UCF Clarifies Its Policy Concerning Recruitment Of Baseball Players

Back on December 2, I had a lot of good things to say about the University of Central Florida’s Compliance Office.  But commentator, Jason Wolf, mentioned an interesting inconsistency.  He correctly stated,

The baseball calendar requires agents to be registered with the MLBPA. However, unless there have been very recent changes, the MLBPA does not require agents to be registered until their client is on the 40-man roster.

The MLBPA has not made any changes; an agent still must have a client on a team’s 40-man roster in order to become MLBPA certified.  So Jason sent a message to Lisa Danner, Assistant Athletics Director for Compliance at UCF, asking for clarification.  Here response is very valuable for any agent that is interested in recruiting UCF baseball players.

Since the MLBPA will not allow agents to register before they represent an athlete that is a member on a 40 man roster, you will not be required to be a member of the MLBPA and submit the applicable documentation, if you do not currently represent any athletes that meet that criteria. Please indicate such in a letter attached to your UCF Registration so that we may place it on file with your registration information.

This levels the playing field.  If UCF and other universities required all agents to be certified before recruiting any of their baseball players, it would prohibit agents from recruiting baseball players at the collegiate level, leaving high schoolers as the only pool of players for non-certified agents to advise leading up to the draft.