personal statement for college baseball

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What Is a Personal Statement? NCSA Personal Statement Examples

A personal statement is your chance to show college coaches who you are outside of your academic and athletic life. It provides an opportunity to showcase your character, extracurricular activities, and anything else you would want a coach to know about you that they can’t get from stats or video.

As a student-athlete, you should include your personal statement in your NCSA athletic profile. You can also use the information from your personal statement to help formulate introduction letters or emails to college coaches .

4 Steps to Writing a Personal Statement

Step 1: be yourself..

When writing your personal statement, be honest and be personal. This is something to keep at the forefront of your mind as you write and revise the statement.

There is no need to write this like an academic paper; instead, tell everything you want your recruiter to know about you. Don’t be ashamed to “boast” your achievements. At the same time, share your passions and what motivates you when it comes to your college future.

Be specific.

Being specific in your personal statement means answering questions like “So what?” and “Why me?” when describing what you bring to your dream college team. This includes:

Awards and accolades
Academics (beyond what is displayed on your athletic profile)
Experiences, hardships, and lessons learned
Motivations
Future goals
Leadership roles

When writing your personal statement, use these questions as a guideline, but make sure your personal statement is unique to you. It should highlight what is impressive about you and your life, such as:

What details of your life have influenced who you are?
When and how did you become interested in your sport?
What have you learned about yourself through playing your sport?
What are your academic goals for high school? For college?
Have you had to overcome any obstacles to get where you are?
What unique characteristics or skills do you possess?

Step 3: Edit and proofread for spelling and grammar.

Once the first draft of your personal statement is written, review it and focus on:

Spelling and grammatical errors
Specificity
Relevancy
Clarity with simple, concise language
Active voice (rather than passive voice)

Then, read the essay aloud to help catch additional mistakes and hear how the writing flows to identify areas of improvement. If you have family or friends who can proofread your personal statement, that will only make it better. This is your chance to shine and make a good impression on a college coach, so give your full effort.

Step 4: Rework your opening sentence.

Lastly, make sure to work on and rework your opening sentence to grab the reader’s attention. It should be personal to you, not using any clichés or quotes. This is arguably the most important part of the statement!

NCSA Personal Statement Examples

Seeking some inspiration for your NCSA personal statement? Review the two examples below from real student-athletes. What makes these statements flourish is that they do not simply repeat the baseline information in the players’ applications and athletic profiles.

Personal Statement for Women’s Basketball

Here is a personal statement from basketball player Laura Marx , hailing from Menomonee Falls, WI.

What did Laura do well here? For one, she provides plenty of specificity with detail on the exact basketball skills she brings to a team followed by her involvement in other sports clubs. This underscores her dedication to the sport.

Throughout the essay, her statements are clear and concise, staying on-topic to her personal passions and accomplishments.

Additionally, she emphasizes her involvement in academic organizations and the community, tying it all together with her desire to thrive both on the court and in the classroom.

Personal Statement for Men’s Football

Check out this personal statement from football player Cormac Shanoff of Little Falls, MN.

This personal statement begins strong by sharing his involvement in two other sports aside from football. This helps highlight his dedication and well-roundedness as an athlete.

He does an especially excellent job at keeping the statement truly personal, with the first section displaying a sense of authenticity and vulnerability. Cormac highlights life lessons he has learned from playing on a team, such as the importance of teamwork and camaraderie.

However, he doesn’t forget to be specific by addressing his sports awards, leadership skills, and academic goals.

FAQs about personal statements

How long should a personal statement be .

As a very general rule of thumb, the word count range for a personal statement is about 500 to 650 words. Ultimately, this depends on the specific requirements provided the university—so, pay attention to your application instructions.

For college sports, a personal statement length requirement might range anywhere from 200 to 650 words, for instance.

Does a personal statement matter?

Including a personal statement with your application is always a good idea, particularly if it’s a college you would really like to attend. If coaches are between two applications, a strong, well-written personal statement will help set you apart.

For student-athletes, meeting the college’s athletic standards is only the first step. Studies have shown that coaches place high importance on athletes’ character and coachability over pure athletic ability. Thus, demonstrating humility, patience, and willingness to learn is key when you are trying to stand out.

Get Recruited with more NCSA resources

Now that you’ve got a grasp on writing a sports-centric personal statement for college coaches, check out our College Recruiting Guide for more about the recruiting process.

If you’re ready to build a free online athletic recruiting profile (including a personal statement) to tell coaches who you are, join the NCSA Athletic Recruiting Network today!

Recruiting in your hands.

Tools and advice to find the right fit.

6 Essential Items Baseball Players Must Have on Their Athletic Profile

Download the College Recruiting Toolkit NOW!

Baseball profiles are also nice to have when you go on campus visits and meet the coach. Depending on the situation, you can give him a copy during the meeting or mail him a copy as a follow-up. (If you’re trying to figure out which college coaches to contact see The DIY College Rankings Baseball Spreadsheet. )

Ultimately, you’ll want to design your player profile to best present you which means that no two profiles will look alike. In fact, consider your athletic profile a way to introduce yourself in the best light. You can customize your profile to highlight your strengths to make a good first impression. At some point you may have to complete an online questionnaire for schools that includes fields that wouldn’t place you in the top of the pile of candidates.

Think about this for a minute. Completing an online questionnaire allows coaches to search and rank prospects by any of the fields. Are there any fields that might cause you to rank lower than other prospects? By contacting the coach first and sending your custom player profile, you have the opportunity to highlight your abilities and how you can contribute to the team. Taking the initiative will be one of the positives the coach will remember.

For some ideas of what a profile should look like, check out 15 Sample Athletic Resumes and Letters . Regardless of what format you choose, your baseball profile must include the following six elements.

Baseball Player Athletic Profile Elements

1. graduating year.

College coaches recruit by class year. Your graduating class year should be prominent on your player profile and in close proximity to your name. (I’m assuming that including your name is a given.) Get into the habit of including it on the subject line of any emails you send. It’s just one more thing to help a coach recruit you.

2. Contact Information

This includes your street address, email, and phone number. Coaches use a variety of means of contacting you. Make sure your email isn’t anything that reduces your chances of being recruited. In other words, if your email is [email protected] , get another one.

And yes, be prepared to deal with email–not everything will be done via messaging. The fact is that different generations are adopting technology at different paces. And unless you’re confident any coach that really wants you will simply use your preferred way of communicating, you need to be prepared to check your email.

One way to manage the college admissions process is to get a separate email for everything college related. Assuming that your parents are an asset to you in the process, share your email information with them to make sure you don’t miss anything important.

You can easily set up the account so that everything gets forwarded to you and your parents. Better yet, you could actually have emails forwarded to you as a text message. Check out Auto-forward important mail to your phone as a text message and How To Forward Email to your Phone as a Text Message for the information you need to bridge this digital divide.

Yet, coaches are adapting at different rates. In my recent review of college recruiting forms, I found one college that made the cell phone required and the email optional. One even asked for your Skype handle. Remember, the goal is to make it as easy as possible for a coach to contact you.

3. NCAA ID and/or NAIA ID

If you’re aiming for an athletic scholarship, you’ll need to register with the NCAA or NAIA to meet eligibility requirements. You can register as a junior. Including the information on your athletic profile shows the coach that you are aware of the requirements for recruitment. It can also be a way for coaches and organizations to contact you with information about their programs.

4. Player Summary

For baseball the basics are right or left-handed for batting and throwing and the positions you want to be recruited for. Other information can be added as relevant but are not absolutely necessary. This information, like your class year, should be prominent on your athletic profile and close to your name.

Save the more detailed information for the supplemental information page discussed below. Do you really want to change your profile with every stat improvement? And if you don’t, then you’re providing coaches with old information and may not have a chance to correct it.

5. Experience/Team Summary

This is the list of teams that you have played on. Minimally, it should include the year and season, team name, jersey number, and positions played. If possible, the coaches’ email and phone number for every team should be included as well.

However, this isn’t always possible. Sometimes you just don’t have the information and the team wasn’t an essential part of your development as a baseball player. You include it on the athletic profile to show that you were playing during that time.

Then there are the times when it wasn’t a great experience and for whatever reasons, you would really rather not have the coach contacted. Again, you include the basic information to show that you played that summer or fall but you don’t include the coaches’ contact information because you don’t want to encourage the college coach to contact this team’s coach.

6. Academic Information

You need to provide your GPA, class rank, and SAT or ACT scores. Yes, even if the NCAA is on the verge of eliminating testing requirements, schools are still asking. If you don’t have those scores yet, put down the date you’re registered to take the test. And if you are at the point of putting together a player profile, you are at the point of knowing when you will take the test. If your scores are less than stellar to the point of causing problems in recruiting, include the date on which you plan to retake the test.

Baseball players should take the ACT or SAT no later than in the fall of their junior year. (See How to Get Recruited to Play College Baseball: Timelines for a complete timeline of what you should do when.) You don’t want to have to take the test during your season and taking it any later leaves the college coaches with a big question mark until they see your scores. Especially if you are looking at D1 programs, take the tests earlier rather than later.

Another thing to be prepared for is that eight of the ten schools I checked on this year had fields where you can upload your test scores and transcripts. Coaches will expect to see your academic qualifications before seriously recruiting you.

Supplemental Information

This information also will be useful when completing recruiting forms for individual colleges. When I initially wrote this post, I went through the recruiting forms for a week’s top 15 D2 baseball teams and five of the eight teams in the College World Series. This year I’ve done a check on five D2 and D1 Baseball Teams. Based on the requested information, it can be really useful for athletes to create a supplemental information page.

What should go on a supplemental information page? Well, the higher ranked the school, apparently the closer they are to crossing the line from recruiting to stalking players and their families. Some schools are asking for parents’ occupations, Alma Maters, business phone, cell phone, and home phone along with all the social media contacts you can think of. Siblings’ names, ages, and colleges were asked for more than once.

One asked for the high school coach’s home phone, I guess they really don’t get paid enough. Then there are requests for the athlete’s non-athletic honors, hobbies, and religious affiliation (no request for attendance records.) Players should also have a list of all their social media handles available if requested because more coaches are requesting. This is a good place to list all tournaments/camps attended, various measurements such as times for the 60-yard dash, and player statistics such as homeruns and RBIs.

The point I’m trying to make is that this is information that you don’t necessarily need on your player profile but will want handy when you’re completing online recruiting forms. When asking for information from non-family members, try to get as much information as they feel comfortable providing. You don’t want to have to go back and ask again. And remember, most of these fields are not required. So if the coach doesn’t want to give out his home number, players shouldn’t stress out about not providing it in the form.

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