Kyle Ruth
December 16, 2014
Today,
most freshman around the country are just starting to find their way around
their new high schools, just starting to figure out who they are, and not
thinking about their future in college, let alone making their decision before
the year is over. Choosing a college is
really the first major decision in a teenager’s life. Today, colleges across
the country that recruit for their sports teams are pushing this decision on
kids that are far too young to make a decision like this.
In October of 2014, Wake Forest received a baseball commitment from a 2018 high school graduate from the state of Maine. A 2018 high school graduate is equivalent to a kid who just started his freshman year in high school this past September. When I was a freshman in high school, not only was I not mature or big enough to be recruited by colleges, I didn’t even know what to look for in a school. A freshman in high school can’t even drive a car or see a Rated R movie, so how can a coach pressure him into a decision that could change the rest of his life. When you make a college decision based on the verbal commitment of a sport such as baseball, you make it based on what the coach can give you athletically and playing time wise. To be realistic, how can a coach promise a 14 or 15 year old kid, that hasn’t graduated 9th grade yet, what he can give him. I feel as if the chance of something changing or him lying is through the roof. Most kids who are recruited so early are kids that have physically matured very early and have college-ready bodies by the time they’re 15.
So what does that
do to the competition of all the kids across the country with desires of
playing at big schools? I believe it
eliminates it for kids who don’t mature as fast, something they can’t
control. When Colonie High school coach
Dave Fields was asked his thoughts on this topic, he said, “It is ruining the
landscape of college baseball, late bloomers don’t have the chance to go to
bigger schools anymore, coaches are putting all their eggs in one basket trying
to evaluate kids at such a young age, and soon you will see the effect of it
because kids won’t pan out to their potential.
Some kids are way too young to be making those decisions.” Once a college coach, Fields never dealt with
the new way of recruiting kids so young and never saw the point in it. Even smaller schools are trying to adapt to
this new world of making teams.
On a phone
conversation with LIU-Brooklyn Head baseball coach Alex Trezza, the comment he
made on recruiting was, “I don’t see the need for it. Yes, we do look at younger kids now just to
keep up and for later down the road, but I don’t think I need to rush it
because I can get kids later when they’re ready for a decision and more mature
than they were their freshman and sophomore year."
Arguments for this
are bigger schools want to lock up their players for longer so they can try to
keep them away from the MLB draft better so they will attend school. However, does time of commitment make a kid
more apt to turn down millions of dollars from the MLB to attend school anyway?
Every time a college coach recruits a kid that is only a freshman or sophomore
in high school, they are doing it
to keep up and so no one else can compete.
They merely cross their fingers that the kid turns into what they hope
he will be. It is ruining the game,
hurting others chances that can’t control it, and putting pressure on kids to
act faster than they have to.
