Are college baseball showcases, clinics & camps necessary? If you’d like to expose your son to college baseball coaches who wouldn’t have had the opportunity to observe him otherwise, then absolutely, they are a must! In today’s baseball recruiting reality, you have to go where the coaches are. Between busy schedules and reduction in recruiting budgets, It is extremely difficult for coaches to come to you.
From what our son and I learned during his baseball-recruiting process, there were two tasks that were unavoidable: Having film and going to camps, clinics or showcases. After talking with college coaches, I am told that it is extremely rare that a player will be put on a roster “sight unseen.” Stats can look great on paper, but a coach has to see a player in action to seal the deal.
We dove into the baseball recruiting process at the end of our son Ben’s sophomore year in high school by having him attend a two-day baseball showcase that several college coaches would be attending. For my husband and me, it was a “watch and see what happens,” event, but for our son it was completely different. He had never been exposed to other players other than the local school and travel teams. It was a real wake up call for him seeing the different caliber of players out there, and what he was up against. Of course we were worried for him, wondering if he thought he could measure up, or for that matter, if he was even cut out to play college baseball.
As it turned out, at the end of the weekend, he was more determined than ever to move ahead in the recruiting process, and motivated to improve himself as a ball player. So began the research on the different camps, clinics and showcases and trying to figure out which ones would be best. Our starting point was creating a checklist of our son’s “must haves” in a school. In Ben’s case, he wanted a medium to large school with a solid graphic design program, on a suburban or urban campus, no more than five hours away by car. With that info in the hopper we set out to find schools that met that criteria first, and then found out if the baseball programs would be offering any sort of camps or clinics. To help our search along, we set up a player profile with a recruiting network company, NCSA Athletic Recruiting, which was a huge help in whittling away schools that didn’t meet Ben’s criteria and kept him focused on the schools that did.
Another outlet for exposure to college coaches turned out to be Ben’s travel team, which provided many opportunities to participate in tournaments where college coaches came to observe potential recruits. We made sure Ben took full advantage of these opportunities by contacting coaches ahead of time to let them know he’d be in their area. That, coupled with his baseball skills video, opened up several conversations with coaches.
There are many different camps, clinics and showcases out there. Some expensive. Some not. We tended to go with the latter which were usually camps held by the schools themselves. It gave Ben many one-on-one opportunities to talk with the head coaches directly, get immediate advice and feedback on where he needed to improve, and for both of them to match a face to a name. A coach coming out to high school games is usually right in the height of their own team’s season, so the chances are pretty slim that they’ll have the time to come see high school players’ games. Attending camps is the one way your son can be seen, and it is an important and essential part of the recruiting process. Taking the time to do the research will be well worth the effort!
