Alex Swenson, a former Division I coach, says fall travel ball usually wastes money because NCAA quiet periods prevent coaches from attending tournaments. He recommends camps during contact periods, a strong highlight video, and local skill work instead, with exceptions for elite teams and players returning from injury.
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Is it worth it to play fall travel ball going through this college recruiting process? Well, this is an important question to ask yourself and to get help and understand. So you are spending your time and resources in the best areas and not wasting time and money going through that. Especially just coming off of the summer with maybe all the travel that you did regionally or even around the country and spending a lot of time of money. And whether you're questioning whether that was worth it or not, that's for another video. But I want to help guide you guys through this so you can put your son in the best possible position to play at the next level. If you're new to my channel, my name is Alex Swenson. I'm a former Division 1 college coach, Scout and recruiter. And now what I do is help high school athletes and their parents navigate this college recruiting process and put them in the best possible position to play at the next level. So if you get anything from this video, please smash that like button right down here and subscribe to my channel. I put out a weekly video as well on the podcast. It's premier athletes. You can find it on Spotify or Apple, wherever if you want to listen on car ride as you're going to games or showcases or tournaments. Alright, so let's dive in. All right. When we're looking at fall travel ball, we need to ask ourselves, well, what are we trying to get out of it? Most of us, okay, a lot of us, if we're going through this recruiting process looking from an exposure standpoint, we want to get exposure to college coaches. These college coaches have to see you and they have to know about you to recruit you. Okay? So again, we just came off the summer travel circuit, if you will, and we are considering doing fall travel ball. Okay? The problem is we are going into the quiet period and typically in the middle of August, we go into the quiet period for a few weeks and. And then we will go into the contact period in September for a few weeks and then we're going to go back into the quiet period from October all the way through February until March 1st, which we go into the contact period. Why is that important to know? Well, the quiet period means that college coaches cannot leave their campus to go watch players at tournaments or at other third party recruiting events. They can only watch their kids at their campus or at camp. Camps get really popular during this time during the quiet period. Or they can have visits, they can have unofficial visits, they can have official visits in quiet period. They can talk to you on the Phone, all that stuff. Definitely, if you are of age and you meet the requirements where they can talk to you, quiet period is a bad name for. It almost implies that they can't talk to you during that time. They can definitely talk to you. It's just they can't leave their campus to go and recruit you. So I bring all of that up where fall travel ball for me, in my opinion, doesn't make much sense at all from a recruiting perspective because there's a short little window compared to what we were just in in the summer where college coaches can actually see you and evaluate you. And tournaments. If you're going to a fall travel team and you're going to tournaments, you're just winging it and hoping college coaches are there at that tournament, you're not going to know who's going to be there. It's kind of the same in the summer, by the way. You're just kind of winging it. And winging it is not a good strategy, and hoping is not a good strategy. Right. We want to be proactive and strategic going through this and making sure that again, we're putting ourselves. This is all about positioning and proactiveness and finding schools that are recruiting our position and putting ourselves in front of them. So from a recruiting perspective and an exposure perspective, fall travel ball is typically, in most cases, okay. Not all, but most cases, not the best bang for your buck, for your time, and certainly not your money. If you are just on the top, top, top team and you know coaches are going to be watching you and know which schools are going to be there, maybe it makes sense, okay. But for 99% of us, that is not the case. Okay. I think it's much better to. To go from using a good highlight video game that in front of college coaches, going to certain showcases where if we're going to go during the contact period in that kind of September timeframe where we know college coaches are going to be there, we're going to get a lot more value there. Also, camps are going to be really, really important. So there's a lot of hit and misses in camps, a lot of opinions about camps, whether it's moneymakers, whether it's not. It's very dependent on the school. What they're looking for. Are they looking for your position? Usually? Typically anywhere from 60 to 70% of the guys that commit a school went to camp, they went to one of the school camps. So if they're interested in you and they're looking for your position, it's going to Make a lot of sense to go to the camp. Now if you are looking for just skill development and working on your skills, which is great and just more just playing time, maybe you didn't play that much this summer. Fall ball might make sense, but you just need to manage your expectations from a recruiting side of things that it's not the best avenue for, for recruiting. It's more for just kind of playing games, maybe getting better. And man, I am all for that. You just need to understand what you're doing. The thing is, you can do skill development locally, you can do it at a facility, you could do it with a trainer, you could do it on your own, you can work on your skill development locally and you don't have to spend crazy amount of money on fall travel ball and then also weight room. You should be heavily lifting in the weight room. So my golden kind of fall, if you will. And what I typically recommend my guys that I work with is, hey, let's stay local, let's work on skill development, let's get in the weight room, start lifting heavy, start eating right and go to certain camps and showcases that make sense for us. I very rarely recommend fall travel unless we're coming back from like an injury or something like that. Even then I think you can get more out of doing training on your own with a, you know, with a teammate or with a trainer there. And then you're going to have a lot of people that watching this that are, hey, can I play another sport or should I just solely focus on fall ball or baseball? That's obviously a personal decision, but there's nothing wrong with playing a fall sport. I've talked to Coach Corbin about this. At Vanderbilt and many other schools, they love multi sport athletes. Okay. It is personal to you whether you want to do and if you truly love playing that other sport, hey, you should go play in the fall and do that and do what you can in the fall with baseball as we're going, especially if you want to play at the next level. So is fall travel ball worth it from a recruiting perspective? In my opinion, no. All right. Again, I think you should be working on your skills, getting in the weight room and then going to camps and showcases for that to get exposure. Now if you're looking for playing time, yeah, it can definitely be worth it there obviously. But you don't need to spend all that crazy amount of money going around the region or country to just to play. Try to play locally if you can. So if you have any questions, please comment down below and I will see you in the next video. Take care.
