Ep. 12 | Daniel Costanza, Saint Mary's College

What You'll Learn in This Episode

Host Ross Hawley sits down with Daniel Costanza, recruiting coordinator and assistant baseball coach at Saint Mary's College in Moraga, California, an NCAA Division I program in the West Coast Conference.

Saint Mary's is personal ground for him. His mother graduated from the school, he spent time there as a student before transferring to York College to finish his playing career, and he and his wife were married in the campus chapel. After four years coaching at Long Beach State, he came back to work again for the head coach who first hired him at twenty-two. This conversation covers what the staff evaluates in the fall, how they assemble a roster in a transfer-portal era, and the specific, practical steps a high school player can take to land on a college coach's radar.

The highlights:

• What a Saint Mary's fall actually looks like, from small-group individuals to first bullpens
• The two things the staff watches most closely in new players: competitiveness and coachability
• Why the program builds from within with Bay Area high school talent and supplements with junior college and portal additions
• The advice he would give his younger self, and why the strength standard has moved
• The nuances of the game young players are behind on, and how showcase schedules contribute
• Two program standards that define what winning looks like away from the scoreboard
• What playing college baseball gives a young man once the eligibility runs out
• How to email a college coach so the email gets read

Inside a Saint Mary's Fall

The staff gets about five and a half weeks of small-group work before anything resembles a team practice, a luxury of Northern California weather. Pitchers open with twenty-pitch fastball bullpens. Position players get thirty to forty minutes a day in either a defensive or an offensive individual.

That structure is deliberate. With a large new group on the roster — freshmen, junior college transfers, portal additions — the fall is when coaches learn who these players are as people and install the defensive and offensive foundations the program will be built on, before the schedule starts making decisions for them.

Competitiveness and Coachability

Costanza's two non-negotiables for a new infielder are how a player handles failure and whether instruction actually sticks. Most recruits arrive having never truly failed, and the first time they are surrounded by players as good as they are can be a shock.

Coachability, in his definition, is not obedience. It is the willingness to try something, keep it if it works, and stay in the conversation if it does not until the staff finds a version that fits the player.

"Are you the type of player who, when a coach says I think we need to get you to move a little better, can take that and try it and implement it? Or are you the kind of guy who, as soon as something gets hard, goes right back to what was comfortable?"

He extends the same standard to himself. He does not expect to have all the answers, and he points out that today's players learn a great deal from video of their favorite big leaguers before they ever meet a college coach. The job is not proving what the staff knows; it is giving players a platform to improve.

Building the Roster From Within

Twelve seasons working alongside the same head coach has given the recruiting approach time to evolve. Early on they were aggressive with freshmen and sophomores. Rule changes and an older college game pushed them toward patience. They have run junior-college-heavy classes before and did not love the culture those years produced.

The current formula is a middle path: build the core with the best high school players available, starting in their own Bay Area backyard, then supplement with junior college and the transfer portal as the roster requires. Their most recent class was high school heavy with three junior college additions and three portal additions.

"There is no quick fix. Our culture has to be built from within, and it has to be built with kids who are in our program for three and four years."

Twelve Years With the Same Staff

Consistency in a coaching staff is a recruiting signal whether or not anyone says it out loud, and Costanza is direct about what his head coach has meant to him — as a pitching coach, as a leader, and as a family man with a home life that looks like the one Costanza is building with two kids under three.

He traces the rest of it back to mentors: his high school coach, the head coach he played for at York College, and the staffs he learned from during four years in the Big West at Long Beach State. He was hired at Saint Mary's at twenty-two as director of operations while finishing a master's degree, worked his way to volunteer and then to paid roles, left, and came back.

The Strength Curve, and the Nuances Kids Miss

Asked what he would tell a younger version of himself, he goes straight to strength and conditioning. When he came out of high school, the weight room started with somebody teaching you how to squat. Today incoming freshmen can run a clinic on lifting form, and there is a baseline of physicality expected the day a player steps on a Division I campus.

The gap, in his view, has moved somewhere else entirely. Players arrive physically ready and behind on how to play — base running, cuts and relays, pop fly communication, the one-run-game decisions that decide seasons. He attributes much of that to schedules stacked with games instead of practice, and to showcase settings where the point is displaying tools rather than winning. It is a real learning curve when half the roster already understands what winning takes.

Finding the Best Player on the Field

On the recruiting trail, his method is simple and unglamorous: find the best player on the field, every time out, whatever the setting. Physicality matters, but he has coached plenty of all-conference players who were not the biggest athletes on the grass and still jumped off the page.

He also weights winning heavily. High school coaches are teaching and competing for the love of it, and players who come out of consistently winning programs tend to arrive with an expectation and a skill set the staff does not have to install. All-conference and all-region players from winning programs are the profile.

What Winning Looks Like as a Person

Costanza knows not every recruit controls the scoreboard, so he offers two standards he lives by instead. The first is a line the head coach delivers to every team on day one.

"Do what you're supposed to do when you're supposed to do it, whether you like it or not. And success favors the well prepared."

He unpacks that into ordinary things: going to class, doing the homework, talking to professors, being early to weights, planning the day, eating well. He is quick to say he is not perfect at any of it, that he wears his emotions as a coach, and that he tells his players as much.

The smaller point underneath is one that should land with any high school player listening. The older the group, the narrower the talent gap. A Division I hitter gets maybe 150 to 200 at-bats, so the distance between hitting .280 and .300 might be eight hits — a hard ninety here, a better drag bunt there, one backside ground ball with a runner on second that finds a hole.

What College Baseball Actually Gives You

He is careful not to romanticize it. Playing as a freshman is hard, the days run from six a.m. weights through class, practice, conditioning, and study hall, and weekends disappear for months at a time. That is the point.

"Nobody is as hard on you as your college coaches, because the expectations are so high. And then you go into the real world, where people are trying to make money and feed their families, and those expectations are really high too."

The sacrifice, the competition, and the guaranteed failure build something a graduate carries into a first job or a first child. Costanza points to Saint Mary's alumni in the big leagues and to the lawyers, doctors, and accountants who came out of the same clubhouse.

The Two People Who Set the Standard

Asked who made him, he does not hesitate: his parents. His father spent more than fifteen years running a community youth center that served hundreds of underprivileged kids. His mother has worked at Chevron for twenty-six years and climbed to an executive role at a time when very few women around her had one.

He is the oldest of four — a brother who is an attorney, a brother who is an engineer, and a sister who is a doctor — and he jokes that he is the one who went into coaching. What he took from both parents was the same thing: they put their family first and grew serious careers at the same time, and they were coaches in their own way whether or not anyone called it that.

Advice for the Next Generation

Two things. First, if a young player genuinely wants to play college baseball and is willing to work for it, there is almost always a path — it just may not be the one on the recruiting posters.

"Not everyone is a Division I player. I had an unbelievable experience at York College, and I would not change it for anything."

Second, he thinks forcing early single-sport specialization is one of the biggest mistakes in youth sports. Athleticism comes from varied movement and varied coaching, basketball and football and soccer are fun, and a mental break from baseball often produces a better baseball player. He also tells players to watch the college game — turn on a Friday night and see what real pitching looks like, then evaluate honestly where the work needs to go.

Getting on a Coach's Radar

The closing stretch is the most immediately usable part of the episode for recruits. Coaching staff emails are on the program website, and staffs receive hundreds of messages a day, so personalization is the whole game. Include the eligibility center number, transcripts, high school and travel coach phone numbers, accolades, and video.

Then follow up. Sending the same school three or four emails is fine, and an email timed right before a coach heads out to an event — here is where I will be playing this weekend — is how a name turns into a face. Beyond that, prospect camps are the single most efficient way to get in front of four or five coaches on a staff, see the campus, and hear how the pitching and hitting coaches actually teach.

Episode Timestamps

Tap any timestamp to jump the player straight to that moment.

• 0:00 — Introduction
• 1:24 — Why Saint Mary's is a sleeping giant, and what fall individuals look like
• 2:42 — What the staff looks for in the fall: competitiveness and coachability
• 6:36 — Building from within, and the current recruiting mix
• 10:31 — Twelve seasons with the same head coach, and the mentors before him
• 14:28 — Advice to his younger self: get ahead of the strength curve
• 17:04 — The nuances of the game young players are behind on
• 19:41 — Finding the best player on the field, and why winning is a skill
• 23:36 — What winning looks like as a person
• 26:18 — Small edges: eight hits between .280 and .300
• 34:08 — How playing college baseball changes a young man's life
• 38:07 — The parents who set the standard
• 42:06 — Advice for the next generation, and the case against specializing
• 45:59 — How to email a college coach so the email gets read

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Daniel Costanza is the recruiting coordinator and assistant baseball coach at Saint Mary's College. Follow him on X at @DCostanza2 and the program at @SMC_Baseball. Subscribe to the Baseball Forward Podcast for more conversations with the players, coaches, and leaders elevating the next generation of the game.