What to expect freshman year as an athlete in college

Hey, how you doing? Alex here. Thanks for joining me. And today we're talking about what to expect as a college freshman student athlete to help you prepare for that chapter. You might already be committed, you might be your senior year or you're planning to be committed, maybe you're a little bit younger, maybe you're a junior or you're a sophomore or you're even a freshman and you're just thinking ahead and what does that look like? How do I prepare for what is coming? So that is what this. And this is going to be a little bit more honed in on baseball specifically, but it's really applicable to all the sports out there, so stay tuned. Feel free to share this with a friend as well that might be going through this or about to become a freshman in college. So a little background on me just in case you're new to my channel. My name is Alex Swinson. I'm a former Division I college coach, scout and recruiter. And now what I do is help high school baseball athletes go through this college recruiting process and help them find the best college fit. So if you're listening on my podcast or you're watching on my YouTube and you get any value from this, please like and subscribe. I put out a weekly video and a weekly podcast that hopefully helps you go through this college recruiting process. Alright, so let's get started. Before we get into what to expect, I want to talk about two things that you can work on right now in high school that's going to help you prepare for for freshman year in college, and that is mentality and physicality. Mentality, I want you to focus on putting your head down, getting rid of all the distractions in high school right now and work harder than you have ever worked in your life. I've seen this time and time again. Student athletes that commit in high school, especially early or whenever they let their foot off the pedal, they relax. No, no, no, no, no. You need to work harder than you have ever worked right now to help you prepare. Being a student athlete in college, you need to put your foot down as hard as you possibly can on that pedal and work, work, work. That's going to help you prepare. So mentality, get rid of the distractions and work hard. Work hard on your skill set. Work hard in the weight room. This is where you're getting physicality. Physicality. You need to be in the weight room, working on your strength, working on your speed, working on your reaction. Again, help you set yourself up for success. Hit the ground running your Freshman year. I want to talk about distractions real quick because we're going to have distractions in college. I don't want to talk about that. But we also have these distractions right now that you can start working on again. Right now we have distractions in life in general and focus. Eliminating these distractions and having a focus is a superpower. It helps you with your development, helps you with your success, man. Because if you can have a focus, it's going to help propel you forward as we go. So let's talk a little bit about distractions. Number one, late night video games. Video games. These video games are crazy addicting and they're crazy good. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying don't play any video games, but take the late night stuff to midnight, to 1, 2, 3, 4 o' clock in the morning out of your schedule because you need good quality sleep. Good quality sleeps, helps you develop physically. That's where you build your muscle mass, helps you with your focus, your brain. All right? Recovering your brain. And you're going to have early mornings in college, so. So late night stuff, man. Take that out. Number two of distraction is hanging out with the wrong people of bad influence, all right? These people can pull you away from your work. They can pull you away from your team. It's a big distraction. Make sure that you are hanging out with the right people of good influence to you that you admire and that inspires you. That's really, really important. Hang out with your team, frankly, all right? Hang out with the leaders of the team. The that's who you want to be around. Number three is parties. This is the reality of college. There's going to be parties. I went to parties. I just tried to be very smart with my decisions, okay? And you shouldn't be going to parties all the time. But the reality is there are going to be parties. There are going to be hangouts and things like that. Be smart with your decisions, guys. Drinking and drugs. It's in this world, it's in college. Be very, very smart with this stuff because this stuff can slow you down dramatically and it can also get you kicked off the team, okay? So be very, very smart and limit these distractions as much as you possibly can. All right, let's get into what to expect as a freshman student athlete in college. I have a bunch of notes in front of me and I want to start from the beginning. And that is moving day. Moving into the dorms, which is an exciting time. I remember it was yesterday that I moved into the dorms. I had so many great memories my freshman year in the dorms with my teammates and all of that. And please, please, please request that your roommate is a fellow team player. Usually they are the guys that come into your same class your freshman year. But you can request this with the college coaches. College coaches are usually on top of that. But you want your teammates to be with you as your roommate because it's a good accountability partner. You're just going to have similar schedules that are going to help you just get on routine as we go. In case you like, you miss your alarm, your roommate can wake you up like hey, we got to get to the weight room or we got to get to practice or whatever it may be. It's a good accountability partner. And pro tip here is start a group chat with all the guys that are coming in to your freshman year in your same class so you can get to know them and then you can get a feel of like who you want to roommate with. That's really, really important. I did that when I was recruiting. Bringing guys into their freshman class, like get them acclimated with, with each other, alright? And then you get acclimated with the dorms, you get acclimated with your roommate and all the guys, hopefully they're all around you get to know where all the other baseball guys are the freshman year and then get down to the baseball facility. Okay. See the coaches, say hello, get in the locker room, Spend as much time as you can in the locker room because this is where you really bond as, as a team and with your teammates. And also you're going to be around the facility a bunch. But just be being around there getting the vibes can help you get, become more comfortable for classes. Make sure you walk your class route before you even start classes so you know where you are going, you know where your classes are. That's super, super helpful. It kind of can leave some anxiety out of like I don't know where I'm going. If you've already done it, if you already walked it before classes, that that helps. And start off on a good foot academically. Make sure you're making all your classes. By the way, the coaches know when you don't make your classes so that's really, really big. And, and academically again, start off with good grades so coaches don't have to worry about it. You don't have to worry about it. And you're not trying to play catch up from a great standpoint. Then you're going to have meetings, you're going to have a team meeting, your baseball meeting, your sport meeting, college coaches are going to talk about expectations for that fall, expectations for the winter in the spring, talking about a game plan, you're going to talk about your schedules, you're going to have times of the the fall where you have four on ones and team practice. You're gonna start weightlifting probably right away. Usually weightlifting is done in the morning at 6am Typically that's where a lot of when I played and when I coached, a lot of our weight rooms were getting it out before classes. So you go 6am, you'd class at 8 or 9 depending on the day, go up to about 1, you get some lunch and then you have practice between 2 or 3, 3 all the way to 6 o' clock depending on if you have an inter squad day or more. Just skill work, then you have study hall at the end. Okay, so that's kind of the day in the life. But to get acclimated with that is making sure that you just understand the schedule and that you plan ahead of time and you know what you're doing. A good way to think about this is plan your day the night before so you know what's going on, you know where you need to be. Okay, then let me talk and rewind a little bit about 4 on ones. 4 on ones is what? When you can't have team practice every single day of the fall and of the winter, it's against NCAA rules. There's only a select number of days you can have team practice. I'm going to talk a little bit about that, which means you're going to have four on ones and that is with four players and one coach. So you're one of the players and that one coach is going to work with you during the week. And it's usually anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, three, four times a week because they can only work with you. There's all these NCAA rules compliance rules that they can do. But you're going to work on skill development. So if you're a position player, you're going to work with your positional coach, whether it's infield or outfield or catching, whatever it may be, you're going to work on those skills. Your course, you're going to hit pitchers, you're going to work on obviously your mechanics, you're going to look at video, you're going to throw bullpens, you're going to throw to hitters eventually. And those are going to be the individual times. Okay, when you're in the individual or four on ones. There's a lot more free time if you will as a student athlete you're going to have. Because you're not going to have a three to four hour team practice once. Three to four hour team practice. Come on. Your days are really full. Kind of rewinding what I said. From 6am workouts class to team workouts, you're going to have team practices in the fall again. That slotted a number of days. I don't know, I can't remember exactly how many days. Like 28 days. And you have to have one day off a week usually. Typically I saw when we did it it was off on Sunday or Monday. But if you have rain it can adjust your schedule. So you're going to be practicing Tuesday through Sunday sometimes or Monday through Saturday all the way through with those three to four hour practices. Some practices are going to be inter squad games, some practices are going to be hey first and third bunt defense, BP selective situations and games that you'll work on and things like that. And that's kind of the team if you will. And then there's this new rule that you're going to be able to play three opponents in the fall. So when I played and when I was coaching, we couldn't play any body in fall so we would only play ourselves. The first opponent that we would see would be our first game in the spring. But now, which is a great new change that you can play three other colleges in the fall, which is awesome because you get some competition, somebody else in a different uniform rather than just playing intersquad game and you can see really good live game situation. Coaches are able to evaluate it. So that's all in the fall. All right. There's a lot going on, a lot of development in the fall. You're going to get strong in the weight room and then you're going to go to winter and winter. Winter break. Winter break can be like a month long and you're going to have a schedule that's that you're going to need to stick to because when you come back from winter break season is going to be right around the corner in February, mid February to late February, sometimes early March, depending on the school and the division. But you're going to have a quick turnaround and you need to be on top of the ball. You can't lose any of what you brought in into the fall over the winter break. So you have to stick to your schedule from your weight training to hey, your arm care to hitting all that stuff, your skill development. And then you come back sometimes in the middle of January rather and you'll pick up, there'll be a week or two of those four on ones and then you're going to go right into team practice for about three or four weeks before the season. And then you're going to have season from Division 1 level. You're going to have four to five games a week. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then sometimes you have Tuesday, Wednesday games back to back. Sometimes it'll just be a Tuesday or a Wednesday and then Friday, Saturday, Sunday. You're traveling with all this depending on your schedule and it's full go from hey, you have to stay up with your academics, you have to get to your classes, you have practices that the days that you are not playing games, you still have to have one day off as well during the season. So usually that's Mondays because you're going to play Friday, Saturday, Sunday off Monday, game Tuesday, practice Wednesday, practice Thursday, travel there. If you're traveling that weekend game Friday, Saturday, Sunday, travel back Sunday off Monday. That's a kind of a normal routine there. Then you have summer ball. Summer ball is these college coaches usually do a good job of putting you in a summer league. Summer league in college is pretty intense, I gotta tell you. A lot of people have heard of Cape Cod League. There's leagues up in Alaska, there's leagues in Florida and New York, out on the west coast, up on the Midwest. And you're playing a lot of games, especially position players. And if you didn't play a lot that year, then you should go and play summer ball to get a lot of at bats. All the summer balls in college are usually 95% of the majority of college players. And it's really, really good competition again, especially in the Cape. That Cape is like the cream of the crop that go there and then you come back in the fall and you repeat that in your sophomore year. Sophomore year is when you really see guys settling down because you know what to expect. But hopefully this video helped you of what to expect from a fall all the way to summer. And if you did, please smash that like button and that thumbs up and I will see you in the next video. Take care.