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What does it take to play college baseball? That’s a question we get asked a lot. We get asked because unless you are familiar with the various levels of college baseball, the answer is not very clear. Unlike a multiple-choice test where you know the exact grade you will receive according to how many questions you get right, projecting a high school baseball player’s success at the next level is far more subjective. The thing that most high school players want to do to show they belong at the next level is line up a list of accomplishments, dust off the old stats, and tell college coaches everything about themselves and what they can do. While this approach may seem logical, college coaches simply do not have the time to sort through mass amounts of information to find what they are looking for. Any additional time they have to spend searching (the more you waste their time), the less likely it is that they will follow up and actively recruit you.

By now you may be starting to figure out what we are hinting at. The recruiting process is not about what you want to show college coaches, it’s about what they want to see. What we are talking about is reverse engineering the recruiting process. That means the best way to get interest from college coaches is to work backwards and think about what makes college coaches interested in a player. From there, you can go about showing them that you fit that mold. If you need hints about what they are looking for, we asked a few dozen college coaches that very question and wrote about it in What Qualities College Coaches Look for in Recruits Part 1 and Part 2. Be sure to check those out, then keep listening for a more comprehensive overview of how to reverse engineer the recruiting process using the following 3 steps:

Step 1: Start General and Work Towards the Specific

While every college coach has slightly different preferences and each level of college baseball has a different standard of play, there are common characteristics that all coaches value. Start by demonstrating that you are a strong candidate in these 4 core areas:

Baseball Tools and Physical Skills
The Mental Game
Strong Grades and Quality Character
Positive Attitude and Great Effort

Coaches will also value your ability to show intangible traits like honesty, trustworthiness, the ability to communicate clearly, and attention to detail, among others.

Step 2: Break down what it means to be good in each core area

There’s a lot that goes into being a college player and each of the 4 core areas listed above have many components. Breaking such big parts of your game down into more manageable chunks is important. The following articles break each core area into 4 actionable steps:

Baseball Tools and Physical Skills

The Mental Game

Strong Grades and Quality Character

Positive Attitude and Great Effort

Step 3: Make it Specific to Each Level, Conference, and School

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33| Talking D1 Baseball and Recruiting with KPB's Eric Johnson and Tom Briner

KPB PodcastBy Keep Playing BaseballMar 31, 2019