On Friday nights, when most teenagers are gathering with friends to fire up the Xbox, 18-year-old Kellen Clark is practicing his swing and pitch at R&D Baseball Academy in Herndon. During the three-month spring baseball season, he spends about an hour at the training facility after two hours of practice with his team at Fairfax County’s Robinson Secondary School.
Clark is one of NoVA’s elite athletes, those who train intensely to improve their odds of getting into top college sports programs.
As a player for the Nova Premier travel team — a group that goes to games, competitions, and tournaments along the East Coast — Clark’s two-month travel season starts when the high school season ends. It entails weekday practices, one weekday game, and games or tournaments on weekends.
In the off season, “I probably spend about an hour with my high school team and then I spend probably two-and-a-half to three hours additionally training [at R&D] in Herndon every single day of the week,” says Clark, a senior. “I’ve definitely made a lot of sacrifices with friend groups and outside activities because I really had a desire to play in college, and I knew that if I really wanted to do that, I would have to put in the hours.”
In late September, the effort paid off. He made a commitment to play baseball next year at Virginia’s University of Lynchburg, where he plans to study business.
Another elite athlete, Kendall DiMillio, 19, says the effort is worth it. A graduate of Ashburn’s Briar Woods High School, she started playing soccer at age 2 and joined her first travel team in second grade. Today, she’s a right midfielder on the team at Virginia Tech, a Division I university.
“I knew since I was probably in seventh or eighth grade that I wanted to play at the next level, I wanted to play in college,” DiMillio says. “There were so many times in high school where I missed homecoming dances. … and I didn’t go on a lot of vacations because all that time was spent on the field. Those sacrifices were essential to get to this level. Playing sports at the collegiate level is just a huge accomplishment.”
Why Travel Teams Matter
That kind of intense dedication is necessary today for students looking for spots on college sports teams. Almost 8 million high schoolers participate in athletics, according to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, a nonprofit that regulates college sports, but only about 2 percent receive athletic scholarships to compete in college. About 187,000 students play at the country’s 363 Division I — NCAA’s top of three tiers — schools, according to Next College Student Athlete, an athletic recruiting network.
“What kids don’t realize … is that when they go to high school, the talent pool becomes bigger, and the talent levels out. When the talent becomes equal, the separating factor is motivation,” says Matt Germanowski, a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent who coached the Diamond Elite, a travel baseball team based in Loudoun County. “It’s the work you do by yourself that will separate you.”
Travel sports have grown in stature in the past 20 to 30 years. Now, it’s not always enough to be a star player on the high school team, says Kirsten Stone, girls basketball coach at Vienna’s Madison High School.
“You have to play travel,” says Stone, adding that some recruiters don’t call high school coaches, only travel coaches. Often top players on the high school team join the Amateur Athletic Union, a nonprofit that hosts tournaments for the country’s best athletes, she says. “That’s when the college coaches come watch you.”
This also means the most serious athletes often give up other sports. “If you’re a three-sport athlete, that’s so awesome, but, most likely, you’re not going to be the best of the best in any of them,” Stone says.
After all, if you’re not playing and practicing, someone else is. “The most important thing about picking a travel team: Is your son going to be on the field? If he’s not on the field, he can’t get better,” Germanowski says.
How Recruitment Has Changed
Technology has also changed the recruiting game, says Lisa Strasman, president of NCSA. More than 35,000 coaches use the recruiting platform to find athletes in 35 sports. It offers recruiting profiles akin to LinkedIn accounts that players create and college coaches search.
“In the past, coaches would have to travel around the country to see kids play,” Strasman says. “Now, there’s so much that they can do scouting talent without even leaving their desk. In recruiting, it also makes the process more competitive.”
Coaches at Virginia Tech look at recruiting databases to see players’ rankings and videos, says Brian Cox, the university’s associate athletics director for communications. “From those evaluations, they create a list, and from that list, you’re going to target a certain number of recruits, depending how many spots you have for this coming year,” he says.
Although scouts look for sport-specific skills, recruits have some common characteristics.
First and foremost, student-athletes need to make sure they meet a college or university’s academic standards and understand the admission and degree requirements. “Secondly, you have to be able to compete. You have to be skilled enough to compete at this level, and they will have a good awareness of what that takes,” Cox says.
Recruiters also note whether players are good teammates and how they treat their coaches and caregivers. “Those relationships matter when a head coach and their staff are evaluating prospective student-athletes,” he says.
Eddie Kim, a Fairfax High School grad who played baseball at James Madison University and for the Oakland Athletics, is the founder of the Nova Premier Baseball league and EK Baseball training academy in Sterling. He’s helped more than 50 players get into college with scholarships or grants, he says.
“There’s no one way to skin the cat in terms of how you get recruited,” Kim says. It could be through coach-recruiter relationships, technology, or camps that universities offer for interested students to showcase their skills.
That’s the route baseball player Clark took. “I first met one of the coaches at a camp, and I went up and introduced myself and asked him to give me an evaluation,” he says. “Lynchburg was one that I wanted to get on their radar for. They weren’t as interested in me yet because they didn’t know who I was, so I took the time to try to get them to know who I was.”
Athletes angling to play on a college team often start trying out for elite teams in elementary school, but there is no age requirement. Germanowski says there’s no need to play travel baseball until age 14. DiMillio says she began hearing from Virginia Tech through her coach during her freshman year. Meanwhile, Cox says the men’s basketball coach made an offer to an eighth grader in late September. Regardless, the NCAA prohibits recruiters from making direct contact with players until just before their junior year. Before that, all communication happens through liaisons, usually the player’s coach.
The Toll, On and Off the Field
This level of dedication comes at a cost. David DiMillio, Kendall’s dad, estimates that it cost $10,000 to $12,000 a year for her to play soccer with The St. James FC Virginia Girls Academy. That covered coaches, equipment, uniforms, personal training, hotels, and gas.
“There’s a lot of people that can’t afford to play at that level because it’s so expensive,” says the elder DiMillio, who played soccer and wrestled at Virginia Tech in the 1980s. A 2019 survey for TD Ameritrade found that many parents spend at least $500 a month on travel sports; 20 percent spent between $500 and $1,000.
This level of playing can also take a physical toll. A recent study found that although the overall injury rate among high school athletes decreased, serious injuries requiring surgery or time away from playing increased. The most common diagnoses are sprains, strains, and concussions.
Ken May, a chiropractor at Sentara Northern Virginia Medical Center’s Century Therapy Center, says that corresponds to a shift in the types of injuries he’s seeing. “People will get hurt here or there, but it’s usually you broke your arm, or you broke your leg — you got hit too hard,” May says. “On any given day, that kind of thing can happen. But there were not that many people tearing the rotator cuff playing baseball when they’re 10 years old, tearing their ACL playing soccer when they’re 11.”
Mental health is another factor. Kids get burned out, says Alexander Brian Yu, a sport psychologist who owns Prevail Performance Counseling in Burke. When that happens, he works with them to uncover the root cause. It’s often anxiety or the emotional pain of losing games.
“I think the more accepting, tolerant, [and] desensitized people can become to loss and mistakes, the better they are for it and the less fearful they are of experiencing that,” Yu says. “If you’re less fearful, then you feel less anxious [and] you’re more able to be present in your sport.”
With young athletes, he emphasizes focusing on things within their control, such as attending practices, rather than outcomes, such as how many points they scored. That promotes a growth mindset in which teens see continual opportunities for improvement.
Love of the sport is what drives young elite athletes to stick with it.
Mitchell Young, a senior at Broad Run High School in Ashburn who plays on the Canes Baseball travel team, spent the fall attending camps at colleges in hopes of playing college ball. “I just like playing the sport. It’s fun,” Young says.
Clark, who’s headed to Lynchburg, agrees that’s the reason to play. “If you’re not having fun while you’re doing this, then there’s no point in doing it.”
Feature image of Kellan Clark by Shannon Ayres
This story originally ran in our December issue. For more stories like this, subscribe to Northern Virginia Magazine.