Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hey, parents and coaches, are your kids using the right glove? The most important skill for youth athletes to learn is how to play proper catch. The problem is most youth gloves are made with bad leather and are too big for small hands. They actually make it harder to play catch. That's why former Major League Baseball shortstop Kevin Smith created Cali Gloves. Cali gloves are crafted from 100% Japanese kip leather and are the perfect size for kids.
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It's the glove Kevin wishes he had growing up and the glove all his teammates want for their kids. Visit caligloves.com to learn more and help your kids play better catch.
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[00:01:12] Speaker B: Welcome to this week's edition of in the Clubhouse with EMG Baseball. I'm Andy Kirakidis, joined by my Wonderful co host Mr. Keith Glasser. How we doing?
[00:01:20] Speaker C: Great. How are you?
[00:01:22] Speaker B: Good.
Topic for today's discussion is some findings from a study that was done national survey that was done out of Ohio State University by Mr. Chris Noster. Apologies Chris, if I pronounce that wrong. Out of Ohio State and Christopher McLeod who's associated with the University of Florida.
Essentially the study is national survey of 785 participants found that while most parents are real have realistic expectations about their child's chances of athletic success, a notable minority believe their child is likely to reach high level of sports. And I'll give you a couple stats here to kind of set the table. 34% think their child would likely become a small college athlete, 21% believe their child will earn a college athletic scholarship and 17% believe their child could become a professional or an Olympic athlete.
Which is like some pretty astonishingly high percentages given what we know about kind of the the difficulty of even reaching that baseline of being able to play college sports at a small school, never mind being Olympic athlete, which is just crazy. I mean on average about 7% of high school athletes go on to play in college.
One of the other statistics that's shown in the survey is that one and a half of NCAA football players get drafted into the NFL. So I mean do the math.
Like if you break that down to the high school level, the amount of high school kids that end up playing in the NFL is just an astonishingly low number. Never mind getting into you Know, the barrier to entry for, you know, to get to the Olympics. So I think the big takeaway from the study is that while some of these parents do still kind of remain grounded and understand kind of the complexity and the difficulty of reaching some of those aspirations, there was a significant minority that hold expectations that far exceed kind of the statistical odds that are pretty well documented in terms of the percentages of kids. I mean, we throw it out there often, but 7% of high school kids play college baseball, 2.8 play Division 1.
So the idea that 27%, if you were to take those same statistics and apply that across college baseball, I mean, you're looking at almost a tenfold expectation of families that are thinking that their kids are going to be Division 1 scholarship baseball players.
So it's an interesting study. Obviously the sample size isn't crazy big, but 785, that's.
Is all of that stuff statistically relevant? I'm sure some statisticians would probably push back on sample size and all that kind of stuff, which is all valid. But I do think that the takeaways. There's enough there in the takeaways of the article to give us a little bit to run with. And it's funny, we were just talking about this, that there's a lot of parents that go through this recruiting process and they try to project their reality onto the baseball landscape in that I think that that can be really detrimental to success in the recruiting process and not really fully understanding the difficulty of playing a college sport, nevermind college baseball, but also just it shows that there's a gap in knowledge and understanding of the talent level and the competitiveness that is currently present in the college baseball landscape, which is, you know, in my eyes, like some of those numbers are like a little bit concerning. When you start to think about how, like how, I mean, shoot, I'm just gonna throw it out there like kind of how hard headed people can be about, you know, to think the 27 out of 100 parents think their kid's going to be a Division 1 athlete.
That's wild to me. Obviously we're close to this and we know.
[00:05:36] Speaker C: Yeah, no, I think that it's.
And I, I think we could tear this apart. Right. Like, because it does, you know, in the article it talks about how there's, you know, it's varying ages and you know, if there's multiple kids, they picked one. And there's socioeconomic backgrounds and a whole, a whole slew of things, you know, maybe that 27% isn't insane if, you know, it's across multiple genders and multiple sports. Right? Like, maybe it's 1 in 10 for baseball and 1 in 10 for blacks. I don't know.
But I think the general, the, the general statement to say that like, you know, 30 of people think that their kid is going to be a Division 1 athlete, I do think is, is kind of wild on its face.
It's, I think in, in, in today's world, it's incredibly difficult. You know, the percentages are very low in order to be able to, to get to the Division 1 level in a lot of these sports. And you have to be, you know, really good at, you know, and we taught, you know, I talked about it on the last podcast where, you know, you're competing nationally for, you know, if you're talking about the Division 1 level and especially in some, you know, football and, and obviously baseball and you know, lacrosse and hockey and hoops, like you're taught, like, you have to be in that percentage at the national level, not just your town, your county, your state, the national level. And that's, that's where I think people kind of, you know, as they say nowadays, lose the plot, um, where you kind of get away from, you know, well, he's really good and you know, he's been good since he's 6 and we're, we're here and he identifies as an athlete. He wants to do this and like, yeah, man, like, that doesn't mean that you are going to play college baseball or college whatever.
You know, I think the Olympic one is pretty wild to think about. Like you're talking about literally being world class where you're competing against the world.
You know, obviously you have to be very good from a national standpoint because you're representing your country. But like, you got to put up world class numbers to be able to be in the conversation, if you will, for the, for the old Olympic team to represent the good old US of A. In the red, white and blue. But, you know, it's a wild concept, I think, and I think a lot of it stems from, you know, a lack of education and a lack of what it actually means to play professionally and what it means to kind of compete at that level. I don't, I would be interested to know in said study, like what level mom and dad played at or the person who filled out the survey. Right. Like, I think sometimes that, you know, the, if you didn't play at a high level that your, your expectations might be a little bit higher than that of parents who have played at, you know, higher levels of sport throughout the course of their lives.
And I don't know, maybe, maybe it's different, but I just, I found it to be, you know, rather wild. I know it kind of set off a little bit of a Twitter firestorm or X X storm because of the sheer absurdity of the number, if you want my honest opinion. Um, you know, but it's, I don't know, like I, I, part of it, I think, is parents being, you know, overly confident in what their children are capable of doing. I thought it was interesting that the older they were, the more, you know, the less likely they were to say that they were going to go professionally. So, like, the younger they were that, you know, the inverse, the younger they were, more people kind of thought their kids would be professional, which I think is a wild concept.
Like, I look at my 4 year old and there's not a thought in my mind that he's going to be a professional anything. Like, he might be a professional parkour guy because all he does is just run around and jump on the couch and do wild stuff, you know, But I don't, you know, I, I think there needs to be some, some reality in what it, what it means to be a professional athlete, what it takes to be a professional athlete, what it takes to be a college athlete.
And that stuff is not going to shake itself out until well into their high school years.
You know, you're, you, you're not going to look at an 8, 9, 10 year old and be like, yeah, it's a Division 1 player. That's a, that's a future pro right there. Like, you're going to look at 16, 17, 18, and be like, yeah, that's, that's a college player right there. That's a dude who looks like he's going to play professionally at some point in time.
And you'll see it, you know, if you're around it enough, you'll see it. You know, I, I was actually texting with him today. Like, I remember the first time I saw Kevin Smith take ground balls.
He was 15 years old. He was taking ground balls at All Stars academies in Latham, New York, owned by Mike Sibolic, who had a huge influence on my career. So shout out Mike Sibolic. He now works with the brewers, but he was taking ground balls and South Troy Dodgers there. And I remember watching Take Fungos and after the first fun go, I looked at the dude who was hitting it and I said, who the hell is that?
And he was like, Kevin Smith, he goes to your high school. And I was like, that is what a Division 1 shortstop looks like. And he was like, yeah, he's 15.
And I was like, okay, but when you're around it enough, you know what it looks like. And, you know, obviously Kevin went and played at Maryland, who's the fourth round draft pick, played in the big leagues, you know, so, like, when you're routed enough, you know what it looks like.
But that doesn't mean, like, just because I said that when he was 15, that that was going to happen, like, that. I don't want to diminish the amount of work that that dude put in over the course of his career to get to where he was to make it to the big leagues, because it's, it's incredibly hard and it's incredibly difficult. And we had him on the podcast. You can go listen to it.
You know, he's very articulate about what it was that he did that got him to the big leagues, you know, but it's the, the ability will stand out, and it's going to start to stand out around 15, 16, 17 years old, not necessarily at 7.
[00:12:12] Speaker B: Yeah, you brought up a really good point about the parents who kind of have experience in this realm, like parents who are college athletes or, you know, professional athletes. And anecdotally, I can tell you that those parents are usually the most grounded because I think they understand, like, hey, this is like, I did this. It's really hard. And most of them also understand that the landscape changed quite a bit, which I always find to be very interesting, that the people who know the most have the most tempered expectations, and their focus isn't on the big flashy thing. It's. It's usually on making sure that their kid enjoys what they're doing, that they provide them with an environment for themselves to get better.
And that's where I find that most of that happens with families that have kind of experience or the parents did it, or maybe an older sibling had gone through it, which I think is a little counterintuitive because you would think that, you know, the guys that are hyper competitive and they played Division 1 sports or they played professional sports, Oddly enough, I, I think it's. It's almost always the exact opposite that the parents with very little experience or never played past the high school level, they seem to have the, the expectations that are usually beyond kind of the reality of the situation. And I, I'm, I'm guessing that the population that thinks that the, you know, that population of 30%, I'm guessing that most of that population is made up of, of parents who likely did not compete beyond the high school level. That would be my guess. I may be wrong, you know, but anecdotally I know that to be true.
[00:14:02] Speaker C: Yeah, no, I, I agree. That's why I, you know, I kind of referenced it. But like, it's, you know, I, I would be interested to kind of know that stuff too. I, I think there's more, there's more in that study that you could probably go a little bit more in depth on, on the survey and, and what it looks like and produce some more numbers. But it's, you know, I just, I thought, I found it very interesting that the older they were, the less likely they were to think that they were going to be Division 1 or professional or Olympic athletes. That the younger, you know, the younger the kid was, the more likely they were to say that, you know, Division one, Olympics or professional was in their future.
And, you know, that just kind of clued me into like, maybe they don't, they don't know what that looks like. You know, I find me a 10 year old that you can look at and be like, yeah, no, that's a future pro.
Okay, that kid might be not playing baseball in two years.
And I'm not saying it's a spoiler like, whatever sport it is. Like, like he might not be playing baseball. He might just be really good at 10 because he's the biggest kid on the field and he hit a growth spurt at 9 years old and he's really good. By the time he's 12, everyone catches up to him and he ain't that good anymore, you know, which, which happens with younger kids. So, you know, I, I found it to be very interesting. I, you know, I, I don't think it's as negative as, as a lot of people kind of made it out to be when it kind of hit Twitter a couple of weeks ago and it took us a little bit of time because we had some, you know, other recordings that we had that went out before we kind of, you know, cut this to kind of get to it. But I at least thought it was, you know, relevant to kind of talk about a little bit and you know, more or less kind of level set. Right. Like 27% is a tad bit too high.
You know, like the reality is that it's, it's a super low percentage that, that are, that are ultimately going to go on and play Division 1 college sports.
You know, having a really good high school career, enjoying yourself and learning, you know, about resiliency and adversity and, you know, what are you toughening your mental capacity and learning teamwork and things of that nature should be a little bit more of the core principles of the youth level than it is the, you know, I just want to go play college baseball or college hockey or volleyball, whatever it might be, and thinking that it's just going to work out that way. Like there's a lot more that goes into it than just really liking sports.
[00:16:41] Speaker B: That is correct, coach. That is correct.
Anything else you want to add?
[00:16:46] Speaker C: No, sir.
[00:16:47] Speaker B: All right. Well, thank you for listening, everybody. Go ahead and check out that study. It's certainly an interesting read.
But yeah, tune in next week. We'll have more to talk about then. Thanks, everybody.
Thank you for listening this week. If you're watching on YouTube, go ahead and hit that subscribe button and smash that like button for us. Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, as well as Spotify. You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram MD Baseball. If you want to find out what me and Keith do to help families and players navigate the recruiting process, go ahead and check us out on emdbaseball.com take a few minutes to check out our new online academy. I promise you'll get some good information out of that. Thanks again for listening. Check in with you next week.
