Preparing for Your Athletic Scholarship Future – rising juniors

Maximizing your Full Scholarship Opportunities

For this age group, the recruiting picture is really starting to clear up. Elite players have multiple offers or have verbally committed. Some second tier D1 offers have started going out, personal invitations have been made to camps, and coaches at the top programs have a pretty good idea of who they want to recruit or in some cases have already moved on to the next class. Players have started to separate themselves. That said, softball recruiting has a trickle-down effect, meaning that as the top programs such as Oklahoma or Alabama narrow down their lists, recruits should figure that out and start looking elsewhere. One of the biggest mistakes recruits make at this stage is to still hold on that they'll play for a CWS mainstay program when in reality that program has no intention to offer them any funding at all. It's time for every single HS softball player with aspirations of playing in college to get their profile out to as many programs as possible. The less you've heard from coaches, the more schools you should be sending your profile out to at this point.

Be Strategic About College Softball Scholarship Offers

If you've been going to showcases and playing on travel teams for 2 or 3 summers now and didn't get a big stack of letters or any emails from coaches throughout your junior year, don't expect different recruiting results by doing the same thing again in the summer between your sophomore and junior year. Sending your profile skills video to schools at the right level will help your drive results. Playing in showcases and on travel teams will make you a better player, but they won't always make you a better recruit. The travel is also expensive and highly inefficient. As you've hopefully learned by now, attending these events hasn't brought you enough recruiting results on its own. If you aren't getting recruited heavily now, don't do the same things over and over again and expect a different result. That's the definition of recruiting insanity!