Travel Ball vs Showcases vs Camps: Which is better?

We have travel ball, we have tournaments, we have showcases, we have camps, we have all of these things. It's almost overwhelming, this recruiting process, just in general, not let alone just those things. And we're gonna go into detail about each. What should you be doing? What shouldn't you be doing? The pros, the cons. I get so many questions really, year round, should I be playing summer travel ball? Should I be playing fall ball or should I focus on certain camps or showcases and or both showcases in camps. We're going to be talking about that. And if you're new to my channel, my name is Alex Swenson. I'm a former Division I college baseball coach, scout and recruiter. And now what I do is help high school baseball players and their families navigate this college recruiting process and put them in the best possible position to play at the next level. So if you get any value from this video or podcast, please smash that like button that thumbs up, share it with a friend and subscribe. Would love to for you to subscribe on the podcast as well. It's a lot sometimes easier to listen to in the car or at the baseball field as well and just trying to provide as much value as I can. So let's first talk about travel ball in particular summer travel ball and then I'm going to talk a little bit about fall travel ball as well. So some summer travel ball, it is not as effective as it used to be from a recruiting state standpoint. Let me tell you why. But before I get into that, let's talk about the pros. So there's no doubt travel baseball in the summertime, it's great from a playing standpoint and getting better and playing against good competition, you will typically face good competition. It depends on your organization, it depends on your travel ball. And before I knock travel ball too much, there are some good organizations out there. It's just starting to get fewer and fewer because it's gotten so big. There's so many travel ball organizations, there's so many tournaments with so, so many games. It is really just kind of flooded the market and diluted everything. So the pros are. It's definitely good from a plane experience, which is great. We do need to play this game. But the question you should be asking yourself, can I do that locally or do I have to get on a travel ball organization and travel around the region or the country? You could save a lot of money if you can do that locally. Okay. But from a recruiting standpoint, unless you are on the top tier team with good Coaches, all right. It's usually not the best from a recruiting standpoint, from an exposure standpoint. And think about this, right? You go to all these tournaments, whether it was in the summertime, think about when you were out and playing, whether you're a player or parent watching this. Were there a bunch of college coaches watching you at all of your games? Probably not. All right. Are there some cases like that? Yeah, but it's becoming fewer and fewer because again, this is diluted. I talk to these college coaches almost on a weekly basis. It's getting really hard for them to find players at tournaments and again travel teams because people are switching all the time and all of these things that are going on. So from a fall, or, excuse me, summer travel ball standpoint, it's good. From an experience standpoint, getting better and playing the game and seeing some good competition, there's nothing wrong with that. But from a recruiting standpoint and exposure standpoint, it's not the best way you can go about this. I also want to talk about fall travel ball. I'm honestly not the biggest fan of fall travel ball. I think it's super overrated, especially because the quiet period is so much into the fall. There's only really about three weeks of the contact period where you can actually get exposure. And most of the schools and coaches are actually on their campus with practice in full go mode there. And I just don't think it's a great roi, honestly. I think you should be focused more on skill development. Maybe you know, in an indoor facility, training, getting with a personal coach, getting in the weight room, focus on skill development, things like that. Getting strong, working on explosive movements, focus on your recovery and or play a different sport too. You could take a little bit of break of baseball too from coming from a baseball guy and a coach at the Division 1A level with 11 years of experience. Go play a different sport too. That's okay. It's not going to affect your recruiting here. So many guys that do that to play at the next level. And Coach Corbin at Vanderbilt talks a lot about that. They love multi sport athletes. So fall travel ball, again, not the biggest fan. This is a time where you could focus on showcases and, or camps. Let's talk about showcases here. Now this is the thing with showcases. Showcases are third party companies bringing in college coaches to scout players. I'm not in this case, I'm not talking about PBR or perfect game. And the reason why I'm not talking about them is because you don't know which schools are going to Be there at a PBR or perfect game like showcase, if you will. I'm talking about showcases that we know which college coaches are going to to be there. And showcases can be very, very beneficial. On the recruiting and exposure side of things. If you go to the good ones, the right ones, okay, There's a lot out there and not all of them are created equal. Not all of them are good. So I'm going to talk a little bit about why it is good as far as the pros from an exposure and recruiting standpoint is because one we're getting directly in front of college coaches. Now the, the good ones that you want to look for, we want to look for showcases that you're going to do a pro style, you're going to do always a pro style that is, hey, you're going to take ground balls. If you're an infielder, you're going to take, you're going to take 10 to 15 swings in BP, you're going to run a 60. All of that. If you're an outfielder, you're going to throw the bases. If you're a pitcher, you're going to throw a bullpen possibly if you have games, catchers, you're going to do your pop time, you're going to hit. It's the showcase standpoint. We call it pro style at the college and professional level. But we don't want just that. All right. Because that doesn't give a true evaluation of the player. We want that. And games, okay? Games is critical in an evaluation standpoint. Right. If games weren't important, a lot of people would just be recruited off of solely just video and or you know, a two hour showcase. That is not the case. Okay. We want to make sure we're looking for showcases where we one, we know that the college coaches are gonna be there and it's the right college coaches. It's the coaches that are either the recruiting coordinator, the head coach, the position coach, not necessarily the volunteer or sometimes. Now it's getting into interns here. Those guys aren't necessarily making decisions on recruiting. We wanna get in front of the decision makers. Okay, Going through this again, not the volunteer or intern side of things. Nothing against volunteers or interns. They're great. I was one during my coaching career. Moved out of that role to a recruiting coordinator, but they just have a different role from recruiting side of things. Okay. So looking for showcases that are at least a day long, preferably two days long on a showcase standpoint and again making sure that we know which college coaches are going to be there and asking if it just has the logo of the school, ask which coaches are going to be there. Okay. So you can do your homework. If you're ever looking for that at some top showcases or campsite, go to premierathletes app. All right. My recruiting platform, baseball specific that walks you step by step through this and will help you with some of the top showcases there. So that's the showcases. Great from a recruiting standpoint, not necessarily playing experience and things like that because you're only going to play one or two games, sometimes three if you're lucky there. But this is more for recruiting. I focus on recruiting side of things. Then we have the school camps. Typically. Okay. A showcase can be a good transition to a school camp. Okay. And let me explain why they can notice you at a showcase. Say you were at a showcase two day event, they really liked you and they wanted to invite you to campus. They wanted to see you at their one day camp. And the thing is, the school camps are school specific. So if the University of Florida invites you to their camp, their school camp, and typically it's usually only them, there's some schools out there, like the University of Richmond does a pretty good job bringing other schools in. If it's during the quiet period, they can bring in like D2s and D3s, nai some jucos as well. But typically it's just that school. This is school camps. Now the thing is with school camps, the truth of the matter is a lot of them, not all of them, a lot of them blast out emails to literally everybody on their mail list. So it's not necessarily the most personal side of things. So you can't necessarily go to all the school camps. Right. You should be having a good school list of schools that you're targeting that's going to be a good fit for you athletically and academically to start. So if we're looking at certain schools and we're considering school camps and we're getting emails and maybe it is a blast email. And just because it's a blast email from a school doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't go. All right, you might want to consider it. If it's a good fit for you athletically, do you make meet the athletic standards of those schools where you are in this recruiting process? Are they a good fit for you academically? You might want to consider that then. Of course, if a college coach personally reaches out to you, you should highly consider that as you go through that because that is showing true interest there as we go through this process. And the same thing applies for school camps that we want to look for, that we were looking for from a showcase standpoint. We want it to be at least a day. A lot of them are a day, but they're doing a pro style in the beginning, in the middle or the beginning of the day and then a game in the afternoon. And then there's some good camps out there that are two days. It's a Saturday, Sunday, and you're getting a lot and you get an interaction. The positives of this is you're getting directly in front of these college coaches, usually interacting with them a lot. So I'm a big fan of school camps, especially if it's a good fit for you athletically and academically and if they're recruiting your position. So you might be getting a lot of emails, you're not sure what is legit, what is not. Go on and reply back to them asking them what they are looking for in your class, are they looking for your position? Attach your video maybe and ask for feedback to see if there could be a possibility there. That way you're creating some dialogue from that standpoint and seeing if there is actually any true interest from the there. So we have travel ball tournaments in there showcases in camps. Hopefully that helps you when you're navigating this process. If you have any questions, please reach out to me and please comment down below as well if you are interested in any other topics or have any questions and I'll see you in the next video. Take care.