Understanding the coach's needs

great post Fungo.

I would like to add my thoughts as well. First, yes, there are times to ignore the odds and shoot for the stars.

But don't get sucked in by labels - risking any chance to ever actually play baseball in order to beat the odds does not make you a competitor - it makes you a risk taker. There is a slight, but distinct difference.

Only you can know which is really the right fit for you.

Sometimes the right fit means risk it all - this is really where I WANT to play. Sometimes the right fit means find me somewhere I WILL play.

Excellent points Fungo. Also good points AParent. I have been looking for a thread to talk about these issues and I believe I have found it. Sit back. This may take a while.

First let us begin with some truisms. At least I see them as truisms. I am talking here about a position player not a pitcher.

1. No parent is as objective about their child's talent for this game as they think they are.
2. The high school player that is the most desired by the vast majority of college coaches is the same one that is desired by the vast majority of Major League Baseball GM's for the same reasons. This ideal player has the projectible tools [run fast, field their position without error, throw hard and accurate, hit for average, hit for power] that a long line of historical consensus {scouts} agrees is necessary to play baseball at the highest levels.
3. This player a) is rare coming out of high school, (b) most likely will be drafted in the early rounds of the MLB Draft [though a few must fall through the cracks] and be paid a lot of money to forgo college and sign, and (c) is not likely to be found on any college roster in this country as a freshman.

If the above three statements are true [or substantially true] then the conclusion must be that every college coach that choses not to go the JUCO route every year [or every other year]for position players, must fill his roster with high school players that do not project all five tools or, to be more blunt about it, are missing one or more of the essentials to play baseball at the highest level. This means that every college head coach [and staff] must decide what mix of tools v lack of tools they are willing to tolerate as a team and recruit those high school players that meet their established criteria [even if those decisions are being made without a specific criteria].

If that is the reality out there in the world of College baseball [and I truly believe it is] then what must I [the parent] do to make the coach's job a little easier when it comes to my son? I must do my homework. First, I suggest the following steps:
1. Get an objective evaluation of your son's talent. An MLB scout that has seen him play, a showcase event that evaluates and rates his talent on a scale that has meaning [Perfect Game, as one example], his High School/Summer coaches, coaches of other teams that have seen him play. What are his strengths and weaknesses? Listen to these people. Do not talk or argue with them regarding their clearly unbiased opinion about a subjective matter.
2. He is going to have to hit. If not for power, at least for average. If he does not do either right now, it needs to be fixed. Hire a local hitting instructor, send him to a camp, or get him in the batting cages and video him, but do something.
3. He is going to have to play some position with enough ability to consistently get people out when the ball is hit to him. If he does not do that well right now, it also needs to be fixed. Again, hire a local instructor, send him to a camp, hit him baseballs over and over again, but do something.
Hopefully, very few parents are confronted by both the last two problems and have a son that wants to play college baseball.

But as a parent your job is not finished. The next phase of your homework will take you into cyberspace. You must do the research to find those college baseball programs that are looking for your son's strengths and appear to tolerate his weaknesses. You must get on many. many, many websites. Certainly HSBBW is a great site and provides a wealth of information. But you need to go to the college, click on the baseball team, look at the rosters, past, present and future, look at the statistics, past and present, and compare their indicators with your son. Is every position player over 6' 0"? If your son is 5' 8" and has not grown much over the last two year, probably not a good fit. Does this team have several players that have a lot of attempted steals? If your son is not a great defensive catcher or a power hitting 1st baseman and runs the 60 yard dash in 8.00+, not a good fit. This team is looking for speed.
Does the team have 5 or 6 players with a lot of at bats and a few home runs each but lots of strikeouts with correspondingly low on base percentages? They are looking for free swingers with home run power and not the singles hitter that gets on base a lot. By comparing the roster to the fielding statistics, do the guys with the highest fielding percentage per position your son wants to play get the starts or does it appear that hitting trumps fielding, i.e. the starting shortstop has a fielding percentage barely over .900 while an upperclassman middle infielder that plays sparingly has a percentage of .980 or above. Not a good fit if your son is a defensive specialist. I suppose I could go on and on but, hopefully if you are still with me, you get the drift.

At the end of this research you should have a list of those colleges [Div I,II,III, NAIA, don't care] that you KNOW FOR A FACT have recruited players like your son and played them at the varsity level. Then fill out a questionare for each of those schools as the HSSBW suggests in its "Recruiting Timeline" and go at it. Make sure that you also rank the schools in terms of an academic fit for your son. Of course, if he only wants to get a civil engineering degree, your choices will be much more limited.

When you have done that, I can assure you from personal experience that your conversation with the coaches at those selected colleges will be much more rewarding. You know their team, you know what they are looking for, and your son's strengths can be used to persuade them of his value to them and his admitted weaknesses do not have to be glossed over but can be dealt with by conversations such as "he does not have that great of an arm. Is there something you guys can do to help fix that or make him better? What would your plan be if he comes here?"

OH MY. I have rambled on here for much too long. And I did not even get to talk about my son and how I approached this very issue with him. Well, let's see if there is any interest out ther first. Agree or disagreee?

TW344,
Excellent post! Thanks for sharing. For the short time you've been here you have learned a lot. Of course knowing you hail from Roane Co WVA and like most from those parts, you have a lot of common sense!!
Fungo
Parkersburg High School class of '63

TW344

Great post.

If your son has a weakness the worst thing you can do for him is try to trivilize it.

You can argue until you are blue in the face that some things don't matter (size; speed; etc. etc.) and you can point out all the exceptions you want.

Bottom line is simple -they are shortcomings in the eyes of some coaches.

Not saying it can't be done - but imagine how hard it will be to make the coach look at you and say - "I like what I see" - when something he values highly is missing from the picture?

It's up to you to find out what a coach looks for - and what he puts on the field.

Even if you don't think something is important. Even if you son has had great success in the past. If a coach highly values something your son is weak at - the perfect school for your son - may not be as perfect as you think.

TW344.....WOW....extremely well stated.

Fungo, AParent & Beezer:

Thanks for the comments. Kind of ran off at the mouth and did not get my hand slapped . . . Yet. Yes, Fungo I am gaining confidence. Keep your very experienced eye on me and make sure I don't get out of line or too big for my britches.

Herber Hoover High School class of 64.

Great post! Wish I'd seen it about 8 months ago!

TW,
Excellent post, no hand slapping here!

Getting evaluations of son's ability and talent, studying team rosters for clues as to what are coaches needs is just another piece of the puzzles for trying to crack the recruiting code.

I think I am trying to understand what Fungo has posted, but let me pose a question.

Son goes to a PG showcase, gets a rating of 8.5. Good grades, 10th maybe early 11th grade. At that point does the parent and player begin looking for programs that will be a right fit for an 8.5 player, or do they start working on bringing the player up to a 9,10? Do parents really pay attention to the rating? Though a player should never give up and work as hard as he can be, when, at what point do you stop and say, let's purely concentrate (exploring schools) on where a good fit will be by the time senior year comes.
I don't mean to hijack the thread, I was just wondering, based on Fungo's thread, when parents should come to realize that they need to chance direction by trying to prove the odds are wrong, and it obviously isn't working.

TPM,
You are allowed to hijack any thread I start. You’ve been there -- done that -- so you know how it is. I think “fit” is an ever changing goal and the player and the parent have to be able to adjust to find the best fit. For instance: a roster that might appear to be a great fit last year just signed an All American at your position. Suddenly that great fit became a terrible fit. The coach’s needs just changed so that recruited player has to move on. My son was recruited as a catcher at the University of Alabama with the anticipation that their junior catcher, Jeremy Brown would turn pro. It looked good and Jeremy Brown was drafted but reneged on his promise to turn pro. My son’s scholarship was intact with the promise to pitch as a freshman and to assume the duties as a catcher as a sophomore. Unbeknownst to us they were already recruiting a high profile catcher in addition to my son and if they had it their way my son would stay on the mound the whole time. Luckily he moved on. I personally think a player needs to keep his options open until he commits to a college. I have seen many businessmen and politicians deny or decline comment until they step to the podium. Are they purposely misleading the crowd? I don’t think so. They are just allowing everything to come to the surface and make sure their comments are appropriate. This is one reason I don’t think a young player 14 years old should commit to a college. Who knows what might happen and what might surface.

Should a player that’s rated an 8.5 look for the “8.5 fit” or should you go for the 10 hoping to improve? Good question. I think that is commonly referred to as “betting on the come” and can backfire. A player always wants to improve but I think if we keep our options open we can make the best choice when the time comes to choose. Besides, ratings are not an exact science and the “fit” is not as narrow are some are led to believe. A player may actually fit at a number of schools and never experience any problems but his odds do improve if they have done their homework and selected the best fit.

The key is the player putting himself in front of enough college coaches so he is seen by those that like what he "has"--- and do not be afraid of being seen by the same coaches tow or three times--have enough confidence in yourself so that you know what you will do on the field everytime.

As we tell players " We can only bring you to the dance--now it is up to you to do your thing. You have impressed us now go and impress them!"

TPM:

Thanks for the compliment.

Regarding your question concerning the PG Rating, I personally would not put too much reliance on the rating itself. I think two other considerations regarding the overall rating would become my guidepost as to the future. When my son was rated by PG I was more interested in the short two sentence report that accompained it. For example, it made note of his 30 yd dash time. Many other players reports did not mention 30 yd times. All players reports had their 60 yd time; in the spot on the form where it said 60 yd time. For other players, where the 30 yd time was mentioned, their overall time was at or under 7.0. My sons 30 time was equal to one of those player's 30 time. yet his 60 yd time was not under 7.0. What is that note saying? I would defer my answer to PGStaffer if he becomes a part of this thread but, for now, to me, PG is saying to anyone reading that report, this kid is fast for 30 yds and could get under 60 with work. PG did not have to do that; but the fact that they did, I believe, is out there for any coach interested in speed. That is just one small thing. They also said some nice things about his swing and his power potential.

The next thing I would do is to compare with other players in his position those things he did not do well. My son's best throw from shortstop was in the low 70's. Most of the other players that listed shortstop as their primary position threw in the upper 70's and a few in the 80's. Obviously, that is a weakness of my son when compared to others vieing for the same position at this point, Again, I would defer to PGStaffer on this but the question for a potential coach would be 'do I have a shortstop here or do I have a second baseman only'. There were other small things about the report in this same vein. Obviously, my son needs to get better at those things everyone else is presently better or more advanced than he before he could expect a comparable rating.

The real question for the 8.5 players parents is what will my son have to do to get the higher rating. What is the "weakness" that is holding him back? That weakness, assuming it is not something beyond the players control, is what needs to be improved to get the rating higher and, at the same time and probably more important, to make him appear more like a 5 tool player to that coach of the top 25 Division I school he wants so badly to attend.

As to "at what point do you stop and say, lets purely concentrate (exploring schools) on where a good fit will be by the time senior year comes", my answer would be, you are always doing that. Let us say that my son falls in love with a Division II college in the Sunshine State Conference that is usually at the bottom of the league. He goes to PG and is rated 9.0. He gets interest from ML scouts who tell him he will be drafted in the lower rounds. He has many choices: 1} get drafted, sign and play minor league ball; 2) get drafted, don't sign at this time, become a wait and see player at a junior college somewhere picked by the MLB Club that signed him, and see if the ML Club will pick him up next June 3) Pick one of the 12 top 25 Division I schools that are after him; or 4)attend the Division II Sunshine Conference School he loves and play baseball. Is he throwing away his major league chance by choosing Option 4? Maybe but probably not. He will be seen by plenty of scouts down in FL if he competes as expected, and, if he does not compete as expected, he spends 4 years at a school he loves plays a game he loves and goes to work after graduation like the rest of us did. [During which time he pays his Dad back for all the time and money I spent on him . . . . .kidding of course.

For my son and I, the fit is the most important thing. We talked about this early on when he first mentioned he wanted to play baseball in college and we are in agreement. He will pick the school he wants to go to based on many other factors than just the baseball program. After all, Sunshine State Conference boys get drafted too. And once your drafted, you have to prove yourself all over again.

PS. and I also agree with everything Fungo said.

PPS I also agree with everything TRhit said.

TW,
You have a pm (private message).

When can D1 start actively recruiting again, are has it already started?
When is the exact date? Thank You

March 1st

Are you refering to actively recruiting 06's?

As a parent of an 07 pitcher, This is a very valuable discussion... Many thanks to all contributors. Its been very helpful...

First of all, I would like to thank all of you, TRhit, TW344, Fungo, TPM, it is thoughtful posts like these that keep me coming back to this site to learn.

From posts like this, I learn, As we like to tell our young atheletes, "You never know who is watching". In this case, "You never know who and how many people you are helping". So again thank you.

One thing that I have found is that success leaves a trail. If you have not looked at college teams web sites, and read the player profiles, I think you will find doing so will be extremely informative.

TW344, that line in your post above, "During which time he pays his Dad back for all the time and money I spent on him . . . . .", had me laughing so hard.

Best of luck to all !!!!!

I don't suppose there's a website that puts all of these stats in one easy, convenient place...with as good an explanation as you have offered? My printer is screaming because I've printed out the stats from the three schools my son is interested in. Going back in the archives several years for stats and rosters. Quite a job. But I can tell you, it has certainly stimulated some good conversations at the dinner table last night. Just a quick question: how do you calculate OBP if the stats don't list APP? Might be a dumb question. But can you figure out OBP without APPs? Great post. It's driving me nuts..but it's good to go nuts every now and then. THANKS

This thread is alot like the one I started back this time last year, concerning my spreadsheet of colleges and the number of LHPs each had. I am happy to report that my 2007 is getting information from colleges at a pretty good clip. Don't know if he will ever play college ball but my little spread sheet and the sample letters on this website have allowed him to crank out letters addressed to the coach with as much individual information about his (the coaches) program as my son wants to include. He populates the colums I have in the spread sheet, hits the mail merge button and fires them off by the 10s' could easily be 100s'.

newcomer,
I had a similar issue with the collection of data. What I found is most college stats are columnar so I could copy, paste into a spread sheet and adjust to fit into another spread sheet that calculates the most popular stats.
In a lot of cases you can handle several colleges in an hour or so. You might want to try that approach.

Hacker, Newcomer,dad4boys, et al:

I was afraid someone would ask this qestion. I had to stumble around quite a bit before I figured out what, for me at least, was the most "efficient" way to search. First off, I tried some baseball oriented college search sites but they were not helpful the way I wanted. Actually, I found the search site I use now quite by accident. I was searching the SAT site for my older son and stumbled across www.educationplanner.com . This is a great college search site. You can get on and narrow your search based on several criteria. Search by State, Region, median SAT score, what sport you want to play, majors available, etc. Of course, at some point you have to search the actual website of the college, but you can certainly narrow down from almost infinite choices [all colleges in the country] to those that are in the region you want to go to school, the size you want, etc. Once you have those 30, 40 even 177 [which is what I started with] names, the real work begins.

The question you have to ask is, once you are on the colleges site and you have clicked on "athletics" and then "baseball" where do you go? I went to coaches. I only wanted to know two things. Had he been there more than 3 years? How long had his assistaints been there? Two seperate questions by the way. If the head coach had been there less than 3 years, I immediately went on to my next college. Why? Because the statistics from the kids that played for the previous head coach were meaningless as an indicator of this coach.

As far as the Assistants coaches longevity was concerned, if a coach had been at this school a long time and kept changing asistants, i took that as a sign that he probably was not easy to get along with. That college, initially at least, went by the wayside.

If the initial test was passed, I went to the hitting stats and looked at the base on balls and the strikeouts of the hitters. Why that particular stat? For one thing, because not every site posted the OBP. And yes, you have to have the ABs before you can determine the OBP. But there was a more important reason why I chose that particular stat. That stat is the most reflective statistic of my son's best baseball strength. My son, as a sophomore, set his high school's career season record in walks. He in fact had 33 walks and 9 strikeouts for that season. I figured, if a college team had one kid that had more walks then strikouts, that might be an abberation, two might be a coincidence but 3 or more had to be a trend. So if a college had more than three guys on the roster that had more walks than strikouts that college went into my favorites folder for futher study at a later date. Then once I went through all the colleges on my list and eliminated all that did not meet my very strigent standards, I had a good workable number of colleges to further study.

What is your son's best attribute? Find that attribute and look for a stat or two that best reflects that and hold the colleges up to the looking glass. You will find a way to get to a workable number and you will actually enjoy the search.

Good luck.

One stat I'm trying to get my head around is how many pitchers play in the field when they're not pitching. And do they get to hit? My son is being looked at primarily as a pitcher right now. But he'll be starting a lot of games in right field. He lead his team in OBP and stolen bases and slugging average. Who knows what will happen this season..but I imagine if the colleges come to a particular game, they might see him field, pitch and hit. It would be a fantasy beyond comprehension if we could find a program that would let him do this, though.

Sometimes it is easier to simply let the cards fall where they may !!! if the boy has the talent the colleges will figure out what to do with him

Newcomer:

I think TRhit is right. If your son has the talent to do both most college coaches will let him do both. However, a quick check at a college's stat sheet [not talking yet about the roster] would not hurt. I would look at the NAMES of the hitters and the NAMES of the pitchers. Only that. If the same name never shows up on both lists at a college in 3 or 4 years of stats then I would conclude that that coach never wants his pitchers hitting and fielding. If you find a college where at least one name is listed on the stat sheet both as a pitcher and a hitter, you know that coach will at least entertain the idea of someone playing both. And if you then go check the roster and see after a name P/OF or P/1B or SS/P then you know, he not only entertains it, he advertizes it and probably seeks it out.

After all, as many people point out, there are only 11.? scholarships for baseball and maybe there are a few coaches out there who have figured out that the most bang for the buck comes if a young man can both pitch and play a position. That, I think, is the type of college coach you want to find for your son.

Hope that helps.