If you're a standout high school baseball player in Pennsylvania, you better like to travel. Since the high school baseball season here is brief compared to other states, Pennsylvania's best spend most of their summers and weekends during the fall traveling throughout the country to showcases and tournaments. Read Full Article

James Barker has taken an active role in Clemson athletics since becoming the school's president in 1999. Barker, a former pole vaulter for the Tigers, recently dealt with a severe backlash from fans after the school's Athletic Admissions Review Committee (AARC) barred football coaches from signing two recruits. Barker recently sat down for a lengthy discussion with The Post and Courier's Larry Williams. Read Full Article

This is exactly the kind of encouragement parents holding second mortgages to pay for trainers and summer camps do NOT need: For the second year running, Southern California basketball coach Tim Floyd offered a scholarship to an eighth-grader. ''Hmmm,'' Louisville coach Rick Pitino mulled over the news. ''I'm not good enough to evaluate that far ahead. Someday, I might wish I was.'' Read Full Article

Entering her 29th season as head women's basketball coach at Southern Illinois University, Wendy Hedberg has seen plenty of changes. But when it comes to SIUE athletics, the Cougars' impending move to NCAA Division I may be the biggest change yet.. Read Full Article

From the Northern tip of New England to the Eastern Shore of Maryland and beyond, it wasn't that long ago when college lacrosse was confined to a dozen states, all along the East Coast. Yet with each passing season, those once-regional boundaries have continued to stretch for the fastest growing sport in America. Read Full Article

ODDS N ENDS

Read an article about a recruiting service in California that charges the "small fee" of $4,500 per student to help place high school athletes. The article also mentioned a money-back guarantee the company provides. I emailed the company and said offering a money-back guarantee was against NCAA regulations. I even sent them the document on NCAA website that states this. Their response was that the money-back guarantee was a company policy and had no bearing on the NCAA. It’s one thing to not know the rules, it’s another thing to not care about the rules.

From time to time I get emails from parents asking what showcases they should attend to be seen by local college coaches. Since I only live where I live, it’s difficult for me to know what’s going on in other parts of the country. The advice I usually give is to simply contact college coaches in your area and ask them what showcases or events they might recommend. Two things happen when you do this. One, you go straight to the source to find out where they will be and what they recommend rather than guessing. And two, it’s an innocent way to introduce yourself to a college coach which may result in you possibly getting recruited or noticed more at an event you will both be at.

Only 30 out of the last 100 people to take the recruiting quiz on varsityedge.com have answered the number of core classes you must take in high school for NCAA D1 and D2 eligibility correctly!

Good news, new Miami football coach Randy Shannon has outlawed guns for its players.

NEWS ON INDIVIDUAL COLLEGES

Indiana University has broken ground for several major athletic facilities, including the Memorial Stadium North Endzone Facility, a basketball development center and a baseball stadium.

UC Davis gained official D1 status and will compete in the Big West Conference and offer 26 varsity sports.

The Oklahoma Sooners must erase wins from their 2005 football season and forfeit 2 scholarships for the next two years

Bluefield College has decided to add another sport, but it is not the sport everyone keeps asking about. The institution has decided to bring back men’s and women’s tennis after a long hiatus, hiring Matt Bohman as the new coach for both squads. Tennis will begin as a club sport at Bluefield College for the 2007-2008 school year. But then they will look to compete intercollegiately in the Appalachian Athletic Conference.

Saint Peter's College (NJ) will no longer sponsor football as an intercollegiate sport as of July 1, 2007.

Seattle University will be moving from D2 to D1. Their final year as a D2 athletic program will be in 2007-08 then they will spend two years in a reclassification status as they move to D1.

Varsity baseball will be returning to the University of Oregon for the 2008-2009 season. Baseball is currently a club sport

Cal-State University Monterey Bay was granted Division 2 Status one year early by the NCAA

THE D1 ILLUSION
One of my lasting memories from playing college baseball is playing Duke University on my first spring trip. Their center-fielder was so fast our coach told our catcher to not even throw down when he stole second and he doubled as the football team's safety in the fall. Their field was surrounded by those TALL pine trees you only seem to see in North Carolina. At the end of the Duke batting practice, the coach played home run derby with 5 of the biggest kids I had ever seen and each of them were hitting balls into the tops of the trees. I assumed they were just trying to intimidate us. We played well that day narrowly losing 2-1. I hit a ball to the warning track which was caught and narrowly missed making a nice diving catch in the outfield.

I recently received my copy of the Stags Sports Page, a quarterly newspaper my Alma Mata puts out. In it contained a letter from the AD that sort of recapped the last year for Stags sports. A portion of it read like so….I, like millions of other sports fans, settled in to watch the men’s and women’s basketball tournament this year. While many individual and team performances stand out, the thing that immediately comes to my mind is the run by the Georgetown University men’s basketball team to the Final Four. And to think that just four months earlier, that same team was playing our Stags at the Arena at Harbor Yard. It made me realized just how far our entire athletic program has come over the last decade. Consider that our men’s lacrosse team hosted North Carolina at Lessing Field in April; our volleyball team played national runner-up Stanford and National quarterfinalist Hawaii; our softball team headed to the West Coast to play San Diego State and Utah; our women’s basketball team took on ACC foe Florida State; not to mention our men’s soccer team advancing to the NCAA tournament second round after beating intrastate and nationally-ranked rival Connecticut…..

For every big-time University you see competing in March Madness or in the Orange Bowl, there are Fairfield’s, Holy Cross, and Monmouth University. In fact, out of the 326+ D1 Universities throughout the country, 57 of them have an enrollment size of less than 5,000 athletes and many of them resemble a small Division 3 school. That pales in comparison to the 40,000+ students that attend the Ohio State’s and Michigan’s of the world.

Last month a parent called me looking for advice and said his son really wanted to play Division 1 baseball at a major program. My first question was “why?” The father said, “well, I’m not sure, I guess I’ll have to ask him.”

Most high school athletes want to play D1 because they think that’s where the scholarship money is, and after years of camps, instruction, travel teams, playing D1 is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. In reality, after D1 football and D1 basketball, there is much less athletic scholarship money to go around for other teams that play other sports. I know D1 lacrosse teams with recruiting budgets of $200 and girl’s D1 tennis teams with one scholarship to divide up between 8 players. If you are a high school athlete, and don’t weigh 300 pounds or are not 7 feet tall, getting straight A’s for four years in high school might be more valuable in academic scholarship money than leading your team in scoring will for athletic money.

If money isn’t the deciding factor, many turn to D1 for the competition, assuming all D1 schools are better than their D2 or D3 counterparts. Yes, there are many D1 teams that are simply more talented than many D2 or D3 teams, but there are many extremely competitive D2 and D3 colleges throughout the country that field teams that can compete with many D1 programs. Kenyon College, a D3 program has won 26 NCAA swimming championships in a row and many of their swimmers could easily compete at the D1 level had they so chosen. The Methodist College men’s golf team has made 27 straight NCAA championships and won 6 in a row from 1994 to 1999. Their women’s team is ok to; they have won 10 CONSECUTIVE D3 National Championships.

The bottom line is, there are a hundred factors that you can evaluate when deciding what colleges to look at and we always tell people to never choose a college (or dismiss a college) solely on what division they are. Would it be great to be in the final four? Of course it would? But for most of us, the reality is that will not happen and choosing a college and competing as a collegiate athlete is about the bigger picture. And while you may not be able to play for North Carolina, Georgetown, Stanford, San Diego State, or Connecticut, you might be able to play for a school that one day plays those schools, which in itself will be a great thrill. I was about 500 SAT points and 50 pounds away from playing for the Duke baseball team, but I played at a little-known school that played Duke one day, which for me was good enough!

The Making of a Student-Athlete: Succeeding in the College Selection and Recruiting Process for High School Athletes, Parents and Coaches. ORDER TODAY