College Camps front toss

[4Martini]

Not all college camps are made the same. My past experience says most camps will be disappointing unless you get recruited from it.

I have all of a sudden been flooded with camp emails (is this because my daughter just started high school?) Some of them seem ridiculous $450 for a single day for coaches from 6 schools. Is it just exploiting hopes and dreams? Or do I really need to budget for this going forward? How many camps do kids do? Our local state u does an awesome one- but a lot of these $250 for 3 hours - seem like they would add up to year of tuition $$& pretty quick.

 

[Rolling Hard]

I have all of a sudden been flooded with camp emails (is this because my daughter just started high school?) Some of them seem ridiculous $450 for a single day for coaches from 6 schools. Is it just exploiting hopes and dreams? Or do I really need to budget for this going forward? How many camps do kids do? Our local state u does an awesome one- but a lot of these $250 for 3 hours - seem like they would add up to year of tuition $$& pretty quick.

There are camps that are broken up in session.
If a player was attend all the sessions over the two days it would cost $1020. Ouch!

 

[FlSoftball]

I had this idea:
A camp that would have cuts at noon. Say you start in the morning with 60 non pitching players. At lunch break coach announced the 25 players that will be coming back after lunch. You get rid of the players that you have no interest in. It would be transparent. Players would know where they stand. Scratch that college off their list and look elsewhere. It's kind of mean to have/allow a player to come to 3 or 4 camps at $300 a pop when the coach knew after the first camp there was absolutely zero chance that player was ever going to be recruited at their school.

Recently at a camp where the head coach announced at the end of camp that they were done with all their 2025 recruiting. I would have been pissed if my DD was a 2025. So a bunch of players basically wasted their time and money attending. Why wouldn't the coach hold a 2026 only camp? Maybe rules??? These popular So Cal Schools camps fill up and sell out in a couple of days of their announcement so it's not like they were going to lose money excluding 2025s.

They may announce they are done with a class but if a diamond falls in their lap you can bet they are going to find a way to make it happen. I have seen it happen quite a few times


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[erniekru]

This is how I have seen schools get around the no invite only camps.

Every camp needs has to have registration open to the public. However, what they do is hold the registration open for only a couple of minutes and start the registration already sold out. From there they direct people who they want to attend the camp to sign up for the camp waitlist. At the end of registration, the school gets to pick and choose players from the wait list to fill the camp. Mission accomplished

 

[RADcatchers]

NCAA recruiting rules in an era where kids are getting paid real money to play? They're asinine.

This IS the game changer!!

Colleges should be allowed to recruit like every other business. OU, UA, and UCLA could post on indeed.com and then fly their candidates in for visits anytime they want.

Great discussion Point Sluggers!

 

[MightyMO]

I wonder if these types of camps/clinics would be considered an unofficial visit?
I think some coaches are afraid of violating any rules. Most colleges use a third party to announce their camps. I think this is to make sure they do not violate any rules, also.

The use of the third party is so that the school doesn't have to try and handle the registration and payment processing. College athletic departments don't want to be in that business, so they'll pay someone to handle it. With that comes the marketing a lot of times.

It's actually a good thing in some cases because the same few companies handle a lot of camps so you can just keep an eye on their site instead of constantly checking multiple schools.

 

[CoachJD]

Why? Batters don't get to tell the pitcher please throw only level strikes.
Got to make adjustments.

Holy mackerel
Clean off your parent goggles the world is not going to be perfect for your daughter. You'll have to make some adjustments!

Come on, you have to realize that it's not possible to actually evaluate a hitter if she isn't getting pitches to hit.

Do you think coaches at these camps are going to be impressed that a hitter is not swinging at garbage front toss?

This isn't about making adjustments or the world being perfect. In order to evaluate in this type of setting, the evaluators need to create a controlled environment the presents opportunities for the players to actually demonstrate the skills that are being evaluated.

If you're trying to evaluate how good infielders are at fielding grounders, would you just tell them to "make adjustments" and "nothing's perfect" if the person hitting the balls only hit pop ups? Because that's really the very bad argument you're making here.

 

[CoachJD]

The other station was more normal slingshot from 15-20 feet at slower speed. Most everyone hit well on that side, so gave a real contrast.

I know a lot of people do it, but I find slingshot from 15 feet to be almost worthless because the hitter has to completely change her approach, process, and event swing. It's too different from an actual pitch to be useful, not too unlike hitting off a pitching machine (a machine is better, imo).

I get why it's done. There are those speed conversion charts where you throw x speed from y distance and it's supposed to replicate an actual pitch. But those break down at extremes. You could throw a ball 1 mph from 1 inch (or whatever) away and even if the math works, it doesn't work in a practical sense. I'm sure the math says you have the "same reaction time" hitting a ball thrown 500 mph from some far away distance, but I still don't think too many people are gonna hit the 500 mph pitch. And I do think 15 feet is on the edge of that extreme, if not in ability to make contact, in the ability to go through your entire swing, especially if the person throwing is just using slingshot. It probably only works as a drill where you start already loaded.

It really does not take that long to learn to do a basic arm circle with decent enough whip to throw effective front toss.

 

[RADcatchers]

Come on, you have to realize that it's not possible to actually evaluate a hitter if she isn't getting pitches to hit.

Do you think coaches at these camps are going to be impressed that a hitter is not swinging at garbage front toss?

This isn't about making adjustments or the world being perfect. In order to evaluate in this type of setting, the evaluators need to create a controlled environment the presents opportunities for the players to actually demonstrate the skills that are being evaluated.

If you're trying to evaluate how good infielders are at fielding grounders, would you just tell them to "make adjustments" and "nothing's perfect" if the person hitting the balls only hit pop ups? Because that's really the very bad argument you're making here.

What are you thinking?
Batters can only be evaluated on meat pitches? Come on now you have to know that there's more to hitting than only hitting a meat pitch.

70% strikes that's a heck of a ratio to show batting skills!


How many times does a college coach evaluating a batter need to see their swing? How many swings? Obviously more swings would be a lot more to make a determination. But if they had 10 swings would that be enough? I think we can see a lot in 5 to10 swings! Good bad ugly

( obviously how someone hits in a live game situation would be preferred. But if we're just looking at swings from front toss that can have an effective evaluation of its own)

 

[Vertigo]

( obviously how someone hits in a live game situation would be preferred. But if we're just looking at swings from front toss that can have an effective evaluation of its own)

And this was my point about having live scrimmages at camps - to better evaluate hitters against live pitching.