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Fundamental Skills
by Dave
Friday, November 14, 2008
I want to speak to you today about the most important softball fundamentals a kid who aspires to play in college can have. These skills are indispensable not only for getting noticed by coaches and achieving scholarship dollars but also to insure success in one's college softball career. These skills cannot be overemphasized. They cannot be ignored. They are bare essentials.
The coach looked pretty glum as he began to talk to his young charges. Something had upset him. He was deeply troubled by some of the results he was seeing with a few of the girls he had coached for years. He wanted to address the shortcomings of his outgoing class and make sure these newer charges would not make the same mistakes.
The coach began by asking who of the 12 or so girls surrounding him wanted to play college ball. All raised their hands. He informed them that just about all of the girls he had now, of the right age and grade, had received scholarships. He began to list them one by one, noting where they were going. There were several good schools in the list. All the girls he talked about had received athletic scholarships to attend the institutions they had signed NLIs with.
This girl was going to ..., where she always aspired to go. That girl just received notice that she'll be going to such and such University, a school she has worked very hard to get into since she entered high school. It was her first choice. That girl will be going here, which is her first choice too. This girl is headed here.
All these girls had received athletic scholarships which would pay for tuition, fees, room and board, meals, books (oh my God, what textbooks cost today!), flowers in a vase on the nightstand on the day they move into the dorms, etc., etc. and so forth. And all this was covered by athletic money. Hurray! Mission accomplished! NOT!
The coach continued by asking the girls what their grades looked like. Most laid claim to straight A's, B+'s and the like. The coach told them that's good. Keep getting those grades. But your grades alone are simply not enough! You really need to try harder and do more.
The coach went on to discuss a few of the girls he coached who had received scholarships. This one was going to a very good institution but she received no academic money. Had she earned some academic scholarship money, say a half, a quarter, even ten percent of the total, the softball team might turn out to be better since the coach would then be able to go out and find some hitter, a catcher, a shortstop who would complete the recipe she was assembling to really compete in the conference.
This kid got a full ride but she settled for a school which, while certainly in the mix for her, was academically a cut below another school which she might have attended but couldn't afford with the less than full ride she was offered there.
That kid got into the school she wanted and received 100% funding via an athletic scholarship but she could not get into the major (of very limited size) she wanted because it was already full of kids with better academic credentials than she possessed.
The bottom line is the coach was upset by the harsh realities of higher education in this country. His kids all got reasonably good grades but they might have gotten better ones had they known earlier how difficult this process was going to be. Further, and more importantly, the real devil in all this was board scores (SATs / ACTs). This coach's kids, while good school students, often lacked that extra something, that little 800 pound gorilla in the room, which often makes a huge difference and which nobody seems to talk about until it is too late, board scores.
I believe we have largely been misled regarding college board scores. If I had a dime for every instance in which someone told me those scores may be somewhat important but not nearly as much as they were when you and I applied for college, I'd be a rich man. The diminished importance of board scores is probably true but fails to acknowledge that, in certain settings, they can make all the difference. I believe that your typical kid applying for a school will not make it in, be put on the waiting list, or be turned down exclusively or largely because of his or her board scores. The board scores won't be the deciding factor for entry. But they may matter in other important ways.
Things were simpler back when I was applying to colleges. You got good enough grades. You made sure your class rank was good enough to get into the schools you targeted. Then you sat for the SATs and, if those scores put you in the middle of the pack of the school's typical freshman class, you usually got in.
I went to a pretty good academic high school. The majority of our top ten class rank got into Ivy League schools. Those who didn't typically went to schools which were about equal to the Ivy League. The entire top 25% had pretty much their pick of the remaining top schools and often attended outstanding institutions.
I wasn't at or near the top of my class in terms of class rank. My grades were OK, mostly Bs. I hadn't taken very many honors classes. I did not take a fourth year of math, science or foreign language. In today's highly competitive environment, I would probably have been in trouble. I targeted and applied to 3 schools, all of which accepted me. One of these was a very good academic institution. The second was pretty darn good too. The third was very average.
I was accepted to all three schools largely because my board scores were very high. I guess you could say I was the classic underachiever. I should have been immersed in math and sciences, particularly given how well I scored on boards. But I was a schlep, uninspired, unambitious. As it turned out, we couldn't afford two of the schools, the two better ones, which had accepted me, so I went to my third choice. But I could have gone to my first choice based solely on academics because back then, things were pretty clear cut - high enough board scores could get you into just about any place. Nowadays, that's not true.
The formula by which universities determine who they will accept and who they will exclude is a complex one. Grades certainly matter a lot. Class rank isn't what it once was because many high schools, especially the best ones, don't even calulate a class rank, let alone report it out. Board scores were once very important but in the modern political climate, these are discounted because schools seek to have well rounded populations and kids from inner cities just do not earn the sort of scores on standardized tests their suburban counterparts do. There are other considerations which, when I applied to college, weren't even in anyone's discussion, let alone a primary consideration. Nowadays things like community service, work experience, particularly in charitable causes, and other intangibles play a much bigger role than they once did. Additionaslly, when a school puts together its acceptance list, it limits the number of kids who come from a particular high school.
When kids are in their sophomore or junior years of high school, they begin contemplating the various choices for college. These are not necessarily cold, rational discussions. Often the discussion centers around a few schools. High school kids don't know the names of very many colleges. It is highly likely that in a population of 500 aspiring college students at a single high school, the list of colleges discussed will be rather short, possibly as small as 30 to 50. These kids will get it into their heads that their first choice is this school or that. And when it comes time to apply, there is a pretty good chance that 20, 30, 40 kids from a single high school will end up applying to the same school.
When today's colleges go over their applications to pull together the acceptance list, one of the things they will try to avoid is pulling in 40 kids from the same high school. This makes a lot of sense. But if you are the fifth or tenth kid, in terms of all academic and other credentials, from that high school and you really want to attend that university, you are probably going to be out of luck.
Also, even if you get into the school of your dreams, that doesn't mean you are going to be accepted into the major of your dreams at that particular institution. Even when I went to college, there were certain majors in my school which were competitive. Several friends of mine did not get into the programs they sought. They went to the school anyway but were often disappointed because they really wanted to be financial analysts, nurses, accountants, chemists or whatever. Some were able to work their way into the majors of their choice but many were not. Today is an even more competitive climate at many schools, particularly in certain majors with well developed, highly respected programs.
Let's say you want to be, I don't know, an astrophysicist. You did pretty well in your science classes but you scored an average of "only" 600 on each of your SAT test sections. You were accepted into the university of your choice. If the astrophysics major in that school only has room for 40 kids and you are ranked 41, you're out of luck. Board scores can often differentiate one kid from another when it comes time to accept a kid into a particular major. And most good programs at most good universities are indeed limited to a relatively small number of kids.
In terms of scholarship money available to athletes, board scores can make a huge difference. I recently spoke with someone whose kid received a large piece of money to play a sport at a college. That kid did not receive a full ride but he is going to sign an NLI for that school and is excited to go there. He'll have to come up with thousands to fund his education. Most likely, he and his parents will take out student loans. So, when he graduates, he'll have more than a valuable piece of paper, he'll also have debt!
This kid's father told me he may very well get some additional academic money. They're really not sure how much yet. The whole equation has not been completed by the school. But they are fairly certain that the piece of money in academic scholarships will be relatively small. Why? His board scores are just average for the athletic team. I wondered why this kid was not going to get more academic aid since he is a very good student with outstanding grades in almost all honors classes who also did some community work, etc. This kid is pretty much of a stellar college applicant. He's stellar except for his board scores which are really not bad, just sort of average when compared to the kids on his new team.
I mentioned the idea that if one were able to get more academic money, one could endear themselves to the coaching staff by freeing up athletic money for pursuing other kids. But there's another reason why academic money is really important. Athletic scholarships are one year deals. If a kid blows out some part of her body and can no longer compete, she may have to leave the institution she has grown to love because her parents cannot afford to pick up the slack after she quits her sport.
Sure, some institutions will honor a scholarship when a kid gets injured on the field of play and is physically unable to perform for the duration of her years. But not all will. And sometimes the injury caused on the field happens to pop out its head after a minor car accident, while fooling around at home during Thanksgiving or Christmas break, or as a result of something done in the weight room while doing mandatory work at 5 in the morning when nobody else is around. Athletic departments may be reticent to continue an athletic schoalrship for a kid who is physically unable to perform and the cause of the injury is at least somewhat suspect.
What if a kid decides she really doesn't want to play softball during her senior year because the team stinks, the coaching staff changed, or all the kids she liked just graduated and all the ones she hates are still on the team, not to mention she wants to take a special course so she can fly through her medical or business school boards? Maybe she is just 6 credits from graduating and this wonderful opportunity to work as a graduate assistant popped into her lap but she cannot compete in the sport and take the position? I can think of a thousand scenarios in which a kid could possibly want to relinquish an athletic scholarship at one point or another while hopefully remaining at the particular institution. Earning academic money is critical to pulling this off. And if you achieve good grades in college, keeping that academic money is usually pretty easy.
So, you may be wondering because I know I am, why I would bring this subject up on a web site which really targets softball players younger than say high school juniors and seniors. My reason for bringing this up here is because now is really the time to begin thinking about this whether you hope to play ball in college or not. Now is the time to mobilize and acknowledge that board scores are still important.
The reason one should addresss the issue of board scores now is because it is far easier to address with years in front of you than it is with just months. You can remediate now, either on your own or with help. By the time your kid is in her junior year, the only way you can do anything at all is to take very expensive classes and cram, cram, cram. This can put a serious damper on living a reasonably sane life at a time when things are already pretty stressful.
Basically, boards consist of verbal and mathematics skills. I don't hold out myself to be an exspert but I think it stand to reason that these skills are pretty easy to break down. If you want to do well on math boards, you need to develop a logical progression of skills. You must have the multiplication tables down pat. I don't mean that if I ask you how much is 12 times 12, you can think for second and eventually come up with 144. I mean that when you look onto a piece of paper and see the equation, you think the answer. I mean that when you contemplate an algebraic equation which leads to the 144, you immediately think 12 times 12, 3 times 3 times 4 times 4, two 3 and four 2s, 9 times 16, etc. The synapses in your brain are capable of doing mathematical gymnastics on the fly. That isn't really quite as impossible as it sounds.
The way to gain real abilities in mathematics is very similar to the way we train athletes, particularly softball athletes, via drilling. There is a whole school, a pretty expensive one, of mathematical training called "Kumon" which specializes in drilling. There are others but Kumon is the one I'm most familiar with. IMHO, Kumon is to math what Kobata is to infielding! Essentially, this is where many school systems fail today's youth in mathematics. Kids no longer drill. They don't live the problems and solutions, they survive the classes.
In order to perform calculus, you must be quick at algebra. In order to perform algebra quickly, you must be fast at multiplication, division, and factoring. These require in-built mastery of the multiplication tables. A good mathematics student doesn't think their way through a calculus problem, they feel their way through it. They are able to concentrate on the thinking part of the solution because they have mastery over the more mechanical sides. They look at a problem requiring factoring and the solution to an algebraic formula and feel the answer while spending more time on the important parts.
I watched a number of people in college struggle in calculus class. We had this nutty professor from Columbia who did not do a very good job of explaining things. We started with about 40 kids in the class. 15 remained at the end of the semester. 2 passed. I achieved the high grade in the class with a 3.0, a B. The other person who passed was a girl I often studied with - who I essentially tutored. She earned a C. I tried to tutor other kids who were my friends but I was struck by the number of them who could not solve the algebraic equations involved. They struggled because they didn't automatically think the answer to several types of problems involving factoring, multplication, etc. They got hung up on these rudimentary parts of the problems and failed to even get to the more difficult parts.
So, if you are planning on remediating your kid's education, I strongly suggest you do so with respect to multiplication tables. It is a simple exercises to make sure your kid has mastery over these but it can take time. Performing drills over a long period of time is the best way I know of accomplishing the task. Then pay special attention when your kid is taking algebra. Get yourself an algebra text book, preferably one with an answer key. And make your kid do some drilling for 15 to 30 minutes a day at least as often as she practices her softball skills. I know this can get pretty hectic during the school year when you try to fit in all these other things. But surely you can find a half hour on at least two days per week. And step it up to four days a week when school is not in session. The time spent drilling when school is out can be crucial to making real strides in this regard.
When your kid gets into geometry, algebra 2 and trig, look through the work. It's been a long time since you did any of that and you need to be refreshed. Build up a collection of problem types, a compilation of problems, and answers, so you can craft drilling work for her to do in the future. If you want to score high on math boards and you do these kinds of things, you can save a ton of money (or if you have the money and want an easier way for yourself, enroll in Kumon or some such). The bottom line is, given years, you can push a kid's math board scores to the roof and clear a path for her in terms of college and career.
Verbal skills are more involved. A student needs sound reading comprehension, a good vocabulary, the ability to express herself well via the written word, etc. These skills sometimes seem daunting to one trying to remediate. You have to take a slow, rational approach. Vocabulary is probably one of the easier problems to solve because there are techniques which, when used frequently over the long-haul, complement techniques used to remediate other areas of verbal skills.
For example, start now developing a large stack of cards or a Word document consisting of all the difficult words encountered. I remember a time when I was doing a lot of fairly difficult reading on my own. In a given hour, I typically came across a dozen words with which I was either not familiar or with which I had only brief, cursory experience. All I did was write the word down and plan to look it up later. I did this on note cards and later looked them up in a good collegiate dictionary, writing the definition on the back of each card. Then I would review these cards periodically. I didn't study them until my brain hurt. I merely reviewed them many times over a long period.
Understand that I readily acknowledge that I do not own one of the stronger, more well developed vocabularies of people I know. But you should have seen me before I did this! And for unknown reasons, I stopped the practice. Eventually I suppose everyone stops doing things like this because life takes its twists and turns and insufficient time remains to keep up good habits. But a junior high school or early high school student has no excuses. If she wants to do well on her boards, she needs to build a vocabulary as muscular as her legs.
Reading comprehension is really easy to remediate. But it takes loads more time. That's because in order to build comprehension, what you have to do is read. You have to read a lot. You have to become a quick reader. You have to understand what you read quickly. The best way to do this is to read material you really like.
If you are a complete sports nut, read sports related material. I recall a kid in high school who was having all sorts of problems in classes which required good reading skills. He had never read very much. He was a very good athlete who was a sports nut. At some point, a very smart teacher decided to make him read sports novels. He read them voraciously for several months and afterwards, his reading skills were dramatically better than they were to begin with.
Whatever genre of stories or other reading materials you take to, get lots of it and read, read, read. After a while, you'll have to move away and engage in more difficult reading but the first step to improving reading skills is to read a lot and you need to be so entertained that you cannot help but to become a fast reader whose comprehension is improving by the day.
At this point in the process, you have to start reading material which challenges you. You need to be forced to sometimes jot down those words which cause you difficulty. If you read something for an hour and do not ever encounter a difficult word, something is wrong. You are not picking sufficiently challenging material. Conversely, if you read material which forces you to look up words every five minutes just to comprehend what the author is saying, chances are decent that you are reading something too difficult and your efforts are wasted.
If you read frequently, read quickly, are challenged by what you read, encounter new words which you write down, look them up and then review systematically, your reading comprehension and verbals skills will improve steadily. Now it is time to consider your writing skills.
I believe our schools do a much better job of teaching writing today than they did when I went to school. Kids today write more, do more presentations, are forced to express themselves on topics they researched or had to dig out from deep inside themselves, than we did in school. But not everyone excells in these areas. And when a kid falls behind, most often they just get stuck in classes in which less of this kind of work is demanded of them. Whether you are very good at expressing yourself via the written word, merely average, or one of those people who gets stuck in "dunce" classes, you can help yourself to become a better writer. The thing to do in order to improve writing skills is ... to write.
It doesn't really matter so much if you write letters never meaning to send, sports stories for games you watched on TV or in person, a diary, the next great novel, or anything at all (except text messages and/or IMs which we'll address momentarily). Just write.
Good writers learn to speak through their written words. They get to that point by writing a lot. I forget which author wrote this but he said, "if you want to be a writer, write, write every day, write as often as you possibly can." What he meant by that is the way to learn to write is just to write. You don't have to write literature. It does not have to constitute grammatic perfection. It can be complete junk which you despise and which, upon re-reading, you have the overwhelming compulsion to throw into the waste basket (I mean recycling bin). But you simply must write.
Texting and IMs do not count as writing. These are mere conversation and poor conversation at that. When you write, you must write in sentences. You must complete some sort of thought. It can be as simple as "I'm hungry now, have to go, be back to write another chapter tomorrow." Or it can be paragraph after paragraph telling some complicated story about your life. The more you write, the more you will be able to write.
As you begin to be able to write what you are thinking, at some point, you should want to do more than a mere diary of the immediate goings on in your life. At some point, I hope that a diary entry which discusses a really hard thing you did at school might explain in some detail about that difficult thing. At some point, I hope that your diary entry might include a deep philosophical thought you havw, a cause and effect essay or some sort of more advanced writing involving more than simply jotting down what happened today. If you are reading a book, perhaps your diary might include a summary of the chapter you finished. If you watched a professional football or college softball game, maybe you can pick a player who really impressed you, do a little internet research and then include a bit of biographical information in your writing. The point is just write. Above all, just write, and then, when you find you can write, stretch yourself.
In more general terms, I want you to consider one other aspect of college boards. If you are already moving along in your high school career, you want to make sure you take the college boards as well as any available practice tests as early as possible. For example, you can sit for the PSATs your sophomore year. Do it! Keep in mind that to enter the National Merit Scholarship competititon, you will still need to take the PSATs again during your junior year. But taking the test early should point out any deficiencies you may need to remediate.
I think you can take the SATs just about any time. I'm not really sure about any restrictions but I recall folks I know having their kid take the test as early as 8th grade, if I'm not mistaken. That's really early since an 8th grader probably has not been exposed to algebra 2 or any of the other material assumed to have been learned. I'm not suggesting that you sign up your pre-high schooler to sit for college boards but I am telling you to plan to have her take the test earlier than her peers. As usual, I'm teaching what I need to learn. I missed the first opportunity to take the PSATs in high school, then registered late for SATs, and even missed one sitting of the CPA exam because I failed to register on time! Don't be me. Get moving early!
I'm really not sure what single specific event caused me to write this piece today. I always think at least a little about college. Every day, something from my college days pops into my head. Very frequently, I find myself involved in my kids' studies to some degree. When that happens, I muse about their future college days. Whenever I'm in a softball setting, something about college pops up whether it be a college scholarship, a kid I know playing on some college team, a game I watched, or whatever. College, college, college. Everywhere I turn, college looms. And within the context of a youth softball blog, I imagine the same thing holds true for you. So I guess I wrote this because I thought perhaps somebody out there might be interested in a few thoughts I have on the subject.
I know that as important as college boards were to me, they are far less important today. Grades and other things are more important. Still, boards are not unimportant. They could be critical in certain settings. It would be well worth your efforts to at least think about them and see if any remediation for your kid is necessary. It really is not hard to do, especially when you have several years. I think your efforts will pay off tremendously.Labels: college, parenting
 
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