If you’re serious about playing college baseball, then you already know that academics are a huge piece of the recruiting puzzle. Simply put, players with good grades give themselves more margin for error and more opportunities to continue playing the game at the college level. Below we discuss 3 reasons why you need to have good grades and a strong academic record.
1. Good students have more opportunities to play baseball.
College coaches want strong, skilled, and talented baseball players, but they need players who will stay academically eligible and make good academic progress. Even if you are the all-conference go-to guy, you might find yourself out in the cold if your grades are barely high enough to keep you on the high school field. Baseball programs and coaches get in trouble if their players don’t pass their classes or graduate. While you don’t need to have a 4.0 to attract interest from college programs, a low GPA might get you passed over for someone else, and the better your grades, the more opportunities you’ll have.
2. Good grades can help you qualify for academic scholarships.
Because coaches have limited athletic scholarships to work with, very few baseball players receive enough money to pay all of their tuition, and almost no one gets enough from athletic scholarships to pay for everything. Some schools don’t even offer athletic scholarships. Academic scholarships can help you pay for your education either in addition to or instead of an athletic scholarship—but only if you qualify for one. Many academic scholarships are awarded based on high school grades all four years. So if you think your grades don’t count until you are older, you’re wrong. Ask your high school counselor about what academic scholarships may be available to you based on the schools that you are interested in. It is never too early to find out what you need to do to qualify.
3. You don’t want to feel stupid in your college classes.
This is really obvious but easy to forget: you get good grades when you are learning what you need to know in your classes. The classes you take each year in high school are supposed to prepare you for classes you’ll take later. For example, you have to take algebra before you take geometry because math classes build on information you’ve learned in lower level classes. During high school and especially senior year, you’ll take classes that will prepare you to take college-level classes. When you get bad grades, it is likely that you are not learning enough to do well in the classes that come later. You do not want to start college classes feeling lost and stupid because you didn’t learn enough in high school. Trust us, being unprepared academically makes things a lot harder. If you learn everything you can in your high school classes, you’ll find that studying in college will be less time consuming and intimidating.
“It does not hurt to have a good academic resume because, worse comes to worse, if you get into a good school, most coaches will let you come onto the field and show that you can play baseball. Having a good academic resume is important…obviously, you need to have the ability… but coming from a small school in a small town, you don’t always get your looks.” – D1 Catcher, California
