How to get recruited for college baseball as a senior: don't panic, get specific. A senior who hasn't heard from coaches by October hasn't been rejected. Many programs hold spots for late risers. Send film, grades and a short email to schools that fit. Then follow up.

Baseball mental toughness is built on boring days. Pressure is a privilege. The players who want the bat in the big moment are usually the ones who did the boring work all week.

Mid-October reality for seniors who have heard nothing: you have not been rejected. Coaches told me on the record this year that there is no such thing as finished recruiting . players get found in the fall of senior year, the spring of senior year, and beyond. What kills a recruitment is not silence. It is stopping.

Junior families: this is the month your son moves from invisible to evaluated. The coaches building spring follow lists are reading September emails, fall production, and transcripts right now. He does not need offers in October. He needs to be findable, productive, and on eight target lists in his own handwriting.

Assignment for senior families: create the FSA accounts, gather the 2025 tax return, and file the FAFSA this week, beta or public, a submission is a submission. Junior and younger families: run one net price calculator for one school your family assumed it could not afford. Report back what you find.

The mistake a former Division I recruiting coordinator flagged on my show: families skip the FAFSA because they will not qualify for anything. Maybe true from the government. But many universities hold a separate pot of grant money they only award to families who filed the form. File it even if you are sure. Especially if you are sure.

Pat Bloom invites parents onto every recruiting Zoom at Washington University and then watches who talks. We definitely do not want the parents driving the call and controlling the call, he told me. He wants the recruit to take ownership, speak for himself, and know more about the school than the name of the business program. The call is your son's audition. Your job on it is presence, not performance.

The best thing a parent can pack for a three-day tournament: patience Saturday, perspective Sunday, and silence on the drive home Monday. He knows how he played.

Alex Madera played four years of Division III baseball at Arcadia. All-American, .432 across four seasons. Then, in a graduate year at North Carolina, where he started all 61 games at shortstop and led the team in hitting. He signed with the Cubs organization this spring. Division III is not where baseball goes to end. For some players, it is where it gets built.

In June 2024, Paul Mainieri, then the head coach at South Carolina, told me: I would rather recruit a kid with a 3.5 grade point average than a 2.2, because I want him to have the cerebral ability to absorb what we are coaching. That is an SEC voice on grades. The academic conversation is not a small-school conversation. It is a baseball conversation.

September planning starts today. Three columns on one page: academics, development, exposure. Most families over-fund the third column and starve the first two. Fund them in that order and the third takes care of itself.

The parent who films every at-bat but never watches his son's face between innings is collecting the wrong footage.

Trade athletic ability for academic excellence. That is the sentence I ask families to sit with. Your son's baseball can open the door to a school his transcript alone might not. But only if the transcript holds up its end of the deal. The bat gets him seen. The grades get him in.

This week's assignment: your son sends one email to one coach at a school where the academics fit. Short, specific, schedule attached, written by him. Coaches answer players more than they answer parents. Teach him the skill now. He will use it his whole life.