As I was logging my hours today, I realized that I had made it to exactly 200 hours on Wednesday (November 18th). I hadn’t planned on logging this day because I had met my goal, but I wanted to share this super cool experience for the mentorship! I continued to work on the videos today, but it was in our coaches development meeting that I wanted to share. I tried to keep my office work separate from my journal entries but this was too important to omit. One of the other directors with Force Baseball played collegiately at the University of Georgia. He invited his college pitching coach, who is now the pitching coach at the University of Missouri, Fred Corral. Coach Corral talked about his leadership approach and how he tries to get through to his player and it was such a captivating experience. He also talked about what he looks for in recruiting and how he has been navigating through the pandemic. It is was outstanding to hear from a Power 5 program on how they are evaluating player in this time and it is helping me understand what skills and information need to be highlighted to show success to recruiting coordinators. Coach Corral is an awesome guy and I was super excited to be able to talk to him a little bit. I might be setting him up with a prospect (he is not a Force player though) which could be beneficial for the both of us. It is cool that the other director was able to bring his mentor in to talk to us about how things should be run from a college perspective!
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Another day working with the class of 2023 videos and at the end of the day I was almost halfway done with all of that class’ videos. I believe that this is our biggest class in terms of college videos and Coach Mendoza and I are moving through them rather quickly. The videos are still repetitive and mundane but it is definitely interesting to watch guys that I have worked with for a couple of years grow and put together a college skills video for them. For example, one kid who is a part of the 2023 is a kid that I have done private lessons with for years. When we started lessons together, he had just finished the 8th grade and was gearing up for high school baseball. I remember him being pretty athletic but not a great hitter. Now, he is absolutely lighting up the numbers and he is one of the best (data wise) in the program as well as the state for his class. It is exciting to see how the work that these kids have put in is starting to pay off, especially considering that we all spent the first couple months of the year in lockdown. While this project is not as thoroughly exciting as I thought it might have been originally, it is definitely awesome to experience the recruiting process again for these kids! As we move forward with the project, I am looking forward to helping these kids get to their dream school for the chance to play collegiate baseball.
Today I finished up the class of 2022 videos and started to work on the class of 2023. It was interesting to see the difference in size and talent as a whole between the two classes. Our older group (2022) is a lot more physical as a whole, which can be expected but the younger guys have some equally “freak athletes” in their class. Most of the coaches that I have been speaking to consistently have not started seriously recruiting the class of 2023 but I see some guys that are movers in the making. I am super excited about creating many of their videos because there is a lot of potential to grow and potentially be big college baseball players. As an organization, it was thought for a while that our 2023 class would be a really good one in terms of producing college ball players and so far the boys have not disappointed. These guys are in a totally different boat than many of the seniors and juniors. While most of the players in our organization are good students (it is a pillar for our organization’s success), it is crucial that we begin preparing this class for the college decision process. One thing that we are already trying to stress is for ACT and SAT practice courses. We have partnered with an ACT tutoring program. I have already explained to them the importance of taking that training as seriously as they take their baseball training and I hope I am getting through to them. Coach Mendoza and I been working closely with this group to get them signed up for the ACT practice services because it is of the utmost importance for their careers at this point!
Well, this project is starting to get tough, but not from a technical standpoint. The task is extremely repetitive and mundane. I still would not have wanted to do anything else, but this project has really gotten to be very time consuming. My goal was to finish the class of 2022 videos by the end of the day today but for my sanity, I am leaving three videos to be finished next week. The process to create each video is taking about an hour to complete. Due to the size and space that I have on my computer, I am splitting video clips on an old iPhone and then I AirDrop them to my computer. After I finish that, I line up video with Rapsodo readings and put them in the frame of the video. After adding all of the actual video, I then am making the information slides that give the players name, height and weight, high school and positions that they play. On one hand, it doesn’t bring a lot of excitement like it did day one because I have committed at least 18 hours a week to it, and after the 10th video, it lacks excitement. However, I am trying to stay positive and it is giving me another opportunity to learn more about the kids that I am working with over the next few months. I get to analyze their video and show them what level I see them fitting best at, as well as just learning little tidbits of information about them or their game!
Another day in editing videos, we finished with a little more than half of the 2022 class done. It is a good feeling knowing that we are nearly done with our second graduating class for these videos. It has been fun to watch some of these kids in their videos because our 2022 class is a very physical bunch. While they aren’t the greatest talent wise (yet), they continue to put up above average numbers, which can attract a college coach. In a recent conversation with Anthony and Force Baseball Operations director, Larry Mosley, we came to the conclusion that our 2022 class might be the biggest beneficiary of the Coronavirus pandemic/shut down because their skills tend to fit a junior college mold. After watching a few videos from our players, I have begun reaching out to some junior college recruiting coordinators all over the country. While it remains to be seen if some of these kids are interested in going to school out of state, I have heard from coaches in Maryland, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Michigan for potential players to go to their program. While it is a small start, I am excited for the futures of some of our players and I am more excited to hear about potential interest and college fits. We still have a lot of work to do with these athletes, but I believe that we are on the right track in terms of how we are beginning our placement programs. With Anthony letting me focus on the 2021-22 classes, I feel that I am able to be a better resource to these kids, as well as being a great resource to the younger kids when they reach the junior year mark.
Today I started off my day by creating videos before we started our training sessions. This week will be another tough one, which is why I am happy to be able to do these videos from home. I began working on the class of 2022 videos, which will take a little longer than the class of 2021. Though not our biggest class, they have the second highest priority because they are just starting this college recruitment process. A lot of the kids who are in the 2022 class and younger do not have video yet, which puts a great amount of importance on what we are doing over the next coming weeks. We have made a plan of finishing all of the videos by Christmas but I think we might be pushing everything too quickly. I believe that we have to perfect the profiles for our junior and senior athletes so that they can really begin contact over the next six months. Our sophomores and freshman do not need that type of exposure right now, as they still have at least three years of high school baseball to play. We are beginning to look into alternative plans to help out the older players in our program, while still helping the younger guys as well. Anthony and I talked about it at work tonight as our best course of action moving forward. I think that we are both moving forward with editing videos, while Mendoza works primarily with the sophomores and freshman (2023 and 2024) and I focus on the seniors and juniors (2021 and 2022).
To wrap up our week, we have created 20 videos for the guys that attended our video day. Each video took about an hour to complete but we eventually finished all of our videos for our 2021 grads. The pressure was on for this group because they needed as much time to circulate these videos compared to the other classes. We decided to send out these videos instead of posting them to YouTube, at least for now because managing 20 videos (one for offense and one for defense) can be a little stressful. I would rather give the videos to the guys that we are working with and allow them to distribute them as they need. We have a plan to post these videos in a couple of weeks, but it is not the right time currently. We have a lot of plans for college exposure with these athletes and I am excited for how we are going to approach this the next couple of weeks.
This week has been tough because of the start of our baseball training program with work, as well as the pressure to get these videos done. However, I think it will only get easier from here. Next week we are looking to begin tackling the class of 2022, which is the most exciting class currently. Our 2021 class is mostly looking at small schools who are closing their recruiting classes, where our 2022 class is starting the process. Next week will have its own challenges, but I am excited to see how it begins to shake out with that class! Today is the home stretch of our video day processes. After taking Monday off, Coach Mendoza and I have began the video editing process. We have had a couple issues because we are working on two separate operating systems on the computer. I’m working on iMovie (Mac iOS) and Mendoza is using a computer program on Window OS. It is tough to work out the differences between the two the different systems but I believe that this is a minor inconvenience. I have worked in video editing for a couple years and this is where my expertise is coming into play. We used the first half of our day to figure how we specifically wanted our videos to be formatted. It was awesome to hear the differences in our thought processes as to how the videos should be created. I personally thought it was a constructive conversation because Coach Mendoza had certain thoughts about what he wanted to see as a coach. I had other perspectives from other current coaches that I have been in contact with over the past few months. We decided on a format that had both of our ideas to create a video format that satisfied what we both wanted.
The second half of the day involved teaching Mendoza how to use some of the effects in the video editing program. While it took me about an hour and a half to make each video today, I believe that I can create each video in about an hour. Much of today was a learning experience but I believe that if we take two or three days a week devoted to video creation, I think we can have all of our videos done by mid-December! We are finally done with the college video days, and I could not be happier. Though it was a fun experience for me, it was an extremely exhausting two weeks and I am excited that we have completed all of it. In our first offering of the videos, we connected with 67 athletes who have shown interest in playing at the college level and wanted to get a video to start their process. On top of that, we had a total of 88 athletes express interest in the profile. To me, it is cool to create these connections with these athletes and help them find their way when it comes to making their college decisions. As we are beginning to put the videos together, Coach Mendoza and I have began evaluating where the each of the kids fit into recruiting range (D1, D2, etc.). Normally, Coach Mendoza and I have stayed on the east side of town, so it has a been interesting getting to know a lot of the west side kids. The west side has a couple of players that I believe are D1 and D2 guys, and I am ready to get to work with them to help achieve their dreams!
The next step for us is to do some video editing and begin to get things rolling for our 18u players. They are on a little bit of a time crunch if they are uncommitted. Luckily though, COVID-19 didn’t do many people favors so a lot of guys are still in the same boat. I think our athletes are not any worse off than other athletes outside of our program. We have asked them to be as proactive with their college choices as we are being with their recruitment and we hope that we can meet in the middle. I am excited to see the next part of the process. We wrapped up the videos on the east side of town tonight and it was a good feeling because we were able to get back on track with our 14u high school kids. We knew that the turnout would be lower than we have seen in the last couple of days, so we were dead set on retaining the efficiency that eluded us last night. Overall was a pretty special day in my opinion because I got to work on the videos of kids that are on my team for next summer, as well as a 17-year-old that was on my team this past summer. It was great to experience because I was especially invested in developing recruiting programs for these kids. After a day like yesterday which was draining my energy (I didn’t really feel the effects of last night until I woke up this morning), these personal relationships really rejuvenated my energy. It was cool to see the growth of some of my kids after not seeing them play for a couple of months. Everything ran relatively smoothly as we only ran into one minor issue, in which we had prepared for on day one; our camera had run out of memory at the very end of the day. Luckily, I had another SD card in my bag to finish up the day. With only one more day to go, I feel that we have successfully created a system that will help in the future if we continue to run this program.
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Author: Ed HarperA Baseball lifer who dedicates his time to the player development of youth players in the Cleveland, Ohio area. Looking for multiple ways to help kids achieve their dreams of playing college and professional baseball is how I devote my time and energy to those that I serve! Archives
November 2020
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