STATS - For Recruiting

[jazzmik68]

Question(s)...

Should a parent keep stats to use on a recruitment letter/athletic resume?

If so..

When should they start keeping a book? Include Freshman year? Summer and Fall stats? Or only worry about Spring stats?

thanks

[Cannonball]

I think all teams are different in their recruitment proceedures. I've only filled out a couple of forms that ask about summer stats. I've often filled out stats for high school. At the end of the year for our varsity high school team, each player has been given their stats but equally important, they are on line for college coaches to check out. I know each area is different. I take it a step further and give my daughter's stats per her conference. Here is the link I send to college coaches (FYI, my daughter is Brianna Butler)

http://stlhighschoolsports.com/sport...s/leadh233.php

I've heard coaches say that they do put some value on stats and I've heard some say they don't care at all and can take a look at a swing, arm strength, ... and determine whether a player can play for them. There is no simple formula.

[tg643]

Levels of competition are so different colleges coaches can't use stats to determine which player is better. I helped my son with several online recruiting forms and never saw a box for playing stats. There were boxes for GPA, SAT scores, throwing velocity, 60 time, height and weight. College recruiting is about eligibility, tools and projectibility, not high school stats. The forms asked for the high school coach and number, summer coach and number and pro scout who has seen you play and number.

Stats can be used as a calling card. Only current stats. But ultimately it will be about what you do in front of them in showcases. When my son got off to a huge start his junior season he sent a copy of the newspaper article on him to colleges coaches saying he was interested in playing in their program. The reponse was good. However, when you get responses you have to sort of form responses from legit responses especially when there's a summer camp invite.

A good site for college recruiting is hsbasedballweb.com. Recruiting is the focus of the site with many members who are high school and travel coaches along with many parents who are going through the process or have been through the process. Several posters sons are now pro players.

It's very important you learn the rules regarding contact and exchange with college programs.

[scorekeeper]

Question(s)...

Should a parent keep stats to use on a recruitment letter/athletic resume?

If so..

When should they start keeping a book? Include Freshman year? Summer and Fall stats? Or only worry about Spring stats?

There are things on a resume that don’t get looked at, but its not your decision as to what they are.

No matter what anyone says, stats are important from a recruitment standpoint! Not because they’re necessarily a true picture of the player, which they can be, but rather that they’re what draws the attention of whomever is looking. What recruiter in his/her right mind is very interested in “average” players. They might be at some time in the process, but not before they’ve had the chance to grab up the best they can lay their hands on, and how is that determined? Stats.

A fly in the ointment is, there’s very little standardization or quality control when it comes to stats, and that poses a bit of a problem for a parent. If you were a recruiter, how much weight would you give stats a parent had been compiling over the years? Wouldn’t you be much more likely to believe stats the team kept, even though they might not be nearly as valid? Sure you would.

In HS, how many teams keep Fr or JV stats? Ours does JV numbers now, but there’s no easy way for a recruiter to get their hands on them. That pretty much leaves the V numbers. Some people might believe that every HSV team is running the numbers for pitching, hitting, base running, and fielding, but believe me, that isn’t even close to true! So, if your kid is in one of those kinds of programs, you’re pretty much out of luck.

But now-a-days there are a lot of teams that not only do some numbers, they do it so they’re available on-line, like Cannonball described. Unfortunately, like CB’s area, many areas have their own place to stick the numbers, so its not like MLB where you go to one place to see all the players. But what’s gaining in popularity, is a national repository for HS V numbers, and the ability to do JV is in the works.

If you haven’t heard of it or been there to look, you can go to MaxPreps.com, and spend days looking at schools, players, and stats from all over the country, in all kinds of sports. Trouble is, there’s no mandate to do it. So even here in NorCal where the company’s based and the percentage of teams using the free service is the highest, there are still many many teams that either don’t use it at all, or choose only to use parts of it. Heck, many schools don’t even enter a schedule or a roster!

But, if your school does do it, the results are available to the entire world! Here’s our roster and our stats. I’m guessing that next year we’ll be putting in heights and weights too, and I believe some simple things like GPA and SAT scores may soon be available.

http://www.maxpreps.com/high-schools...all/roster.htm
http://www.maxpreps.com/high-schools...ball/stats.htm

That’s a heap of information, and a heap of trouble for a coach to keep up with. He’s got to find a scorekeeper who will show up for every game, and one that hopefully understands the difference between a hit and an error. He’s got to find a statistician to take the data from the scorebook and stick it into wherever it will be available to the public, whether it’s a more localized thing like CB’s or a national thing like MaxPreps.

Go talk to the coach at your school and see if you can do something to help. Keep in mind that if your kid is in a national database with tens of thousands of other players and he’s got a whole lot more eyes looking at him than only those you send a letter to.

[jazzmik68]

I understand what they're saying about some of the online recruitment submission forms. Some of them don't have a place to enter STATS.

But I agree with Scorekeeper... that on a "resume" letter you'd be sending in to a prospective school/coach, that there should be STATS listed.
All of the sample form letters I have have a place for stats.

Our school does use MaxPreps. So the stats will be online.... I just have to find out who is actually doing them and whether they know what they are doing or not.

I was just curious if I needed to be keeping track myself also.

Believe me it something that I don't want to do. I always laugh every time I see all the scorebooks come out at games. Most of them kept by moms who think every
ground ball by little Johnny that gets through an IF's legs is a base hit.

[tg643]

All that blather and wind blowing about the quality of game stats doesn't answer the question. Stats are only a calling card. They don't prove anything. The player still has to demonstrate his tools and skills in front of the coaches. I've found college coaches are far more interested in my son's sixty time, throwing velocity, size, GPA and SAT scores than his batting average.

[scorekeeper]

. . .Our school does use MaxPreps. So the stats will be online.... I just have to find out who is actually doing them and whether they know what they are doing or not.

What do you mean by them knowing what they’re doing. And FYI, whether or not they do, as a parent, it’ll be awful tough to get someone to believe your stats and not the one’s provided by the team.

Something that fouls the whole process up, is purposeful cheating, and another is ignorance of the rules. FI, runner on 2nd, 2 out and batter hits a pop fly to left that F7 drops, and runner scores. The dropped ball was scored an error, but the batter was given an RBI.

You’d be surprised at how many people don’t know that’s not an RBI, but you’d also be surprised at how many times it is known, but scored as an RBI anyway to help the stats of the player. Unless you had access to the book, you’d never know that was a BS RBI.

I could go on for a long time on things like that, and its definitely a reason HS stats aren’t looked at as being very reliable. There are also a lot of “holes” in the numbers displayed by organizations like MaxPreps. By holes I mean something like not having all the games scheduled or the data for all the games put in. Also, in general the data fields aren’t required, so its possible to not enter K’s for one game or SB’s for another.

Another problem is, in general those places don’t “validate” the data as it’s being put in. FI, last season we had a kid who hadn’t given up a run after the 1st several games, and I was wondering why he wasn’t showing up on the league leaderboard while a player at another school with an ERA of 1.10 was. It took me a while but I found it. The guy who was putting the data into the system made a little boo boo. Quite accidentally, he had entered 42 innings for one of that kid’s appearances, instead of 4 and 2/3rds.

An automatic calculation is done for a lot of stats like ERA, where in order to be eligible, a players needs a certain percentage of IPs that the leader has. In this case, there were only a few games, and this kid showed up as having a total of 47 innings. In order to be eligible, pitchers needed 33%, or 15 innings. At that point in time, there were no pitchers anywhere that had that many innings, so he was the only one eligible.

Now that was a fluke, but having written programs and dealt with data input for many many years, I can tell you that that kind of thing isn’t all that unusual, and mistakes like that can really have an effect when you’re only talking about 30 games or so. So, there are definitely a lot of reasons the stats won’t be really spot on.

Everyone knows I do the stats, and its standard that anyone having a question of any kind can contact me and get an explanation. I’ve made plenty of mistakes over the years, and I appreciate it when they’re brought to my attention so I can correct them, but don’t hold your breath for a coach or anyone else to appreciate it the way I do.