NCAA Fall Recruiting Contact Period Has Started - For Baseball

Hey, how you doing? Alex here. Thanks for joining me. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about the recruiting rule change that we just entered and why that is important and to look ahead and think ahead of things that are going to be happening and what we can consider doing this fall and winter to put ourselves in the best possible position to play at the next level. That is what I'm here for. And if you're new to my channel, my name is Alex Swinson. I'm a former Division 1 college baseball coach, scout, and recruiter. And now what I do is help high school baseball athletes and their parents get noticed and go through 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 episode, please smash that, like, button and that thumbs up. If you're on YouTube and if you're on the podcast listening, please subscribe. It is growing quickly, and I love that people are listening. That's fantastic. In the car or wherever you may be at the practice page, Parents. I found that parents, you know, listen to me at practices and things like that. So that's fantastic. And please leave comments in the YouTube section or anywhere to help me talk about topics that you guys want to know about. And I also try to do topics that you just might not even be aware of going through this college recruiting process because you can't know everything. You guys have busy lives and all that good stuff. But we're going to dive into this and what all this means. But. But before we do, we're going to take a listen to our sponsor, who I'm pumped that they are sponsoring this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Element. I absolutely love them. Been using them the last two years. So what is Element? Element is a tasty electrolyte drink with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. I am a health nut, and in my opinion, this is the healthiest electrolyte drink on the market. You probably have a teenager that sweats a lot. At practices that get games during training, you might actually sweat a lot, too. I know that I do, and this is why I use it a lot. And the thing is, when we sweat a lot, we can lose up to seven grams of sodium. And if we don't replace that sodium, there's things that can happen. We can have lackluster performance. We can have muscle fatigue, we can have muscle cramps. So we want to prevent that. So the key benefits is this can boost performance and recovery. And prevent and eliminate headaches, muscle cramps, fatigue, sleepiness, all of those things. There's dozens of professional athletes and teams that are on monthly subscriptions of Element. This is actually the free sample pack that you will get. So try Element today with this special offer. Claim your free Element sample pack of 8 when you order using the link down below. All right, now let's get into the recruiting rule change that just happened. And I put up a calendar on YouTube. So if you're watching on YouTube, you obviously see this. And if you're listening on the podcast, I'm going to do my best to explain this. So basically, I have six months from August through January, and we are currently in September right now. And we just entered the contact period, so I'm going to highlight this. And we started the contact period on September 15th. So we were just into the quiet period, really started at the end of August and went into beginning of September. And we were in the contact period for a lot of the summer, mostly all the summer as we went. And now we're going to be hopping around from the contact period to the quiet period, et cetera here. And again, we're in September now. Over the next, really three weeks, we're going to be in the contact period. Well, why is that important and what does that exactly mean? So the contact period means that college coaches can now go watch and evaluate players off of their campus. When we're in the quiet period, which is this tan color. If you're watching here, that means college coaches cannot go watch tournaments, cannot go watch showcases that are off their campus. They can only watch and evaluate and have college visits, okay, on their campus. Basically, they can have only in person contact or visually watch a player on their campus during the quiet period. The green, which is the contact period, which we just indicated entered, again, means that college coaches can leave their campus and do all of those things off their campus, barring any, as far as in person contact, talking to it, barring your year of graduation, because there's rules with that, which I'm not going to get into right now. You've heard me probably talk about it, but I'll get into that on another episode. But they can go out and watch. They can watch any player, whether you're a freshman or sophomore or junior, and evaluate you there just depends on whether they can start recruiting you and have like recruiting interactions. So we got into the contact period September 15th. We will be here through October 8th. Okay. I've had a lot of questions, in particular on my YouTube and Instagram page. There's a lot of showcases happening and tournaments happen at the end of October. Division 1 schools will not be there because they cannot be there. They can be at showcases, which I highly recommend is during the contact period. Meaning there's certain showcases out there, third party events, not necessarily PBR or Perfect Game. Not talking about them. I'm talking about other third party showcases that you guys probably get emails of from them. And they're not all created equal. Honestly. Some of them could lure you in with a school logo and worst case the coach or schools are not even there or it's not the decision maker. It's like a volunteer or head coach. We want the decision makers there and go to those because we know we're going to be getting exposure to those college coaches where tournaments at like a PG event or a PBR event. We have no idea who's going to be there. We just have no idea. Right. And a lot of oftentimes they're not there, especially in the fall because they're either practicing, they have their on campus practice and things like that, which we're going to actually talk about here in a minute. But that's where I like going, to certain showcases that we know college coaches are going to be there and the coaches that will be there that are the decision makers during this time and letting coaches know that will be in certain areas. And I also do realize there's a lot of players that will be playing tournaments and that's completely fine. Playing and all that is completely fine. You're going to be getting better there, sending out your schedule where you're going to be just in case a college coach will be at that tournament and at that game. So we're in the contact period. And then October 8th, we want to watch what we're doing as far as just spinning our money and our time past this. So October 9th starts and we go all the way through January and February of the quiet period, which means certain showcases and camps. It's not worth going to if we're going from an exposure standpoint to get in front of college coaches. So save your time, save your money. Better to go to camps, videos and all that social media. Having people like place you at certain places as well. Finding schools that are recruiting your position and that recruiting your class. Very important during this time. So now I want to talk a little bit about visiting schools this time right now, especially for baseball players because we're not as busy with our spring season and our summer season. Very important. And I would highly recommend visiting Schools, especially just locally. A couple of different reasons. One, students are on campus. It is vibrant and this is a big one. Especially starting in September, middle of September, most schools have their baseball practices going. So they have fall ball going on. They're practicing during the week and especially on the weekends. They have intersquads on the weekends. And some Division 1 schools will be playing games. They'll play two or three games in the fall that you can go and watch. I mean, again, especially some of your local schools, going to visit them and watch a practice can really help you gauge where you need to be and where you need to get to and also gauge. And so the college coach can see you at practice because college coaches know who's watching their practices as we go. So this is a great way to. To get familiar with the program, how they run their program, how they run their practices, et cetera. That I just recommend that so much going forward and then also seeing campus, seeing if you get a feel of the campus, see if this is what you. Where you see yourself. And a lot of the time you'll have a gut feeling of like, I just don't see myself here or I definitely see myself here. So that's very, very helpful. Make sure you can go and do that. When do I recommend? That depends on, I mean, sophomore, junior year, Sophomore, really at the earliest, junior year, definitely. We want to be going or in between there and then of course going into senior year. We definitely want to have and have been at some schools also things to focus on weight training in the fall, lifting heavy and focus on building mass, building muscle, especially doing this the right way, making sure if we're going to lift heavy that we are lifting correctly and we have some supervision, whether that's their strength coach or anything like that, spotters, all that for safety. But this is the time to really develop our muscles and get bigger. It's harder to do that during the season and spring and summer, but this is the time to do that. Focus on your nutrition, focus on your protein intake. If you weigh around 180 pounds, you want around 180 grams of protein. Protein that's going to help build your muscles as well. And then what else we have the weight training. Long toss, Long toss is huge, especially right now in the fall and the winter. Take some time if you need to going off of a summer break to recover your arm, but you should be long tossing twice a week. And if you're pitching, yeah, you have your outing, you might have your bullpen find a way to get at least one one long toss session in and work your way back. And really try to go high intensity with your long toss, especially when your arm is fresh. Listen to your arm. If you are sore, do not long toss obviously, but get your arm into a spot to where you can long toss and extend that out. It is still like some of the best ways to increase your arm velocity and your velo as we go through this, but that is what I have for you today. Keep an eye out on this calendar here. Take a picture of this as we go. Let me know if you have any questions. Please comment down below and I will see you in the next video. Have a great fall. Talk to you soon. Bye.