Do You Need a Baseball Recruiting Service?

Do you need a recruiting service for high school baseball? Most families reading this do not. College coaches want to hear from your son. They want a feel for the kid, not a blast from a company that sent the same paragraph to a hundred inboxes before lunch. Your job as a dad is to help him write the email and then get out of the way.

A lot of services want you to feel like you are already late, and like there is a paywall between you and the college coaches. That isn’t true. Families pay them because the process feels like a secret, and it isn’t. The secret, if you want to call it that, is whether the tools match the schools on the list.

What a service actually does

Most of them send the same note with a link. Coaches delete those. Recruiting runs on trusted eyes, because there are too many players in the country for a coach to see them all. He leans on people he already believes — a high school coach, a JUCO guy, a club that has put kids in college for a long time. Once that trust is gone, it is hard to get back, which is why a mail-merge under your son’s name does more damage than families think.

It cannot show a coach who he is, and it cannot add 5 mph to the arm. It is the same product as a highlight tape that only shows the good. Useful as a first look, maybe. Not a relationship.

What actually moves a coach

The tools have to be there. If the 60, the arm, and the exit velo don’t match the schools on the list, another email will not fix it. Are you good enough? is the first question. How to contact a college baseball coach is the second — three paragraphs, from his email, one coach at a time, a short video they can open immediately.

There is a place for a trusted advisor when real money is on the table. That is a different conversation than a sophomore who is not on a board yet. Guide him. Don’t become his agent, and don’t hand the whole thing to someone who doesn’t have his best intentions.

Put the numbers into the Free Objective Evaluation. I’ll send the grade to your inbox. It is not a recruiting service. It is a picture of the tools for where he currently stands, and you can’t match the work to the goal until you have that picture.