Play Ball!

Baseball is hard; it is one of the hardest sports to play. You have to hit a round ball with a round long bat that comes at you at dangerous speeds like 95 mph and above. You will have to make an instant decision whether you are swinging or not. 

On top of all that, the ball goes in many different directions due to the different types of pitches each pitcher has; it’s like playing wiffle ball at times! Baseball gets harder and harder as you get older, and as someone that played high school baseball for four years and has been involved with college baseball for four years, I am here to tell you the similarities and differences between high school and college baseball. 

Every baseball player’s goal out of high school is to play at the next level; some have the talent to play Division I (DI), while most are only talented enough for Division II (DII), Division III (DIII), or Junior College (JUCO). 

DI is the top of the mountain for college baseball, it gets national recognition and gives you the best chance to get drafted to the big leagues. 

DII is filled with, what I like to call, “Division I rejects.” The student athletes that go DI originally realize they aren’t good enough and decide to transfer out and play at a DII school. 

DIII is also just as tough as Division I and II, but it gives you the least chance to get drafted. The one thing that is similar in all three levels, is that every school is a four year school. What makes junior college so different is that those schools are only two years, which means if you want to keep playing, you have to transfer to a four year school.

Transfer Portal

The transfer portal has become a big topic of conversation in college sports in general. What is the transfer portal? It is a place where athletes will put themselves in to go to a different school whether it’s because they don’t like where they are at, or they had a great season and think that a better program will bring them in, or they do it to get the most money from Name, Image, Likeness (NIL).

Name Image and Likeness 

Name Image and Likeness is a unique opportunity for college athletes to make money while playing their sport. Some top Division I schools have a separate NIL budget that they use to spend on potential recruits that they feel they could lure in with more NIL money. NIL is a big thing in college football, but it has started to branch out in college basketball and baseball. 

That’s just a small glimpse of what college baseball looks like. There’s still so much more. High school baseball looks nothing like college baseball and here’s why.

Academics

Academics in college mean just as much if not more than in high school. In high school, you take the same classes every day at the same time from September to June. 

In college, your classes change every semester and there’s no guarantee that you get into the class that you either need to take or want to take. All of the class times are different with each class, starting from 8 am the earliest and 6 pm the latest, at least that’s what it is here at Centenary. 

Most college programs will require you to do a set amount of hours in study hall each week to make sure you are on top of your schoolwork and also to maybe get a head start on any future assignments. In high school, study hall isn’t mandatory and it’s easier to manage your school work. As a freshman, I had no clue how I was going to be able to go to study hall on top of everything that I was doing. Luckily, the study hall hours are very athlete friendly so it’s not hard to attend. 

Schedule

Baseball practices in college are all based on your class schedule. Coaches do it that way on purpose so that they can get as many players to practice as possible. Sometimes players either show up to practice late or leave practice early for class. In high school, practices were always right after school so students wouldn’t miss any class time because of sports. 

That’s just the practice schedule; that doesn’t even take into account the early morning workouts in college that happen Monday through Friday. Early morning workouts don’t happen in high school, at least in most public schools. 

The game schedule in college is more lengthy than a high school schedule. At the DIII level, colleges are allowed a maximum 40 games in a season including teams within your conference. In high school when I played, we played 29 games but that included the playoffs, we played 25 regular season games. Those extra 11 to 15 games can really take a toll on a player’s body. If you thought playing 40 games was a lot, DI and DII play even more games, but they don’t come close to the 162 games that are played in Major League Baseball. 

Roster Size

In DIII, the maximum number of players that can travel on your roster is 35, so if there’s more than 35 players on the roster, some players won’t travel with the team to their game. In high school, most programs don’t carry a crazy amount of student athletes on the roster. 

Most college programs only have one team, while in high school, there is a freshman, junior varsity (JV), and varsity (V) teams. Players from all three levels can have a chance to get called up to varsity which was considered the A team. 

Baseball is such a fun sport to play. While it is hard, the memories that are made along the way is what makes it fun. It’s hard to play baseball at higher levels and not everyone can do it and not everyone has the same skill level, but college baseball is a night and day difference when it’s compared to high school.

If you do play baseball at a high level, cherish every moment because before you know it, four years go by before you even realize. Every game for me unlocks a brand new memory and I am going to miss it when I graduate.