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Game Of The Student
by Dave
Friday, March 31, 2006
I was reminded today that while we often speak of softball players as, hopefully, students of the game, we should also keep in mind that softball is a game played by many students. That is, one of the objectives of all this effort we put into the game, aside from the extreme amounts of fun it gives us, is to obtain full or partial scholarships to fund or defray the extremely high cost of college. What triggered this thought in me was a discussion I saw on a softball forum. That discussion centered around the issue of whether girls who play high school softball can also play travel ball. Some high school coaches forbid their players from practicing with their travel clubs during the season. I can see the logic in that but let's not forget that high school ball is NOT the gateway to a college scholarship.
Your average college softball team begins practicing before the high school teams hit the field. Their season begins earlier and ends later. They practice pretty much all the time and when they aren't practicing, they are playing double headers all over the country. They and their staffs have little time to do anything even close to recruiting while they are rather busily taking care of business with the existing team. They don't have time to plow through the sports pages of newspapers covering their entire recruiting area. They must find another way to locate and evaluate potential recruits.
Now, once the season is over, we have an entirely different situation. The coaches are free to roam wherever they like and they do. They roam to all sorts of college showcase tournaments and there are many of these.
The trick is finding a showcase where the coaches of your choice are likely to be in attendance and then hopefully get them to see you play. Now that sounds passive but it is not. You could approach this task as a passive, reactive pursuit and simply wait for some college coaches to see you smack the ball out of the yard or do something else noteworthy. Then you could sit back and wait for some coach to contact you and offer something. Maybe you'd get a partial scholarship offer from some school in a state you've never dreamed of going to college in at a school you've never heard of which does not offer the curriculum for the major you've wanted since you were five. Or maybe you could participate in the recruiting process a little more aggressively.
Here's a thought, how about making a list of schools you are interested in? You could cull the list down to a select couple dozen which you might consider and then check out whether the school has softball and decide whether the program is a reasonable fit for you. You could rank the schools from top to bottom, maybe cut a few more off the list. Then you might try contacting the coaches of the teams directly to express your interest. Coaches are not allowed to contact prospects until a certain point in their high school career and that is actually too late to start getting a coach's attention. But their is nothing to prevent you from opening the dialogue and once you do, you are likely to get loads more information, particularly about the softball program, than you might get through publicly available sources.
One of the first pieces of information you'll want to obtain from these coaches is where they go for showcase tournaments. Create a list of these and note how many of the teams you are interested in will have a coach at. After you have this knowledge, you can begin working on getting on a team which attends some of these. Then assuming you get on a team which hits the major showcases where all your favorite schools are in attendance, you're done right? How about taking the added step of letting the coaches know who you are and where you'll be? This way they can at least take a look at you and express interest or suggest that you might be better suited for another team.
Now doesn't that sound entirely more reasonable than passively waiting for the coach of your favorite college team to call you at home and offer a scholarship because she saw in your local paper that you hit 3 home runs in a game or made second team all-state? If I've convinced you to be less of a victim and be more aggressive, the next question is when should you begin this proactive process? The answer is the time to start is as early as possible. If you can find a team which goes to the showcases, go for it even if you're just a freshman who doesn't regularly play on the varsity. Coaches cannot base their decisions merely on how you do against your high school competition. So if you are not yet on varsity because there is a junior who hits .750 with 25 HRs per season who plays your position, that shouldn't discourage you. If you can get in front of the coaches for the team of your choice and show that you have the goods, they're not going to worry about the fact that you only pinch run on the varsity because Big Momma Wilkerson is entrenched at your position and already has a full scholarship to UCLA.
Everything in life is such a chore. Every day you have to take 200 rep.s at the batting tee, 200 grounders from each of the infield positions, 200 fly balls, an hour of pitching practice, circuit and weight training, etc., etc. But what's it all for if you really want to play college ball and you don't go that one extra mile of being proactive and understanding how the big game is played. Your future is in your own hands. This is not like boys baseball where professional scouts go to high school games to see who the big club is going to draft this summer. It's up to you.
 
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