Report Card Collection Yields 85% Median Grade for Titans’ Student-Athletes

Baseball statistics are an important gauge of player performance at any level.  Pop times for catchers, exit velocity for hitters, and spin rates for pitchers are collected regularly as valuable, objective recruitment data. For high performance sports organizations like The Titans Baseball Club, academic statistics are also important enough to collect and present to prospective colleges and universities. Based on 302 marks collected during our 86 player-parent meetings, the middle (or median mark) earned by Titans student-athletes was an outstanding 85%.  

Titans College Placement Coordinator and 18U Head Coach Denis Bailey connected the high marks with better opportunities in US Colleges:  “These excellent marks are exactly what college coaches love to hear about when we’re talking to them about Titans players. We are providing them with student-athletes and it gives the US Coaches extra confidence that each player will not be an academic risk.”

The 30-45 minute meetings were conducted in November and December 2021 during the strength and conditioning phase of the Titans’ off-season program. 

Players shared their report card marks and insights into their respective schools during meetings with Education Compliance Officer Jim Stewart and College Placement Coordinator Denis Bailey.  The meetings—most of which took place in the Titans Clubhouse at True North Fieldhouse and attended by parents, too—featured players reporting their grades and engaging in academic and athletic goal-setting with the Titans Front Office staff.  In addition, prospective post-secondary destinations were discussed and the Field Level database was used with 16U, 17U, and 18U players to narrow down prospective US College destinations.  Parent and player questions about post-secondary destinations and pathways (NCAA/NAIA/NJCAA/OUA/OCAA) were also answered by Titans staff. Entrance requirements, such as a solid GPA, were also reviewed and reinforced by Titans staff. To this end, Titans student-athletes were strongly encouraged to make the Honor Roll at the end of Semester One and make this an annual habit in order to build the type of GPA that earns US and Canadian University and College academic scholarships. 

Additionally, the accumulated numbers were encouraging in that they represented an overall improvement of 2% compared to the 2020 collection (meetings were conducted over Zoom last year due to a dangerous phase of the Pandemic and yielded an 83% median).  Another promising sign was that many more Titans were availing themselves of on-line project, assignment, and essay help with their Education Compliance Officer.  Dozens of players emailed projects this semester to improve their written expression and make their high school assignments more polished.  “Business has been brisk,” mentioned Education Compliance Officer Jim Stewart, a retired Department Head of English with the YCDSB and Faculty of Education instructor at UT. “It’s great to see our players submitting drafts three days before they’re due and learning from the constructive feedback that is provided to them. The median of 85% does speak to the strong efforts by our student-athletes thus far this school year. It also speaks to the level of our parents’ engagement; it’s clear that they actively encourage their sons to do well in school from the get-go in Grade Nine.”