News from baseball coaches' convention

[AusTexDawg]

Here are some of the items discussed at last weekend baseball coaches' convention, per D1 Baseball:

• Surveys show strong support for additional recruiting dead periods during Conference tourneys, regionals, opening weekend of CWS and July 4th (It's probably enough that some coaches have to re-recruit some of their low-round draft-eligible players during the postseason)
• Interest in expanding fall dead period, but no legislation yet, to encourage high school players to shut down pitching beginning in mid-October and discourage late fall showcases
• Debated not allowing unofficial visits before September 1 of high school sophomore year and forcing coaches to honor offers to younger kids.
• NCAA Division I Council will vote in April whether to allow 4 fall exhibition games as long as travel < 400 mi. and no class is missed. Softball currently gets 8 fall exhibitions. (if we're going to play JSU, Valley or Alcorn, maybe some of those games would fit here to reduce the hit to RPI in the spring. Also, some of us might be interested in Delta State here)
• Ray Tanner, who's also the chair of Div. I baseball committee, and others think baseball could get a 4th paid coach. Per TCU's Jim Schlossnagle, "Coach Tanner feels like we can piggyback on [the newly-added 10th football coach slot], hopefully, to have a shot ? if you?re at practice (and not on the road recruiting).? (Given the pushback from the smaller programs against raising the scholarship cap, I think this is going to be a hard sell. The P5 schools don't have the weight in baseball that they do in football since there's no real threat that they would pull out and not play the smaller schools)