Committed to a School Athletically, But Recently Admitted To Better Academic Schools

You really need to determine how important playing varsity baseball is to you relative to career goals. For my D, it gave her a social anchor at her D3 (and she pretty much knew she was going to start all 4 years). However she was a STEM major who is now a PhD candidate at an R1 doing some pretty cool research. The path to a PhD is broad vs IB.

My S on the other hand was recruited by several D3 (including IB targets) for baseball, but after visits, he found the D3’s to be too small for what he was looking for in a college experience. He chose an Ivy with no clear idea of a major or a career. He let his experiences in college dictate that. He also played club baseball, which was much less of a time sink since practices were limited and they mostly played games. He ended up in IB, but even at his top tier target school, many more didn’t get a job in IB than succeeded.

So to me, unless baseball is something you have to have as part of your college experience, you should choose the school where you think you will have the best academic and social fit where you will end up doing better academically and socially. It’s all about planning a path that gives you the most options at its end point. If IB (and here you need to understand what the various types of jobs entail – I assure you it is not just wheeling and dealing, wining and dining as a former M&A guy, especially at junior levels, but a lot of late night/weekend grunt work), then going to a target is very important. But even at a target, you won’t even get past an initial screen unless your GPA is over something like a 3.6 and you have taken and done well in some quantitative course. You still need to walk into the college with a Plan B.

5 Likes

Again, just presented another path/option if the OP truly has his heart set on playing ball for four more years. Is it the easiest, cheapest, most common way? No, absolutely not. I agree that your path obviously is the best route.

I think we sometimes put a lot of pressure on 17/18 year olds to think that they MUST choose a very specific path in order to get to their end goal. It doesn’t always pan out that way. Life happens. College students sometimes decide to change their majors in the middle of their college careers. Sometimes they decide their sport at the collegiate level wasn’t what they thought it would be.

Presenting options gives them the chance to really consider all of those different variables so that in the end, they make the right choice “for them.”

1 Like

Oh, and just to clarify, I didn’t “steer kids” towards sports. I was a volunteer recruiting coordinator for one specific 18U team known for getting its players into college programs. These kids already had their minds made up that they wanted to play for a college team. I just communicated with the college coaches from the schools they were interested in to help facilitate the process.

I’d choose the academics and future opportunities over playing D3 baseball. You never know if you will actually get playing time at the D3 college. I know of a number of baseball players (half dozen) who are going to D2 or D3 schools in the middle of nowhere and hardly play. If my kid got into UMich or UCB or UNC CH or UTA I’d suggest there over a D3 without scholarship.

Now if the D3 school is somewhere like NYU or Pomona or WashU or Chicago, I’d suggest staying the course….

1 Like