Brendan Hall:

Her dazzling fastball and sizzling bat have been on the radar of college coaches for quite a while. As a junior at Ashland High School, Nicole D’Argento was named the state’s softball player of the year.
Letters from colleges started arriving for D’Argento, a senior this year, in the summer of 2005, before her freshman year. Now, that stack of letters sits in her living room and “looks at least a foot tall,” she said recently with a laugh.
Softball has long been a year-round commitment for D’Argento. Her older brother, Russ, played baseball at Old Dominion and the University of Connecticut after helping propel Ashland High to the Division 3 state title in 2000.
Last spring, Nicole hurled the Clocker softball team to a perfect 28-0 season, and the Division 2 state title. She has a career earned-run average hovering under 0.50 and she will enter her senior season just 16 strikeouts shy of the exclusive 500 mark for her high school career.
With so many colleges lining up for her services, D’Argento made her decision early.
Last fall, she made a nonbinding verbal agreement to attend Boston College, which nosed out the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of Virginia.

Last fall, she made a nonbinding verbal agreement to attend Boston College, which nosed out the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of Virginia.
On Wednesday, the first day that nonfootball student-athletes are allowed to officially commit, D’Argento will sign her letter of intent to Boston College, joining a number of other local area athletes who will make their college choice official as early as possible.
It’s a decision she is glad to be done with.
“You have no idea,” D’Argento said. “All my friends right now are looking at schools, visiting schools. They always tell me how lucky I am. It’s such a relief; I couldn’t be happier.”
The early-signing period starts Wednesday and ends Nov. 19. According to the NCAA, early signees accounted for 52 percent of scholarship athletes that signed for the 2007-2008 academic year, an eight percent increase from 2006-2007.
“For athletes that are getting full scholarships, the early-signing period allows them to cease the recruiting process,” said Cindy Scott, Bentley University’s assistant athletic director, who oversees compliance for the Waltham school. Before arriving at Bentley in 1997, Scott served as the women’s basketball coach at Southern Illinois for 21 seasons. “A lot of them have seen the process begin much earlier for them, sometimes their freshman and sophomore years. It lets them end a stressful process faster, because it’s lasted longer for them.”
For many athletes such as D’Argento, the process can be stressful. College coaches are not allowed to make direct contact with prospective student-athletes until the July 1 before their senior year. Student-athletes may be contacted by mail and are allowed to call coaches themselves.
Making a decision early relieves a lot of the anxiety, at least for some students.
Elaine Schwaiger, the women’s softball coach at Merrimack College, said “most of the time, you can sense what a kid wants and how sure they are of it.
“Some kids know what they want; they have a vision for their future and they’re all business. When you have a kid who knows what she wants, the early-signing period is perfect. When you have one that doesn’t, it could make things more stressful because it’s one more deadline to deal with.”
However, Elaine Sortino, University of Massachusetts softball coach, wonders if the early-signing process is “pigeon-holing kids.”
“I think that you’re seeing fewer multi-sport athletes,” said Sortino, entering her 30th season in Amherst.
“We’re having dialogue right now with juniors; I can feel their level of stress.”
D’Argento has starred at Ashland High, but she was essentially recruited through her play with the Polar Crush, a Worcester-based select team that traveled to showcases all over the country during the summer. Ashland High coach Steve O’Neill said that he never received an inquiry from a college coach regarding D’Argento.
Erik Murphy, a 6-foot-10 senior on the basketball team at St. Mark’s School in Southborough, was on the watch list early on. Clemson sent him a mailing before his freshman year, and Boston College made an offer a bit later. His father, Jay, had starred for the Eagles during the Tom Davis era.
He considered BC but verbally committed to the University of Florida in January.
“I never really stressed out,” said Murphy, who will sign his letter at St. Mark’s on Wednesday. “My dad helped me out a lot because he went through the same thing; we went through all of the visits together. When I did Florida, I knew I was in the right place.
“When I got my first offer from BC, I was real excited, obviously because my dad went there. At first, that was where I thought I was going to end up, but my dad sat me down and had me weigh my options. He told me to take my time, and make my decision based on what I thought was the right fit.”
One of his teammates, 6-foot-9 junior Nate Lubick of Southborough, the son of St. Mark’s coach Dave Lubick, verbally committed to Georgetown last month.
Weston High pitcher Sahil Bloom, who gave a verbal commitment to Stanford in July, said that he started receiving standard, nonpersonalized letters two to three times per week as a sophomore.
So with the aid of coaches and a personal trainer, he started to get the word out on himself, through e-mails and letters. A leap in his athleticism didn’t hurt; his fastball was clocked this summer in the low 90s. By the time he committed to Stanford, a number of other schools were on his trail.
Once things started picking up, Bloom was receiving personalized letters, some of them handwritten.
“You really always want baseball to be fun, and it wasn’t for a little while,” Bloom said. “I started thinking about recruiting way too much during the high school season. It kind of alienated me from my teammates who weren’t going through the process. They couldn’t understand what I was going through.”
Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High senior Derek Lowe can relate. A senior captain on the football team, he verbally committed to play baseball at William & Mary in August. He recalls receiving at least one call a day.
“It was brutal,” he said, laughing and sighing at the memory.
Brendan Hall can be reached at bhall59@hotmail.com.