How Parents Can Understand The Baseball Recruiting Process
Noah Jackson co-founded the First Base Foundation in 2003, a non-profit dedicated to making travel baseball more affordable and transforming lives through positive mentorship, developing leadership skills and building self-esteem. He played college baseball at University of California Berkeley, minor league baseball for two years with the Chicago Cubs, and was a top scout in the MLB for 3 years with the San Diego Padres.
In Jackson's experience, one of the biggest barriers in the college baseball recruiting process is a lack of understanding from parents. Parents, especially those who have never been to college, don't understand how to pay for, apply, or be accepted into college and don't want their kids to play unless they are offered a full athletic scholarship. But coaches and leaders can help parents to understand this process.
For instance, many baseball parents do not understand that college baseball teams rarely, if ever, offer full scholarships. While this might scare some parents away, coaches and leaders can help these parents to understand that there are other ways to get scholarship money, such as need-based aid, that makes up for a lack of full scholarships. Jackson urges parents to look at this strategy not as second-rate, but simply as a way of overcoming a hurdle that exists for all prospective college baseball players.
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