their contact details to the clip and put the whole thing on the DVD. Several of the coaches then called the references to follow up so they must have watched it as the contact details were at the end of the clips.

DVDs are great - you can put all kinds of stuff on them - the key is to make it easy to navigate. Other things to consider besides the obvious game footage and hitting / fielding clips might include transcripts, SAT score reports, and a baseball resume.

equipman - The advice we were given from some 'connected' people was to include a reference if a specific college would know that person as someone they trust.

For example, with one college, our son (and family) were pretty good friends with their former pitching coach. So when he wrote them a letter, he included a sentence about that coach being familiar with his abilities. In other cases it might have been a HS or summer coach...or a former player from that school. In most cases it was no one.

I do know, for sure, that coaches checked out many of these references with the names he gave that they knew fairly well. To my knowledge, they never followed up with any of the names they did not know.

Good luck!

Not sure how good a reference is that you know the contents. Better to give contact info and allow a private discussion.

Bobblehead - Are you referring to my post?

If so, I didn't say he/we knew the contents of the reference...just that we knew the coach would trust that person's viewpoint. Don't have any idea what they ultimately said.

A coach, instructor, teacher has their reputation on the line. I think they're far more interested in maintaining their reputation than falsely selling someone they don't believe in.

equipman - I repeat my advice to give them references that are both familiar with your son's abilities and that the college will trust. I am advising nothing more than that.

Thanks for the advice. We will leave it with the names and contact info in the bio

Why do this with coaches who may not have seen your son in action?

A bit of overzealous is it not?