Out-of-State Percentages on NC Baseball Rosters

A question on another site's message board piqued my curiousity sufficiently last night to do a quick analysis. The question touched on the issue of the percentage of out-of-state baseball players on the rosters of state-supported universities; so, I went to the websites of the 10 UNC-system campuses that play Division I baseball and checked their rosters. Here are the results, listed from highest percentage of out-of-state players to the lowest:

NC State 46% 17/37
Western Carolina 45% 13/29
UNC-Greensboro 42% 13/31
East Carolina 36% 8/22
UNC-Chapel Hill 33% 10/31
UNC-Charlotte 30% 9/30
UNC-Asheville 25% 7/28
Appalachian State 12% 4/33
NC A&T 4% 1/25
UNC-Wilmington Not available


Keep in mind that rosters posted at this time year can vary and will be more uniform once regular season rosters are posted next January/February. For some reason, UNC-Wilmington's site doesn't currently carry a roster.

 

Great topic Prep. With the talent level in NC seeming to improve each year, why do you think some of the schools are continuing to significantly recruit out of state?

 

Having never spoken directly to a DI coach about this, anything I might say in response to your question would be speculative, based upon hearsay that one picks up over time. However, my speculation would be that a number of the state's DI coaches simply feel that, while improving, the state's talent pool alone is inadequate to get them where they want to be (i.e. a 40-win regular season playing deeply into the NCAA playoffs).

The flip side of all of this, of course, is that there are approximately 185 of North Carolina's high school players who are able to play DI baseball relatively close to home at their state-supported schools; not to mention the many additional players playing at quality private DI, DII, DIII, NAIA, and JUCO programs in the state. And, returning to the assertion in your post, Braves, it may well be the case that the 185 we see reported today would have been lower in the past. I simply don't know.

 

UNCW 05/06 Roster

UNCW is always a little slow in posting their current roster...however they did have one available at their World Series last week.
35 of the 36 players listed are from NC!
The 1 out of state is from NY.

 

So, after adding UNC-W's 35 to the 185, we now have 220 residents of North Carolina playing close to home at state-supported DI programs. That's great!

Thanks very much for providing Wilmington's numbers, BB9er...and best of luck this season!

 

You aren't seeing a knock on the NC players as much as a knock on other states and their college level baseball programs.

NC has as many D1 programs as Virginia/South Carolina combined. NC has as many D1 programs as Florida/Georgia combined.

NC has more D1 programs than Texas ....

When you add together scholarship programs (D1, D2, JUCO, NAIA) inside of NC and compare them to other states, NC comes in #3 in the nation in the number of opportunities... Of COURSE guys from other states (particularly the cold weather states) travel down to events like Blue-Gray, Impact, Perfect Game and programs like College Select play a lot of games in the region. There are opportunities available. Though NC has a lot of talent, it doesn't have the talent level to fill the rosters of all of the baseball schools in the state.

You would like to see opportunities for in-state guys, particularly at the state supported schools, but if a coach doesn't win, he won't last very long. The competition for the top in-state players is very stiff. Wake is a great example. They have 2 NC guys on the entire roster. Its a tough state to recruit for the colleges. With 100 counties, tough travel time coast-to-mountains, etc. the percentages don't surprise me very much.

 

SC getting NC players

SC Gamecocks have 5 NC players and Clemson Tigers have 4 NC players.

I don't know much of anything about cost restrictions of taking out of state players, but when considering the goal to get to the pinnacle (Omaha) in college baseball , it just does not seem that a coach at a major D1 baseball powerhouse school will make it a huge priority to see how many players he can get from his home state and not go out & try to get the best players no matter where they are from.

 

EastOfRaliegh .. I agree completely ...

South Carolina and Clemson are at a competitive advantage because of the in-state lottery funds part of the college education for in-state students. This allows them to just promise roster spots to in-state players while spending their recruiting bucks "out-of-state" .... of course I'm speaking "generally".

But .. talking about in-state versus out-of-state and recruiting dollars, this is how it works. We are going to "round" things off" quite a bit in order to make the math simple.

Public School X has 11.7 baseball scholarships (equivalent) that they offer. The 11.7 scholarships are based on the percentage of the average tuition.

For in-state STUDENTS, the average tuition is 10,000.
For OUT-of-state STUDENTS the average tuition is 20,000.

The student has 5,000 students, 1,000 of them come from "out-of-state".
Thus 4000 students are paying 10,000 and 1,000 is play 20,000. The average tuition that the college can use for it's calculations is thus 12,000 / year.

If he recruits JUST in-state players, he ends up with an extra 2.34 "invisible" scholarships. He will have an EQUIVALENT of 14 players of full scholarships since the NCAA's "Math" is based on the average tuition. The NCAA calculates it like this ... Average Tuition (12,000 X 11.7) = max amount of money you can offer within program and YOU divy it up what ever way you like.

Private School Y has the same tuition for In-state versus Out-of-state. There is no way they can "monkey" the number in order to generate any equivalencies. So, schools like Duke, Wake ... it makes no difference. There is no advantage to recruiting in-state ... simple dollars and sense.

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I'm certain that most programs, particularly the smaller programs would prefer to recruit higher in-state because its more practical. You can see the prospects frequently and have a better idea to how they will do in college. I would say that MOST programs don't have any "borders". They might find that their recruiting buck doesn't go as far when they travel out-of-state, but they will still make a run at the best players they can.

They recruit in-state because they get more bang for their buck and it's more cost-effective not to have to travel as much. If a major program has a low percentage of local players, it's probably because they have a recruiting problem, an image problem or an ego problem.

 

Great post Pops..one I believe in

 

The South Carolina schools also have the ability to waive out-of-state tuition in certain situations.