Olive Garden

Hey guys, the name's Hayden Carter and I’m from the great city of  Oceanside, California (About 45 minutes north of San Diego). I attend the fine institution of California State University, Bakersfield, and yes that is a real school. I’m not going to be that boring guy who goes through his whole life story as a baseball player and says how he was on the Little League All-Star team or was the best player on his Junior Varsity baseball team. Instead, I’ll just say I’ve been around the game for about 15 years and I’ve experienced a lot in that time, so I feel like I have a solid understanding for how the game works. My favorite experience over those 15 years was when I accepted an athletic scholarship to play baseball at Cal State Bakersfield (CSUB). This will be the only time I discuss anything about me, so don’t be alarmed by all of this ME talk, but I feel like this is an interesting story that gives a little insight on how the college recruiting process works.



August 21, 2011: the day the San Diego Padres officially retired Trevor Hoffman’s number 51 at PETCO Park. My family and I had gone down to watch the ceremony and the game against the Florida Marlins and now we were out at dinner at the local Olive Garden*. I had recently taken a visit to Cal State Bakersfield. My dad and I met with the head coach, toured the campus, and got the general background of the fairly new program. It was late in the summer and I had no other offers, so before I was recruited by CSUB, I was planning on attending Palomar College. I knew the Palomar coaches well because they had been my summer ball coaches for the past couple of summers and I thought I had a good shot at making the team as a two-way player (pitcher AND a hitter…pretty rare at the college level). The main thing for me was getting playing time as a freshman, so I did some research that compared my chances of playing my freshman year at both schools. The research favored Palomar, and the fact that Bakersfield was, well, Bakersfield, made the decision to attend Palomar way easier.

So back to Olive Garden.

The first day of classes for Palomar was tomorrow and I was convinced that Palomar College would be a better fit for me compared to CSUB. I’m eating my spaghetti and breadsticks and I’m thinking back to the discussion I had had with my high school baseball coach about how great an opportunity I had been given with CSUB and how it was the perfect fit for me. Although he gave many good reasons to attend CSUB, I still believed I could be a two-way player at the college level (CSUB was recruiting me as a pitcher only). But, in the middle of my meal, I start thinking about the schools CSUB would face the upcoming year, and how a lot of those schools had either not recruited me or had stopped recruiting me during my senior year in high school. There were other things I was thinking about, but the chance to show these schools what they missed out on when they didn’t recruit me started to make me seriously consider committing to CSUB. In the middle of the meal, I finally say to my family, “I think I want to go to Bakersfield”.

Nowadays, my parents say that I only chose to go to Bakersfield because classes started at Palomar the next day and committing to CSUB gave me an extra two or three weeks of summer vacation, but the chance to prove those schools wrong made me want to go to CSUB even more. So, I call up the head coach of CSUB (In the parking lot of Olive Garden) and tell him I wanted to commit. The conversation was short and he ends the talk by saying the National Letter of Intent (NLI) was being sent in the mail and to make the commitment complete, I would only need to sign it and mail it back.

Usually, when high school athletes commit to a college or university, there is this ceremony where the athlete and his parents sign the NLI in front of some cameras, the athlete puts on the hat of the university, and then your name gets put in the paper. Well, my ceremony was a little different. I came home to find the NLI on the kitchen counter, so I got a pen and, with no one around, signed the NLI while eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and put it back in the mail. No cameras, no parents around, no newspaper article, just me signing a document and ending the long journey of finding a school to play baseball at.

It pretty much summed up the entire process of me finding a school that was the best fit for me athletically and academically. It was pretty crazy how fast things happened with my commitment, but I think my under-the-radar NLI signing was a perfect ending to me finding the best possible place for me to play collegiate baseball at.



*How ironic was it that on the day Trevor Hoffman’s number was retired, the closer that replaced Hoffman, Heath Bell, blew a save against the team Hoffman made his ML debut with? 



P.S. In case anyone was interested, the Padres did end up beating the Florida Marlins 4-3 on a Will Venable walk-off single, and Heath Bell ended up earning the victory in that game.



-Hayden Carter