It Pays to be Open Minded
in Your College Choice
Imagine attending one of U.S. News’ Top 50 Liberal Arts schools, being able to play your sport there as a FROSH, loving your college experience, and when you first started the recruiting process you have never heard of this school? Well, that is the EXACT story I am about to share with you…
For the sake of this blog post, I have changed the athlete’s name to JOHN, and I will be sharing the comments from “JOHN’s” dad in a two part series.
The BENEFITS
I wanted to share this information with you because it is a GREAT story about a young man that stayed open minded to his college choice, while at the same time understood what was TRULY important to him as he made his final college decision. He now finds himself playing baseball in KY, and he is EXTREMELY happy about his decision. I am so proud of this young man, and that is why I wanted to share a bit of his story with you.
Enjoy the dad’s emails, and I look forward to your comments and questions.
“John’s Experience at Centre College”
Hey Chris:
How are you and your family? I hope that everyone is doing well. I miss talking with you and working together. Oh well, I guess that all good things come to an end. I wanted to give you an update as to what’s been going on with John. He’s in his spring semester at Centre College (in Kentucky). He had a very good fall ball and is doing well in school. The academics there are very intense and the professors have high expectations of the students. The baseball team already had 3 students drop from the baseball team to focus on grades and there are a few more who are borderline. The coaches there put academics/grades first and if a player is struggling in the classroom, then they risk being suspended from the team, completely removed or being limited in playing time until their grades improve. One teammate left the school after the first semester since his grades were not up to par and decided to leave to pursue other less intense colleges. Unfortunately, he was one of the better freshman baseball players so his loss hurts.
Back in October, after fall ball, the coaches asked the team to vote for who the starters should be and John received 21 out of 28 votes to be the starting catcher over 5 other catchers (2 seniors, 1 junior and 2 freshman). Their first game of the season is this Saturday (a double header) against Transylvania University. The coaches haven’t yet made any announcements as to who the starters will be but in any event; John should get lots of playing time. A couple of local Kentucky dads have mentioned to me that they’ve heard from their sons that John looks real good on the field and will be an impact player this season.
If you want to look at how the season progresses for John, feel free to check out the college website at www.centre.edu. Once there, at the left side, click on the link “Athletics and Recreation”. Then, once again on the left side click on the link “Baseball”. Once on the baseball website, go to the right side and you can click on the link “Schedule and Results” to look at the scores and stats for each game. In the preseason coaches’ poll, Centre is picked to finish 5th out of 6 teams in the East division of the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference (SCAC). There are also 6 teams in the West division in the conference for a total of 11 teams. Last year, Centre finished 3rd in the East division of the SCAC with an 8-8 conference record and 20-17 overall. They lost their top pitcher from last year and now have 15 out of the 29 players who are freshman which may be why they were downgraded from last year’s finish. This is a pretty legitimate Div. III conference with a few teams who generally make the top 25 teams nationwide (ie, Trinity (Texas), DePauw and Rhodes).
Part 2 Coming Soon…
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