COLLEGE BASEBALL RECRUITING SPECIAL EDITION Special Edition | Page 25

Recruiting
This is part 1 of a 3 part series discussing recruiting as it relates to me personally and division 1 baseball.
As part of these articles, I would like to discuss what you need to be doing as a parent or player, what I
do as a recruiter, and lay out some general information as it pertains to recruiting at the D1 level. For
the purpose of this article I will cover general information on scholarships, roster size, and the difference
between public and private Universities. To understand recruiting, you will need to understand the
numbers.
We are allowed to have 35 players on the spring roster. In many situations, schools will have more than
35 guys on their fall roster. We do not have to get our roster to 35 until the week before our first game.
Many factors will dictate how many players a school will need for their upcoming recruiting classes.
Depending on how many scholarship players are returning will dictate how many scholarship spots are
available. Determining how many players are needed to fulfill a schools roster will dictate how many
walk-on players are needed.
There are a lot of fallacies as it pertains to the financial side to recruiting and scholarship offers. A full
scholarship will cover room, board, books, tuition, and fees. All of these categories together will give you
the full cost of the school you are communicating with. This is different than “cost of attendance”.
Across all of division 1 baseball, if you are a fully funded program you are allotted 11.7 full scholarships.
Consider the 11.7 as the total money you have in your bank account. The 11.7 can be distributed
amongst 27 players. The minimum amount of money you can give one player is 25%. The average
baseball scholarship (doing simple math) will get you to a 43% scholarship. Only a select few will receive
more than that and the MAJORITY will be on less than that. You will hear a lot of baseball scholarships
presented in percentages. Scholarships are presented in percentages because we generally give
fractions of a full scholarship.
Walk-on players have a general stigma surrounding the name “Walk-On”. However, in our programs
recent history two of our highest draft picks and coincidentally our best players started as walk-o. For m,
the only difference between a scholarship player and a walk-on is if we have money or a scholarship
spot to give a player. In college baseball, the best players will play regardless of scholarship amount, or if
they are a scholarship player or walk-on. We have a job to do and most of that job involves putting the
best players on the field.
Generally, there are four types of aid to cover the cost of college. The four types of aid include but not
limited to government, athletic, academic, and loans/scholarships. Depending on your family situation,
your grades, and the school you are applying to, the amount of money you will receive from these
various opportunities will differ from family to family. Remember that most of the time the scholarship
you receive to play baseball will only cover a fraction of what it actually costs to go to school. A majority
of baseball players will look to other aid to cover the rest of school.
Having worked for both public and private schools, I have an understanding (at least a little bit) of the
differences between both. Already knowing what a full scholarship looks like in the eyes of the NCAA;
we can see one major difference between most private and public schools. Tuition is typically the
biggest variable when comparing public vs private schools. It simply costs more money to go to MOST