Commitment Tracker: How COVID Has Effected Commitment Trends

Since its inception, PBR of North Carolina has worked to help players and parents understand, and follow, the recruiting landscape.  With close to 30 years of college coaching experience between North Carolina’s Executive Director of Scouting, Brandon Hall, and the State’s Director of Scouting, Matt Payne, there is understanding of what college coaches are working to do to build their roster and how they handle scholarship allotments and roster space.

2020 has dealt players, parents, and college coaches a set of circumstances that are unprecedented.  The 2019 class all received red-shirts and created somewhat of a “super-class” this year with the 2020 class.  Each player on a college roster from the 2019 or 2020 class is a Freshman entering the spring of 2021.  With roster and budget limitations, there is a big worry about the 2021 class and potentially future classes behind them, as to what their opportunity may be to play at the next level.

In April of 2018, we completed a look at several states across the PBR map, outlining commitment trends from the states.  The Commitment Trends articles are part of the Recruiting Essentials library on PBR’s website.  From these articles, we learned that in a typical year, the state of North Carolina is going to see close to 500 players in the state commit to play college baseball in each senior class.  We believe PBR is able to track close to 90% of these commitments, but we know some slip through across the vast state.  We also learned that 50%, or just less, of the total number of players that would commit, have been tracked as committed by the end of the early signing period.  Half of the senior class typically commits after the early signing period in November, each year.  The 2020 grad class is the only tracked class to break 250 commitments prior to November.

Today we take a look at where recruiting lies in North Carolina as we come to the end of the early signing period for the 2021 class.

Total Commitments

*The class of 2019 saw a total of 449 tracked commitments
*The class of 2020 saw a total of 425 tracked commitments

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