Baseball · Issue No. 16
Does My Son's Batting Average Actually Matter for Recruiting?
Week of September 14, 2026
A parent wrote in: "My son's batting average dipped this spring and he's worried it's going to hurt his recruiting chances. Should he be worried?"
Our answer: A veteran recruiting coach who's placed over a thousand players has heard this exact worry constantly — and his answer is refreshingly direct.
After 17 years helping well over a thousand players navigate the college recruiting process, one veteran recruiting coach has a blunt message for parents: a lot of what families obsess over doesn't register with college coaches at all. Here are the five he says matter the least — and why.
Batting average. In nearly two decades of doing this professionally, he says he's never once had a college coach ask him what a player hit. Batting average is a fan statistic. Evaluators care about hard contact, bat speed, and how a ball comes off the bat — a bloop single that pads an average tells a coach nothing useful, while a hard-hit line drive that gets caught tells them plenty.
Playing for a "name" travel organization. Being on a nationally recognized org's top team can matter — but being on that same org's C-team or regional squad carries essentially no weight with college coaches, whatever the jersey says. The organization's brand doesn't recruit a player; his own play does.
Rankings. He's blunt here: the businesses selling recruiting rankings are also the businesses selling the showcases that generate those rankings. College coaches, in his experience, evaluate with their own eyes rather than outsourcing that judgment to a number attached to one showcase performance.
Parent evaluations. This is the one he says stings the most to hear: a parent's opinion of how good their son is carries no weight in the process. College coaches and pro scouts are the only opinions that matter here, and bragging about a son's talent to a coach directly can actively hurt a family's credibility.
National tournaments. Decades ago, a "national tournament" genuinely gathered the country's best teams in one place, and college coaches showed up because that's where the talent was concentrated. Today, some events have swelled into hundreds of teams spread across dozens of fields, many of them hours from where any college coach is actually watching. The word "national" in an event's name doesn't guarantee exposure the way it once did.
None of this means those five things are worthless in an absolute sense — a high batting average is still nice, a good ranking isn't a bad thing to have. The point is narrower and more useful than that: don't spend a family's limited time and money chasing any of these five under the belief that they're what actually gets a player recruited. They're not.
From an interview with a college baseball recruiting coach.
This piece ran in PPA Pro Issue No. 16, alongside a camp spotlight and trainer pick for every sport. Subscribe free.