Adam Kelly
Jamie Shevchik has built a Keystone College baseball program to the point where it has a reputation of consistently having some of the country’s strongest National Collegiate Athletic Association Division III teams.
The way Shevchik sees it, much of top-level Division III baseball could become stronger with more players available in the aftermath of a season lost to the coronavirus.
Shevchik told the Abington Journal that he sees changes ahead in the way his and other programs pursue recruiting because of the additional players available.
The NCAA will allow another year of eligibility to those who would have played their final season of college baseball in 2020. That means players from that pool will have to mix with an incoming freshman class and the three years of players in between to fight for everything from Division I scholarship money and playing time down to roster spots among the top programs on the Division III level.
“The challenges that we have right now are how do we maintain recruiting?” said Shevchik, who has won more than 600 career games and guided his team into the last 13 Division III national tournaments. “How do you get out and watch baseball games?
“We are literally being as creative as we can be right now with the process. That is using tools we have and using this virus to our advantage, if that makes any sense.”
That requires a different line of thinking across many subject areas.
“I’m never big on social media,” Shevchik said. “Sometimes, I hate a lot of the things, but right now, it’s one of the biggest recruiting tools that we have.
“We’re recruiting guys that we probably would have missed throughout the spring because we (usually) spend less time on social media and we’re spending that time with our players.
“One of the biggest things we’re doing right now is constantly scouring Twitter and seeing what players are available. We have nothing to do right now, but to make phone calls and follow up and stay online and do whatever we can to bring kids in.”
The players the Giants could potentially bring in may include a higher caliber of talent. Shevchik sees his program, with its history, better positioned than some in Division III to take advantage of the changing landscape.
“If you see what’s happened with the NCAA now allowing all these kids to have another year of eligibility, these rosters are going to be inflated and overrun with kids that these schools can’t handle,” Shevchik said. “There’s going to be a lot of those Division I kids and Division II kids with the seniors coming back, there are a lot of those kids left out there with no homes for the fall.
“We’re hoping some of those kids can start filtering down from Division I to II to III. We’ve probably already talked to about two dozen Division I or Division II kids who were that senior or that junior who might need a home for next year.
“We’re working it to our advantage the best that we can. From the recruiting side, it might be the best recruiting class that we’ve ever had.”
Shevchik’s recruiting pitch is that Keystone presents itself better than some Division III schools can. In the past year, Keystone had already cut tuition costs, which could be an issue for families trying to determine if they can still afford sending their non-scholarship athletes to college.
“We’re using this to our advantage,” he said. “Would I much rather have been on the field playing baseball? Absolutely.
“But, to keep this thing going, we’re just being creative.”
Shevchik said the possibilities include adding some graduate transfers, even players from the Division I level, looking for a place for their final year.
The changes, as he sees them, however, are not just a one-year issue.
“This whole influx of roster boom is going to affect a four-year period with every kid getting a year back,” Shevchik.
In explaining his example, Shevchik points to a hypothetical 30-man Division I roster where an extra group of about a half-dozen players now unexpectedly remain in the program while 10 recruits are coming in. The bloated rosters could cause decisions to be reconsidered as players determine the best place to be.
“This is going to be a 3-4-year thing until some of the numbers weed themselves out,” he said. “ … These kids are running out of room and roster spots to play baseball, all across the country at all levels.”
Keystone already has a junior varsity program and schedule in place, which allowed for 43 players on the most recent team. The Giants had already played four JV games and had nine more scheduled when the season was halted early because of the coronavirus.
