Parents-Make Sure You're Not Hurting Your Son's Chances

Parents, I am talking to you with this post. There are a lot of things that you can do to help your kid get a scholarship at the next level. However, what I am mostly going to talk about in this article is what you should not do that will actually help achieve the same goal. I am going to discuss all the things that parents do that hurt their kid's chances of getting recruited so that you don’t make the make mistakes.

· Don’t put pressure on your kid to get a scholarship. I promise you that if your financial situation makes a scholarship a necessity, your kid already knows that and reminding him of that only makes the stress of trying to get recruited worse. Baseball is hard enough without parents adding mountains of pressure to what is already a pressure packed sport.

· Don’t let your kid forget about academics. Baseball only gets 11.7 scholarships for the whole team. The likelihood of your son getting a full ride is slim to none. However, if he gets a 25-50% athletic scholarship and has really good grades, they might be able to put together a package that gets him between 75-100% of the tuition covered. A lot of parents let their kids slack in school because “my kid has never really been good at school, but he'll get an athletic scholarship”. Any kid can get good grades if they work hard enough, period. And if your kid gets one offer and can’t get in or can’t get enough academic money to make it feasible then they might miss out

· DO NOT TALK TO COACHES. This means no emails, no calls, no talking to them at travel ball games. They are there to watch, not talk to you and if you think it will help your kid get noticed by pointing him out to the coaches, it probably will have the opposite effect. With this, do not write your kid's emails for him, the coaches can tell and it will automatically go in their trash file.

· Let your kid do the talking on visits. I remember sitting in my assistant coach’s office one day while a visit was taking place in the head coach’s office and all I remember thinking was, ‘this kid hasn’t said a word and the only person talking is his dad’. When I asked my coach about it afterwards he said that that is how most visits go. When you are on a visit, everything your kid does is being evaluated. From holding doors to shaking hands, the coaches are watching everything. They do not care about you as parents. Most of all they want to evaluate your son as a person. Is he mature? Can he hold a conversation? Can he make eye contact? They want grown ups on their team. I cover all of this is my blog post about what to do on visits, but my point is, you are not doing your kid any favors by trying to sell him to the coaches. They already like him as a player, that part is over, and now they want to see if his personality will allow him to fit into their culture and be successful at the next level. When you do all the talking, that shows them the exact opposite.

· THINGS TO TAKE-AWAY

---It is time to back off.

------Let your kid play baseball and have fun. He is the only one who can write his destiny so let him write it. If coaches start to take interest, let him handle it. If he doesn’t end up playing college baseball, make sure he knows he can be successful in other areas. Besides that, just take a step back and let him have fun playing the game he loves. Too many kids lose their love of the game because their parents add too much pressure.