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Dugout Dish: In the Clubhouse with EMD | Focus on Making Your Varsity Team · Dugout Dish Baseball Recruiting Podcast powered by EMD Baseball

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Foreign. Welcome to this week's edition of in the Clubhouse with EMD Baseball. I'm Andy Kira. Kitties joined by my wonderful co host rocking this sweet green Jordan. Zip up hoodie right now, Keith Glasser. How we doing?
• 0:26
  Speaker B: Great. How are you? My wife got this for me at the.
• 0:30
  Speaker A: Yeah, looks good. Goes good with your skin tone. Olive is a good look on you.
• 0:34
  Speaker B: It's comfortable, it's warm. It's got the Jordan over here. You know, just dudes being dudes.
• 0:43
  Speaker A: Dudes being dudes. Today's topic. We often find that the recruiting process can be. Can get people caught up in the end result. We're specifically speaking to 26s and 27s right now. Hopefully more so than 27s but either way, but not losing sight of what's right in front of you. It doesn't mean those long term goals of playing college baseball don't matter. Doesn't mean they don't go away. Doesn't mean that you shouldn't start to execute your recruiting plan.
• 1:20
  Speaker B: But.
• 1:23
  Speaker A: We'Re in the middle of January. If you're a 27, if you're 26, who hasn't made varsity. Let's check that box first. Give us your thoughts on that, Coach Glass. Sure.
• 1:38
  Speaker B: You know, I think the biggest thing that you need to understand going into the recruiting process is we've talked about this quite frequently, like you need to be recruited before you're or you need to be recruitable before you're recruited. Right. So you know, I, I think that one of the biggest things. Am I frozen?
• 2:00
  Speaker A: Perhaps.
• 2:02
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 2:03
  Speaker A: You can still hear loud and clear though.
• 2:04
  Speaker B: Okay, I don't care. I'm gonna keep going. For those of you watch on YouTube. I'm sorry, the. You need to be recruited before you're recruited. That said, you know, you, you want to take your goals and fashion them to what it is you ultimately want out of this recruitment process. Making the varsity team as a sophomore or junior is a very good starting step to being able to play college baseball. The flip side to that is if you do make the JV team and specifically as a sophomore, that's okay. And one of the things that I think people get lost in, in this is you still need to play baseball in order to get better at baseball and continue to be on your path to be recruitable. So you can be recruited. That might mean playing JV for a year and getting as many as at bats as you possibly can in order to continue to develop versus maybe being a backup or the, you know, 18th guy on the roster who doesn't play a lot just to say you were on the team, you know, so there's, there, there's positives and negatives to both. You know, I think your ultimate goal should be that you want to make the varsity team and be one of the better players. But if that is going to look like you're never going to play, that's not going to help you in the process either because you're going to spend two or three months not playing the game of baseball when you could be doing it on the JV team. So, you know, I think your goal ultimately should be that you make the varsity team. But understand that if there is a minor setback in there, it's okay. It doesn't mean that you're not recruitable. Take that time to develop, get better, get bigger, get stronger, faster, get better at playing baseball and then roll into the summer and you'll be in a far better spot than you might have been had you not played at all.
• 3:58
  Speaker A: Agree 100%. And it's one of those boxes that you definitely want to, you need to be a good player first. And kind of a bar for high school players is to, to make the varsity team. And that goes to the, you need to be recruitable before you get recruited conversation. And you know, it's not, it's not the end all be all. If you're a sophomore and you don't make varsity, there's plenty of kids who are going to be in that situation this spring who are going to play college baseball, period. But work towards that short term goal as a part of your long term goal. And you know, we just got off a podcast that we'll release here soon. That's one of the things that we talked about is that a lot of times kids can get too fixated on the long term goal, but they forget that there's steps that they have to take to get there. And this is one of those steps. One of those steps is can we put together a good enough performance where we can make our varsity team, whether it happens as a sophomore, a freshman, or as a junior. That should be a, a check, a checkpoint for you in the recruiting process to validate where you are and help guide you throughout your process. But you're in this January, February, March time frame for the guys in the Northeast. Like you don't play until April, bust your ass and put yourself in a position because you've been doing the stuff in the weight room, you've been doing your skill work, you've been Eating right, you've been sleeping right. And give yourself the best chance possible to make that varsity team and that's one step closer to being a recruitable player. And it's important not to lose sight of some of these short term things because one, you only get to play high school baseball once. Right. And to just completely dismiss that as something that you need to work towards and something you need to enjoy would be a big mistake. The second part of it is it's really hard to get recruited if you can't check that box first. So having some short term focus on the things that are right in front of you doesn't negate your long term goals. It actually enhances them and it gives you something to work towards that's attainable in the short term versus that long term goal of playing college baseball. Because we've talked about it a lot, most 2026 is you're not going to get your attention until June, July and August. For most 2027s your recruiting process, and by most, I'm talking 99% of kids, your recruiting process isn't going to really heat up until this time next year and next spring and summer. So you'd be remiss to not focus on being a really good high school player and sacrifice that and solely be focused on the recruiting portion of it. Because you got to check that box first.
• 6:42
  Speaker B: Yeah. And I think the other thing, couple other caveats to this one, it's obviously going to depend on the type of high school program you're in, right? Like if you're at a private school and you know, baseball is a thing, and it's going to be heavily loaded with juniors and seniors, like, hey, if you make JV team, so be it. Let's continue to work towards what you want. The other thing, and I think this is pointed more, this is a point that I have pointed more towards the coaches, is if you have guys that could potentially, you know, aspire to play college baseball and you know you're just going to keep them on the varsity team to be a guy that could potentially play, like you might be delaying his development by not letting him play JV baseball to get better and just to put him on the varsity team for, quote, unquote, experience, you're not going to get a whole hell of a lot of experience sitting on the bench. Like you might learn, but you're going to get more experience playing. And I think that sometimes that gets lost on some people. And I think that's an important point to make. And if you're a kid or a family in that situation, like you might want to fight to go to play on the JV team to get the burn, get the at bats, get the game, speed play so that this summer you can put yourself in a far better spot.
• 7:58
  Speaker A: It's a very good point, coach. I'm glad you brought it up. Anything else you'd like to add?
• 8:06
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it's not an indictment on the coaches, right? I know there's a lot of good coaches out there that do that. I just think that sometimes there's. You pull guys up because you want the experience in a couple years and you know, you kind of delay that development because there's, there's not a lot going on, you know, from a gameplay standpoint. So just something to think about. But you know, I again, I think that, you know, you're dead right that from if you're 27, like your recruiting process is way more the spring and summer of 2026, not really 2025, you know, so you want to make sure that you're doing all the things it is that you need to do in that long term goal the slow burn, if you will, this year to make sure that you're putting yourself in a really advantageous position this high school season, this summer, this fall, into the winter, and into next year. So you put yourself in a really good spot to be recruited in the summer and spring of 2026.
• 9:03
  Speaker A: Well said. All right, I think that closes out the topic for this evening. Thank you for listening, everybody. Tune in next week. We'll talk more baseball, more recruiting. 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.