The recruiting process has CHANGED - be prepared

We are in the wild, wild west of college baseball in the recruiting process right now. And I wanted to make this video because I've been getting a lot of questions about what this means for high school athletes, high school baseball athletes in particular, as we go into the thick of the recruiting process this summer and all the changes that have happened with the transfer portal, the draft shrinking, name, image and likeness, and of course, junior college. So I want to talk about that and how that has affected the recruiting process or could be affecting and what we can do to help ourselves. Because the reality of it is it has definitely gotten harder. I'm going to go into reasons why and I'm going to talk about what we can do to help ourselves go through this recruiting process as we go. So my name is Alex Swinson. If you're new to my channel. I'm a former Division 1 college baseball coach, scout and recruiter. And now what I do is I help talented high school baseball athletes go through this recruiting process and just help them find the best college fit for them. So if you get anything from this video, please smash that, like button that thumbs up down here and subscribe to my channel. I put out a weekly video on the recruiting process and just here to help you guys as much as I possibly can. Alright, let's hop into it. So the recruiting landscape has dramatically changed and the main reason for this is there's a few of them, but the main reason is the transfer portal. So what exactly does that mean? So about a year ago, NCAA made a rule change allowing athletes, college athletes, to transfer from one college, their current college, to another without penalty. Before they made this rule change, if you decided to transfer out of your current college to another college, you had to sit out a year, which pretty much stopped anybody from transferring. Because if you have to sit out a year, it goes against your eligibility. And you only have four years of eligibility, so that's 25% of your playing time gone. So it was dramatic enough where it really prevented people from transferring, but now you can transfer one time. But what does this, this mean for the high school baseball athlete? All right, us going through this recruiting process. Well, basically this means that the high school athlete is competing now against other established college athletes. Because now as a college coach, right, a college coach that's going out, they're going into this transfer portal, which I'll pull up here and I'm going to scroll down as there's over 1900 college players in this transfer portal. And what all these names mean is they are leaving their program and seeking out another program to play at, which ultimately they're just going to take another spot from this. From another program. Okay. Which high school athletes would typically take. All right? And now with the state of college baseball and college athletics in general, it's very important, especially at the Division 1, is we win now. Right? We win now for the college coach's sake. Because if you don't win now, right. Your job security is not very good. You're going to get booted out. Okay? So college coaches are looking for impact players right away. So the reality of it is, if you take an established college player that has done well or pretty well at another college and you take a high school athlete, you're going to go usually with the college athlete. Now, that said, it doesn't mean that they're not going to recruit high school athletes. They definitely will. But the reality of it is, if you do the math, they're not going to take as many high school baseball athletes. So that makes it even more difficult going through this recruiting process and finding a college is difficult. Okay? There's about a 7% success rate if we're talking division one division, division two, and division three. Okay? Now there's also junior college as well, which I believe my theory is junior college is going to be really, really popular, and it could be a really good option for a lot of high school athletes. Not everybody, but a lot of high school athletes, because it used to be where high school athletes would compete with some junior college players, but that became just kind of common. All right? And on average, a recruiting class would have eight to 12 high school athletes coming into the program and then some junior college, okay? So there. But that's going to shrink a little bit because they're going to take either more junior college and. Or they're going to bring in other transfers from the transfer portal. Okay? So the next thing that is happening that is affecting the. The recruiting process from high school, okay. And it's not as much as the transfer portal is the draft. So the draft now is cut in half. There used to be over 40 rounds in the draft. Now there are 20 rounds. So all those players that were going to go professional from rounds 21 to 22 all the way up through 40, and I think it was like 43 at one point. Some weird, weird number. So 43, they're all going to go to college now because they're not going to get drafted. All right? There'll be some of you that sign a professional contract, etc. But most of Them are all going to go to college, so they're going to take those slots. And again, they're taking slots from other high school athletes. Now technically those are high school athletes that are getting drafted out of high school. Okay, so they're still technically, but they would have gone to play professionally and other high school players would have gone in and taken that slot. So again, this is dramatically changing the recruiting. And I say at the beginning of this video, we are in the wild wild west of the college baseball and recruiting. Another factor of why we're in the wild wild west, other than just the recruiting and everything that I just explained is there's name, image and likeness. College players not specifically in baseball as much, although they're starting to get paid as more. But college players are getting paid now from private companies because they can get paid by basically like sponsors. Okay, Nike, this is just an example. Nike can pay college athletes to be. There's basically the Nike sponsoring that athlete. And there's a lot of companies out there now that are paying athletes. And again, not just only in baseball, but football is getting paid the most. There is like a girl at LSU who's on the gymnastics team. I think she has a million dollar contract. It is just, it's crazy right now because college athletes have never been paid before and now they are. And everybody's trying to figure out how to handle this. Okay, so whether you believe they should be paid or not, it really doesn't matter. It's just like everybody's trying to figure this out and how to best navigate this as we go through this. That's why we're in the wild, wild west of this. Not only from the recruiting standpoint, but now athletes getting paid a lot of money to play and to sponsor certain companies. Okay, so I wanted to talk a little bit briefly about what can we be doing to help ourselves. Gives us the best chance to play at the next level. First off, you need to look at all the levels and I get it. I know that you want to play at the highest level that you possibly can, Division 1. And most people, not I shouldn't say most, but a lot of kids go after the Power 5 schools, which is fantastic. I understand that. All right, Power 5 schools are the SEC, ACC, you know, the PAC 12, all those schools there. And that's great and all, but they discount the mid major division ones or the lower division ones, which are fantastic programs. And they also discount Division 2 and Division 3, which are excellent, excellent levels to play a college baseball at a lot of Division two. S and Division threes would beat up on division ones. I don't know if you guys saw but in NAIA program beat a division one program this year. So this says that the level of college baseball, the talent that's going into college baseball is better than ever. And you need to make sure that you have a wide school list, not only division ones, but division two, Division Threes and have a true evaluation of yourself of where you project out. Okay. Because college coaches aren't recruiting you of who you are right now. They're projecting out where you're going to be. Right? Yes, of course. They're looking at your athleticism, your metrics, which is one piece of the puzzle. And they're also looking at your physicality, how well you look and again how much you project out when you're, if you're a sophomore or junior right now, what, what are you going to be like? Freshman, sophomore, junior year? That's super important. But you have to show some characteristics of that. So the reason why I say you should have an evaluation is have a coach that knows what they're doing and can give you a true evaluation of what you're doing well, but probably more importantly, it is more important what you need to improve on. All right? Specifically at your position and the skill set that you need to improve so you can project out which level of baseball are you going to be? Alright. And so you can accurately go after those schools and not miss opportunities. There's so many missed opportunities of players that go after Power 5 schools that could have easily played at a lower Division 1 or Division 2 or Division 3 school and had an amazing experience. An amazing experience. Being a student athlete and at the next level was a life changing experience for me and is a life changing for a lot of athletes every single year. Why is that the case? Because the experiences that you're going to have as a team, as a student athlete, the life skills that you're going to learn on and off the field, how to deal with failure, how to deal with success, your work ethic, how to go after one goal as a unit, as a team, the relationships that you build, all of these things you can get at all of these levels. And the honest truth of it is you're not going to play this game forever. You're just not. Nobody plays this game forever, right? So setting ourselves up for success after baseball is super, super important. And we can be so hyper focused on playing baseball at the next level that we forget about the school aspect of it. We miss the opportunities of finding the right, college fit that's going to fit us socially, geographically, of course, financially, all of these factors involved. Okay, but go after them, right? You're also going to need to go after them and hey, be engaged with them, right? You can't just sit on the sidelines and hope that somebody's going to find you. You need to go out and recruit schools, but recruit realistic schools and some reach schools, too. So make sure you are doing that to give yourself the best chance in this ever changing landscape in the wild, wild West. All right. Let me know if you have any questions. Please comment down below if you agree or disagree with anything that I have said and would love to hear any feedback that you guys want me to talk about as we go through this process. I look forward to hearing from you and I will see you in the next video. Have a great day.