While you are going through this process, I want you to keep a few things in mind. First, your daughter, your player, will not be getting a multimillion dollar contract to play softball when her college career is over.  Softball is not the reason she is going to college.  Softball, at best, is only a stepping stone to help get her the education that will take her through the rest of her life. 

Second, this is about her and not you.  She is the one who has to be happy with the choice, not you and certainly not her travel coach.  This is may be a difficult time in your entire family's lives for awhile and it can be emotionally draining.  You can make this period much easier by realizing your player must ultimately choose the school that she wants to attend.  This does not mean that you will not be a significant part of the decision making process.  In addition to actually helping your player do the search, your opinion and guidance will be sought out on a regular basis.  In the long run you may find that you have a closer relationship with your player than you ever did.

Third, there will be conflict between you and your player.  Aside from the inevitable difference of opinions over schools, there will be conflicts in physically getting things done; doing the research, writing the letters, scheduling meetings, etc.  There is exactly one reason for this.  Your player is a teenager and you are an adult.  She is looking at this from a teenager’s perspective and you are looking at it from an adult’s perspective.  You are asking a girl who does not know what she is doing on Saturday night to begin thinking about and making decisions that will affect the rest of her life.  Recognize that emotionally she may not be ready to do that when you are.  Once I asked a girl how her search was going and her response to me was to list all the things in her life at that moment that she thought were important.   This included everything from what she wanted for Christmas to what she needed to do to get ready for an upcoming dance.  Did she really think that getting shoes for the winter formal was more important than her college search?  Probably not, but it was her way of saying that she was not ready to think about it or talk about it. 

In addition, time passes faster for an adult than they do for a child.  I call this the Christmas factor.  Just think about how a child perceives time around Christmas and you will understand this.  You have just finished Thanksgiving dinner, you sit down to watch "It's a Wonderful Life" or some other Christmas movie.  At that moment you realize that there are only 4 shopping weeks until Christmas and you panic because you have not even started shopping.  At that exact same moment, the children in the room think, "it is 4 whole weeks" until Christmas. Four weeks seems like an eternity to them and yet you know they will pass in the blink of an eye.  Time just passes differently for adults than it does for teenagers. 

I wrote this with the hopes of making it a bit easier for softball players to get into the college of their choice.  You should find this information helpful; at least I hope you do.  If you take nothing else from this book, heed this one piece of advice.  You cannot start the search too early.  I will say that virtually every parent and player who has walked away from the process disappointed in the college that was selected has said the same thing: “We should have started the search earlier.”  Sometimes this is as a result of ego (my player is so good that I don’t have to do this) and sometimes it is out of ignorance (I had no idea what needed to be done), but for whatever the reason, that is the single most common and biggest mistake that parents and players can make.  Start the process early.

I will also admit that I had an ulterior motive when I wrote this.  Originally, it was my intent to help girls get recruited from beyond a limited geographic region.  But I recently realized that although I had always preached about finding the right fit between a player and a school, what I had originally written could have been interpreted that to mean I too was putting too much emphasis on getting a girl on to a Division I team, regardless of the location.  Now, my ulterior motive is to change the mindset of the people involved in the recruiting process.   Because of that, this site is going to be ever evolving. 

While I still believe that doors across the country should be open for the players, or, put another way, players should not be limited to the schools available to them simply because of where they grew up,  I find myself realizing that too many players are shortchanging themselves because they, or their travel coach, are locked into the idea of playing Division I ball.  In my opinion, that mindset is detrimental to many players in the recruiting process.

Everything on this website is about finding the right fit.  That should be the goal of the recruiting process.  Finding not the best scholarship opportunity, but the right fit to give the player the best and most opportunity to succeed on the field and in the classroom, regardless of the school or the division it plays in. There will be people who will measure your player's success in the recruitment process by which school or which division she ultimately goes to.  DO NOT LISTEN TO THEM. Most of them are ignorant, jealous or worse dishonest.  Some of them will simply have their own self interest at heart. Remember, the only person who has to be happy with the decision is the player.