As a high school baseball player with aspirations to play at the next level, you need to go through the process of getting yourself on the radar of colleges. While the means of getting recruited have changed, the concept is still very simple: you are trying to sell yourself to a coach that you fit their program. Consider yourself a sales person selling yourself to the buyer, which is a coach.
You want to provide information to the coach that answers their questions of why you should be in their program. There are many different markets to sell yourself to, which are the different programs that are looking for certain metrics/data in order to find their players. The more relevant and in-depth data you provide, the more likely you are to hear back and move forward with the recruiting process.
When I was trying to sell myself back in 2015, there were very limited resources I could utilize but I used every single one. As a pitcher, my emails to coaches consisted of my pitching velocity, height, weight and an iMovie quality recruiting video. At that time, I was using the same tools everyone else provided to coaches in order to be competitive with other baseball players trying to sell themselves in the same market.
Jumping ahead to 2021, sales techniques have evolved dramatically. The evolution in sales techniques for recruiting is due to the emergence and mass availability of data-collecting technology, such as Rapsodo, Hitrax, Blast, Pocket Radars, etc. You can now find these tools at training facilities and colleges across the country, so why not utilize them for your recruiting? Chances are other athletes fighting for that recruiting spot are doing the same thing.
There are many benefits to adding data gathered by these tools to both your recruiting messages and emails. Primarily, it gives the coaches a ton of your data at their fingertips without having to gather it themselves. As a pitcher, you can provide your pitch velocity, spin rate, spin efficiency, vertical and horizontal movement all attached to a video referencing the pitch. As a hitter, you can provide your exit velocity, max distance, bat speed, and so many more metrics. Now, without even having to watch you play, they have a feel for your base metrics.
This leads into the second benefit – the coaches’ familiarity with all of these metrics and technology. Coaches have a lot of experience utilizing these tools within their own program. As a result, they know the metrics and qualities that they are looking for when recruiting. While sending a coach your pitching velocity with a video of the three pitches you throw can be okay, sending a Rapsodo report of multiple bullpen sessions provides a lot more useful information for that coach to utilize. By comparing these qualities to the data they’ve seen from players in their conference or in their program, they can determine if you are fit for their team.
Overall, providing relevant data from these credible tools will grab the attention of coaches. While they will still need to watch you play in person and contact your current coaches to get a feel for the type of player you are, utilizing these tools is the most effective first step in reaching out to a program you’re interested in. Recruiting continues to evolve with the increase in technology, so in order to maximize your chances to play at the next level, your recruiting strategy must evolve too.
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