The MAJOR bottleneck in high school recruiting!

Hey team, Alex Swenson here. Thanks for joining me today. The purpose of today's video is to bring you up to date on the new NCAA changes and to bring to your attention some of the current events that has been happening in college baseball that is affecting the recruiting process in high school and to how to best navigate that to give you or your son the best chance to play at the next level. If you're new to this channel, my name is Alex Swenson. I'm a former Division 1 college baseball coach and now I'm here to help you or your son go through this recruiting process. So if you get anything from today's video, please smash that like button that thumbs up down here and subscribe to my channel. I put out a weekly video on recruiting and how to just get better on and off the field. Alright, let's hop into it. So, as some of you may or may not know, there was a bottleneck that was created for student athletes in high school that were trying to go through this recruiting process and play college baseball or college athletes athletics. This was for all sports really. And this started when the pandemic hit in April of 2020. And the first event that really happened was when NCAA shut down the season, all seasons, you might have remembered, the baseball season was canceled, March Madness was canceled. Everything was just canceled. And in turn, NCAA gave everybody a year back of eligibility. So all the student athletes that were in college that missed their season, which was everybody got a year back of eligibility. And this is specifically for baseball as well. And so freshmen, sophomore, juniors and seniors that were that in 2020, well, in 2021, they were still, from an athletic standpoint, still freshmen, sophomore, juniors and seniors. So everybody was coming back. So what did that mean for high school student athletes that were still moving on, right? That were still, hey, moving on to a senior or coming into college or moving to a junior year, well, they weren't as in demand of high school athletes because they were getting all their college players back. And everybody got a year of eligibility which just lengthened their career in college. Okay, so this had multiple years of effects, if you will. Now the good news is that is dissipating as we go and that's the good news about it. But there are still some bottlenecks in this recruitment recruiting process and we're going to go over those two and of course we're going to go into just again, how to best navigate this recruiting process really quickly. Again, give yourself the best chance and to fight through these this bottleneck. If you will. All right, let's hop into it. All right. The first one that I want to start with is the NCAA Division I committee has just approved two blanket waivers. But to give you some context to this, before the pandemic for Division I baseball roster management, you could only have 35 active players. That was your limit. But for 2022 this season, actually that we're going into right now, it has been extended to 40 because of the extra year of eligibility. And actually in 2021, it was unlimited. You could have as many players as you wanted, but with the new approval of two blanket waivers for the 2023 year. Okay. And really moving forward, it looks like, or what they're suggesting suggesting is the roster size is going back down to 35, but may be up to 40 because of the extra year of eligibility. So if you still have like seniors, this is where I get back. It is dissipating the players that are staying in college for a long time. I mean, there's college players out there that have been in college for five or six years playing because maybe they had an injury or whatever, but they got a year of extra eligibility back. So they're bringing it back down to 35, which from a high school recruiting standpoint, as high school athletes, not necessarily a good thing. Okay. Because they're bringing obviously that roster number down. There's not as many spots available. A lot of coaches, although debatable, but many of them wanted to be at 40 because you have more players to compete and move forward. And for the scholarship standpoint, since the rosters went up, they extended the scholarships to 32. It was at 27 with 35, but it moved up to as much as 32 and it's bringing it back down to 27. So out of the 35 people on the roster, only 27 for baseball can have scholarships. And if any of you all know college baseball, you only have 11.7 scholarship to Divvy out, and that's if you're fully funded. So not a lot of scholarships here. And it's pretty rare for schools to have actually 27 guys on scholarship. That's only really power five schools do that. But. So this is another thing then NCAA committee is also saying that they are moving to have a 25% minimum scholarship back in place for 2023. That said, there is a lot of pushback to this. So what does that all that mean when they move to a unlimited roster or 40 man roster for college baseball? They said you could have any amount of scholarship. Okay. Given you could have 1% all the way up to, of course, 100% where as back before the pandemic it was 25% minimum. If you gave a scholarship, if you were a college baseball coach and you gave a scholarship, an athletic scholarship, that is to a high school graduate coming in or any, you know, any of the college players on there, because you can change it. It had to be 25% minimum. So that, that is changing and going back to that. So that is the one of the changes. One of the aspects to the bottleneck is if you have felt that this recruiting process has been more difficult, if you've heard this is one reason, let's get into the next reason. So the next reason is huge. This is a big one too. This is just as big is the NCAA transfer portal. And the NCAA created the one time transfer rule in April of 20211 and it allows athletes that are in college to transfer to different schools one time and play immediately. Where before if they were to transfer, they had to sit out a year, which was massive and for the most part was not worth it to the student athlete to sit out because you only have four years of eligibility to play in college. So if you miss a whole year, I mean that's 25%, that's a quarter of your career, which is big. So this rule effectively created free agency for college athletes is moving around as they go. And what does this mean for high school student athletes? Well now basically the high school student athletes competing with other college athletes and for positions. Because if a college coach is in need of a right handed pitcher or catcher, middle infielder or center fielder though, they can look at college players as well in the transfer portal, not only high school, where that wasn't really the case at all before this rule took into effect. So this is a bigger rule, this is creating more competition in the recruiting process and something that we need to be aware of going forward. The next one is the MLB draft. Okay, this is one aspect of it. This isn't a massive thing that's creating a bottleneck. But again, this is just another little piece that is creating that bottleneck and the recruiting process. So before 2020, the draft was 40 rounds, okay, 40 rounds, which was a lot of athletes, thousands of athletes going into the draft and going and playing possibly professionally. Not everybody went, but when the pandemic hit, it dropped down to 5 in 2020. So all the guys that would have gotten drafted from a 6 through 40 are now going to college. So they are going to college, which are they're taking up those roster spots where many of them would have gone on into play professionally and other high school athletes would have gotten those spots. Again, nothing wrong with this or as far as the athlete going to college, but this is just the reality of it. Now, the draft for this year is 20 rounds, which is good. Gave a little bit of relief for, at least for U.S. student athletes in high school going through this process, but still that it's looking like they're going to stay at 20. They're not going to go back up to 40 rounds because the. The minor leagues is actually shrunk. There's not as many minor league teams out there. And so they're not bringing in as many players, which ultimately means, again, high school players that would have gone and played minor league baseball are going to college right now, which in turn for college baseball. It's a really, really good thing making college baseball awesome. I mean, the talent in college baseball right now is unprecedented. It's unbelievable. But again, it makes it harder, make it more competitive, which, again, we just need to learn how to deal with. So let's talk about how we deal with that. Okay. You have to make sure to deal with all this bottlenecks. You are being proactive in this recruiting process. You are creating your school list. You are creating your skill video. You are reaching out to these college coaches and finding schools that are in need of your position to give yourself the best chance. Because some schools are not going to be in need of your position, some schools are not going to be looking for you, or they're going to be done with recruiting your position, or it just might not be a good fit as far as athletically, that you match their methodology or their skill set that they're looking for. And you need to have a wide range of schools, so the earlier you do this, the better. Okay. I usually suggest sophomore year, freshman year. I don't really suggest unless you're just a stud guy that's throwing. You know, if you're a pitcher, for example, 85 miles an hour already as a freshman. Yeah. Then you can start this process a little bit sooner. But for guys that are normally like, I wasn't a high school athlete, I wasn't ready to start the recruiting process freshman year. I needed to just get acclimated with my high school team, my high school coach, and help my high school team team out, not worry about college that early. But sophomore year, you could start that process. And I suggest doing that to get ahead of this. So I hope you got something from this video, please comment down below. Let me know if you have any questions or comments, and I will get back to you. All right, I'll see you in the next video. Take care.