Also I forgot to post this yesterday, but we added another DIII pitcher commit.
It can be hard to tell how these lower level pitching transfers are gonna turn out, but the stats are very impressive.
If you wanna watch him close out the DIII national title game, here’s the link: https://youtu.be/gTKbqGCeffk?si=ZzyoPNmk42PHRKZe&t=7377 He comes into the game in the 8th at 2:02:55, and then finishes the game in the 9th at 2:15:41.
I was going to ask how does it typically work with a player making a jump like that? I feel like I see it more in baseball nowadays but it’s still rare if impossible for the major sports. The gap is jisttoo large to navigate
Yeah it’s definitely more common in baseball than say basketball or football where the difference in pure athleticism makes it really hard to transition up, but I don’t remember the last time we took two pitchers from the DIII level. We’ve gotten hitters before, like Ference last year and Chris Baker who was a bench bat for us two years ago but typically our transfer pitchers from lower divisions are either coming out of mid major DI schools, JUCO, or the occasional DII program like Blake Barker did.
Seems to be popping up more and more though, UNC got Dylan Weber from Christopher Newport who was a 1st Team All-American at the DIII level this year and a guy I had on my radar as someone we might go after. I mean if they have the requisite stuff or velocity then high level programs are gonna find them from anywhere.
yet we (and actually, HE, as he closed out the game) literally did beat them.
certainly i get there are factors like NIL and just a desire to do something different, but this one burns me as it’s not like he’s going for a guaranteed starting role. I’d imagine he’ll have a very similar role to what he did for us as a main bullpen arm.
maybe he fits in to that Starkville vibe more? i’m sure it’d be fun to play college games in front of 10K nightly, but man we have a shot at CWS 3 years in a row. i wonder if he had another issue here?
Yep, that’s why I altered the adage (you may have read it differently).
lol missed that, nicely done!
My son is a DII pitcher. He played a couple of summers in the Northwoods League, which may be the second-best summer league behind Cape Cod. You had all kinds of players in that league – DI, DII, DIII, JUCO, NAIA – and they all could play. In fact, my son faced about a half-dozen UVA players, including Kyle Teel, and held them all hitless. A lot of those lower-division players are just kids who matured a year or two later – they weren’t throwing hard or hitting hard in high school, but they are now.
Yeah, isn’t baseball recruiting all about finding kids really early and getting them to commit? I vaguely recall someone telling me about 8th graders getting recruited?
If I’m not making that up, I could see late bloomers really getting penalized.
Absolutely eighth grade. Sometimes earlier. Especially for pitchers, and almost entirely based on velocity. You get an eighth or ninth grader throwing in the 80s, he’s got a stack of D1 offers, regardless of how good a pitcher he actually may be. It’s a numbers game: Schools collect as many arms as possible, knowing a bunch of them won’t work out (or will work out too well, and the kids will go pro). Major League teams use the same philosophy when they draft.
And you’re right: Late bloomers definitely get overlooked. Which is why the transfer portal is so important.
I follow hoops recruiting very close. Football recruiting close, but not like hoops. Baseball recruiting confuses me.
We’ve got friends whose son was on 2 D1 rosters over 4 years. Notice I said “on rosters” because he didn’t really play. His parents decided when he was about 8-9 that he was playing D1 no matter what the cost. The times I saw him play as a kid/teen, I never saw it. Decent player, but nothing that really stood out.
They had him in every travel ball league and named camp you can imagine. In HS he played on the 9th grade team as a freshman, JV team as a sophomore, made varsity as a junior but sat the bench. Between his junior and senior year he “committed” to a lower end D1 without having started (or even played much) varsity. I can’t see that happening in hoops or football unless very unusual circumstances.
He transferred after 2 years of not playing in college to another lower D1, but didn’t play there either. Wasn’t on scholarship either stop. Weird situation…great kid and very smart, but always felt like his “ceiling” as a player was HS. Not really college, or at best D2 or D3.
They did change the rule in college baseball that now you’re only allowed to offer scholarships/take a commitment from a player once they’ve reached their junior year of HS. Before that you’re absolutely right, a good portion of the class would be filled out while kids were still in the 9th and 10th grade with some being committed in the 8th grade. Lacrosse was the same way.
This is not uncommon. My son played for one of the top high school baseball teams in our state and his team was littered with talent. Of the guys that went to schools like UNC, NC State and Clemson, few got more than just a little playing time. The guys that went to “lower” divisions fared much better with playing time.
The guys that blow up early (middle school thru 9th grade) often plateau–there are obviously exceptions. The late bloomers often end up on DII and DIII teams where they can, hopefully, get some attention and either bounce to a more competitive situation or at least get drafted.
As a parent, that’s just wild. Playing baseball at any level is a huge time commitment (there’s probably an argument that its the team sport with the biggest time commitment, given how long both the individual games and the season are) then add that on top of the general grind of being a D1 athlete means you have to give up a ton of other stuff. Going through all that and then virtually never getting to play seems like a surprising choice to me. You’d really have to love the environment. Maybe if you were sort of quasi-manager or helped the coaches out a lot? Even then, whew.
My younger daughter is probably on the periphery of being a low-D1 athlete for both field hockey and track, if we decided to aggressively pursue it. She LOVES playing and loves sports in general, so we asked if it was something she wanted to try and go after.
“Why would I want to do that?!? Do you know how much time being a D1 athlete takes?” was her response. She loves being a HS athlete, and will be sad when its over. But not so sad that she has any interest in the sacrifices necessary to even have a shot at D1.
Yeah, like I kind of alluded to…unusual family dynamic. Don’t know if the kid wanted it more, or mom & dad. But going back to his 11th grade year (when he was on varsity but didn’t play), went to another HS his 12th grade year and did play, then 4 years in college. That’s a lot of time/energy/sacrifice/expense to basically play 1 year out of 6.
I love this. She seems wise!
You are raising a very wise young woman.
Just as an update to this, Mancini committed to Vandy a couple days ago. Very talented player.
That hurts…
It sucks but honestly we are more than fine when it comes to IF depth, or just position player depth in general. He would’ve been great to have for competition purposes but there will be very few teams in the country who trot out an IF that’s as good offensively as Becker/Godbout/Hanson/Ford if they all remain there.
Who plays ss for us? Godbout isn’t that quick but is sound.