<p>I'm an avid baseball pitcher who hopes to get recruited by top schools but part of my concern is that I'm not good enough. It is still too early to say as I'm still a sophomore, but I do need a little bit of improvement to get into the standard recruitment range, I know that for sure. But do my chances at being recruited significantly improve base upon my academics?</p>
<p>My current HS GPA is sitting at around a 3.95, and I'm taking my school's most difficult courses (our school does not calculate W GPA, and they do not calculate class rank either). Although it is too early to definitively say, my academic strength is in mathematics and I believe that I will get an 800 on the Math SATI section and the Math SAT IIc as well. I am also a strong student in the sciences, so I project myself earning high 700s on both physics and chemistry. As for the rest of the SATI, I'm not as strong in English as I am other subjects but I do believe I can achieve low/mid 700s on both CR and writing.</p>
<p>All of this together puts my at 230, or a 9 out of 9 on the AI calculator. But I am skeptical that this alone will not push me into some of my dream schools (MIT, Columbia, Yale), which is why I've become very interested in recruitment. My real question is if top schools recruit below-average athletes that maintain scores a lot higher than the recruited athlete's norm.</p>
<p>To get recruited to any college you still need to be an above average athlete. What that means exactly depends on the sport, your own school/league, and the schools you’re looking at. To get recruited at D1 schools (even the Ivy League, which is still D1) you probably need to be one of the top athletes in your sport in the state (at least top 10-15, maybe more if you’re from CA/TX or another big one), even if you can maintain those grades and get those scores. I honestly don’t know much about ranking athletes in other sports as I do track and XC and the way rankings work for those are pretty clear cut. However, to get recruited to a D3 school (especially a top tier one athletically and academically like MIT) you generally still need to be very competitive on the varsity level, at least in your league if not in the entire state as well.
The two athletes I know at MIT are a wrestler from my high school who was the New England champion in his weight class and one of my teammates who was a pretty average JV runner his junior year of high school and managed to improve and make varsity our senior year and, while he was definitely not recruited, made it on to the team and has continued to improve quite a bit. I will say, though, that to get recruited to a school like MIT (or Tufts, where I go), especially with the stats you have, you don’t need to be the best in your region.</p>
<p>As far as Columbia and Yale, I know a bunch of athletes on the Track and Field and XC teams at each of those schools and pretty much all of them were state champions or at least very competitive on that level.</p>
Yes, they are referred to as “boosters”, because they raise the academic stats of the team, and thus can potentially enable the acceptance of a lower academic, stronger athletic recruit.</p>
<p>Monstor344- you sound like a bright kid that may have the potential to play college baseball. There’s a lot you can be doing to find your answers.</p>
<p>First I recommend you log onto the high school baseball web site @ [High</a> School Baseball Web](<a href=“http://www.hsbaseballweb.com%5DHigh”>http://www.hsbaseballweb.com). This is the most incredible website with everything you need to know about getting recruited. There are tons of very experienced coaches, parents, and players that can provide great advice. Start reading this message board and then post questions in the appropriate forums. If you post this question in the recruiting forum you will get specific answers as to the next steps you need to take.</p>
<p>Since you are a sophomore it’s the perfect time to start researching all your options. There is an excellent showcase, especially for high academic students that want to play baseball in college. It’s called the Head First showcase and some of the colleges you are interested in will attend and evaluate players. </p>
<p>Start reading the high school baseball web and good luck!</p>
That wouldn’t significantly help him get in, as he would by definition already be meeting the school’s admissions standards. I suppose the coach could still flag him to give an extra boost in admissions.
That doesn’t work at all schools, though, as a lot of schools give different degrees of power to coaches. At my own school, my understanding is that the coach gets a fixed number of spots for kids that he wants to get in and tells that to admissions.
Also, I disagree that this would apply to a “below-average athlete”; you still need to be above average, if not well above average, compared to other HS athletes to even make the team at most of these schools.</p>
<p>Thanks for the responses guys. hebrewhammer, I’m not a benchwarmer; I’m still an above average player, but I know (or at least I think I know) that most players who attend showcases are excellent. When I say below average, I mean in comparison with kids who attend showcases, not in my league.</p>