Well, we just got back from Northern California and thought I'd write a review for any posters that are thinking about sending thier sons to future Stanford Camps.
Overall, it was a great experience. My wife I think was the one that said it was the best money we have ever spent on baseball.
We arrived a day early to do some touristy stuff before heading down to Palo Alto on Saturday morning.
They checked the guys in, gave them their personalized Stanford Jerseys, assigned them to their teams and then they went off to do some agility testing on them. Sparq Training did the testing and were very professional. 30/60 time, Medicine Ball Throw, Shuttle Time and verticle jump.
That afternoon they checked the guys into their dorm rooms and had an evening speaking program at the Sunken Diamond after they ate at the dorms.
The rest of the days of camp consist of either morning games and afternoon practices (working at stations on position specific skills) or visa versa with an evening speaking program.
My son was lucky in that 3 of his 4 games were at the Sunken Diamond. All four of his games had at least 6 or 7 college coaches watching, the ones at Sunken Diamond had twice that many. A college coach is assigned to coach every team (think there were 20 teams total).
Games consisted of 9 innings or 2 hours, which ever came first. They rotated pitchers and fielders based on the number they had on their rosters. My son would play each outfield position, then sit an inning, then rotate back thru them again. Seemed the outfielders might have gotten a little more playing time than the infielders.
The games are played with a 1-1 count to move things along. Also, if a player walks, a runner is placed on first and the batter gets another at bat. But this time, the pitcher is required to throw all fast balls. The coach my son was playing for also had the guys hitting and running on any at bat after a walk.
The practices were pretty intense, they worked the guys pretty hard while trying to teach them different aspects of the game.
There were 325 kids at this years camp. Rumor going around the parents and kids that the NCAA clamped down on Stanford on how they selected the kids and were required to open up registration for a few more campers to be in compliance. Normally the camp has 250 kids from what I've been told.
Adding the extra kids I think diluted the talent pool a little. You could easily spot a percentage of the kids that were overmatched. There were however a LOT of talented young men at the camp.
The last day the coaches working the stations did their final evaluations on the young men, which they told them they would recieve in the mail in 6-8 weeks.
All in all, it was a great experience for my son whether or not he gets any phone calls or contacts from it. It showed him how hard he will have to work at the next level and what will be expected of him. It was also a first class operation, as an example no camp tshirts here, but a personalized uniform.
Everything ran on time and seemed to run flawlessly. The boys got plenty to eat (very important for teenagers) and the weather was perfect. My son was approached by a number of coaches while there and in the coming months we'll see if that translates to phone calls or letters. Every coach that was there recieved information on every player there.
If your son is invited, send him. I know a lot of kids that just made the first few days of camp and had to leave to head to Jupiter and they were very accomadating to those requests. One player from Texas showed up a couple days late due to a prior committment.
They do take a select number of incoming Juniors, and had I known that, I would have tried to get an invite for my son so he could have attended twice.
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