Recruiting is in full swing - are you ready?

We are entering the best time of the year for the college recruiting process because college coaches are going to be really just freed up from their time perspective to go out and evaluate talent, evaluate players, find positions that they're in need of for your particular class. And by the way, they're not in need of every position for every class. There's a lot of factors that are involved in that. The guys that are leaving the program, guys that are coming into the program, guys in your class, guys before your class, guys post your class, all these different factors involved with this. But about 80 to 85% of all college coaches are going to be released really after this weekend. And the reason why for that is conference tournaments are happening right now, and once the college team loses, there's no longer really kind of hunkered down with their season. I mean, these, these schools and these coaches are playing four to five games a week. And during your high school season, they can't really go out and recruit that much, not as easily as they're going to be able to this summer. That's why, I mean, literally all they're going to be doing is recruiting this summer and again, evaluating talent, watching games, etc. From there being at showcases and camps. And we just want to make sure we're prepared and ready and we want to make sure that we are maximizing ourselves this summer and really goes into the fall. But I want to talk specifically about this summer going forward and just again, position ourselves and making sure we're positioning ourselves so we can again give ourselves the best chance to play at the next level. So if you, if you have no idea who I am, my name is Alex Swenson. I'm a former Division 1 college coach, Scout and recruiter. And what I do now is help high school athletes, specifically baseball athletes, go through this college recruiting process and just put them in the best possible position. So I put out a weekly video just on the recruiting process and how to get better on and off the field. So if you get anything from this video, please smash that, like, button and subscribe to my channel. I put out a weekly video and if you want any more information down in the descriptions below, you'll be able to schedule a call with me or take a look at my website to get more detail about what I do. But let's hop into today's topic. Hey, make sure you're watching college baseball over this next week or really this next month, because we have about another month left of college baseball this weekend. Division 2 and Division 3 are having their super regionals. The winners of those will go on to the College World series for Division 2 and Division 3. And Division 1 is having their conference tournament. And next weekend we will be the NCAA Tournament, which is the March madness of college baseball for Division 1. 64 teams will enter and they will go all the way through from the NCAA tournament to super regionals and then the College World Series, which again will end at the end of June. But watch these teams. Watch the teams that you are going for as far as the level of college baseball and that you feel is going to be a good fit for you. You. And observe the talent, right? Watch the talent's a great way to learn and to see where you're at and where you need to improve and what your competition is, right? There's so much to learn, not only the game of baseball to, but to see what these guys are doing, how physical they are, and help motivate you to get physical, right? And to improve your game where you need to and improve your skill set at your position. College baseball is in the best spot that I've seen it in a long, long time. I mean, the accessibility to watch college games through streaming services and just on TV now is higher than ever. And it's in a really, really healthy spot. So you being a high school baseball player, a parent of a high school player, it's an exciting time because there's so much. It's so much ease when I was playing and my parents, my parents couldn't watch a game very easily if they didn't come down, which I was way out of town, I was about 500 miles away, so it was tough for them to see. Now it's so easy to watch a game really, at any level. So check that out. But let's get into what we need to be doing to help ourselves play and maximize our recruiting this summer, number one is reaching out to college coaches before and after your recruiting events. So this can be showcases, this can be camps, this can be for the top tournaments. Tournaments can be tricky because frankly, there's some tournaments out there. There's really not a lot of college coaches at. And which is frustrating because you could have a long weekend or even a week and you don't really see that many college coaches. But at certain showcases and certain camps, there's good ones out there and there's bad ones out there. You know, the college coaches that are going to be there and you know that the college coaches that are there, they're actually recruit. You want to make sure that you are sending your information to them beforehand. Ideally, it's within that week of the recruiting event, so you're on the top of their mind going into that event. And then of course, you're following up. Now during the camps and showcases, you want to make sure that you are interactive with the college coaches. I know that can feel uncomfortable sometimes as a teenager, but it can say a lot about a student athlete coming up and just introducing your. It doesn't have to be a long, drawn out conversation. And they're not. College coaches aren't honestly going to want all that because they're evaluating players. But it's good to come up, look a coach in the eye, shake your hand and introduce yourself and just say you look forward to competing in front of them or if you're in the middle of it or post, is there anything that I could work on or anything that you liked, etc. From there, number two is go where the college coaches are. So maybe you're just doing tournaments this summer, which again, I don't advise always just going to tournaments unless you're on the number one team. Okay, you need to be on the number one team where you're going to have college scouts watch you. Now, as a parent, you're going to be able to observe this and see if actual college scouts are there. If they're not, then that tournament is probably not that good. Or you're not on the number one team, which is okay. I was never really on the number one team. I got my exposures through certain showcases and camps where college coaches were at. But as a student athlete, as a high school player, you should not be worried about. This is much easier said than done. You should not be worried about recruiting. Recruiting process. College scouts there watching you play. You need to be playing loose and not worried about all of that stuff when you're at the game because you just need to be focused on the game. But as a parent, you can definitely observe just like, hey, is this tournament worth it? Is it not worth it? And get some feedback from the, from the actual summer organization of if they're not like, why is this the case? Why are we at this tournament if their college coaches aren't here, etc. So when I say go where the college coaches are, this means the showcases in camps that, that they're going to be at. Some showcases are really, really good because they have 50 to 100 coaches some of these events and man, you can knock out of a lot of exposure playing in front of showcase events when you're looking at showcases and camps, make sure they're one day of at least one day events and preferably two because you want to play games as well. You don't want to just do a, a showcase where it's just the metrics, right? You do the pro style, meaning you, if you're an infielder, you take five ground balls, you take some BP, you run a 60 and that's it. Well, that's not really showing you what you're going to do in the game. All right. You need to be able to place play a game and show what you can do in the game. Especially if you're like average metrics and you're not a big standout. I was never a big standout metrics guy, but I could really play in the game as a gamer and the games were super important to me. For most players they are. So don't go to a showcase or a camp if you're not going to play games. I'm a big believer in that. Number three is you're not going to be able to be everywhere. Obviously you're not going to be able to attend all the showcases and camps and etc. From there. So you need to maximize your exposure through technology and your personal recruiting video and getting your video out there to help garner interest and to get things moving and communication with college coaches. So utilize your personal recruiting video is going to be really, really important over the summer to again, maximize exposure because you're not going to be able to get in front of everybody. But the beautiful thing about technology, it can help a lot from an exposure standpoint. And number four, the last one is stay physical, stay in the weight room over the summer. I know that this can be difficult, but this is so, so important to do. And the reason why is you can lose so much weight over the summer. I did this, I did not lift earlier on in my career. I did not lift during the summer or that very minimal. I lifted and I lost a lot of weight, I lost a lot of strength, which has affected my performance. Stay consistent. A good goal is to go at least two or three times, preferably three throughout the week. And you can lift before a game. It's not going to hurt your performance of big leaguers. Mike Trout lifts before almost every single game. A lot of guys do this, all right? So that's kind of a myth out there. Like I don't want to lift before my game because I'm going to get tired and I'm going to lose my strength. That is not the case at all. So stay consistent in the weight room and make sure that we are not losing weight. Because if we're losing weight, we're losing muscle, we're losing strength, and we're affecting our performance. And we want to stay physical during the summer. So I hope you got something from this video. If you did, please smash that, like, button and subscribe to my channel, and I will see you in the next video.