Ep. 13 | Garrett Callaghan, UMass Boston

What You'll Learn in This Episode

Host Ross Hawley sits down with Garrett Callaghan, recruiting coordinator and assistant baseball coach at UMass Boston, an NCAA Division III program that has spent years near the top of the national conversation.

Callaghan is early in his coaching career and close enough to his playing days to remember them clearly. He put up four years of numbers at Ithaca College, added a fifth year at Rutgers, and now recruits for the Beacons. That vantage point makes him unusually specific about what recruiters notice, what Division III talent actually looks like, and which habits separate a good high school player from a good college one.

The highlights:

• What the staff teaches newcomers about being a Beacon, on the field and off it
• Why grades and between-inning warm-up reps carry real recruiting weight
• The dugout behavior that ends a recruitment on the spot
• What he wishes he had known as a freshman, and the nutrition and weight room changes that turned his career
• The two-minute breathing routine that opens every UMass Boston practice
• Why summer ball and a wood bat matter, and how the staff builds individual summer plans
• What most players misunderstand about the level of play in Division III
• His father's two-word acronym, and why discipline beats motivation

From the Batter's Box to the Coaching Box

Callaghan is honest that he misses playing every day and expects to be in a men's league until his body says otherwise. Coaching is what fills the gap, and the transition has been smoother than he expected, largely because of a head coach who handed a first-time twenty-four-year-old coach real autonomy.

The staff has also given the program a good year on the equipment side, with a new school-wide New Balance deal covering uniforms head to toe, a Wilson glove partnership, and bat and protective gear to go with it.

What It Means to Be a Beacon

With a large group of freshmen, junior college transfers, and grad transfers arriving, the early fall is as much about standards as it is about bunt defense and first-and-third coverage. UMass Boston has taken the ABCA academic team award in five or six recent years, and Callaghan's framing for why that matters is the line the program keeps coming back to.

"How you do one thing is how you do everything."

He has watched it hold in both directions. The best students are usually the best players, the best players usually have the best work ethic, and the guys with the best work ethic usually land the best jobs after graduation. The guys who turn in homework late are, more often than not, the same guys who are late and unfocused at practice.

What Recruiters Actually Watch

Grades open doors before anyone sees a swing — Callaghan cites roughly a 3.5 GPA putting a player in range at three quarters of schools and a 4.0 pushing that into the nineties — and a strong transcript tells a staff something about focus before they have met the kid.

Then there is the part high school players rarely think about. A shortstop is not guaranteed a ground ball in a given game, but a recruiter in the stands will see twenty-five warm-up reps between innings, plus how the player talks to teammates in the dugout and how he handles a phone call. The red flags are just as visible. Frustration is fine and even shows a player cares; going at teammates or coaches is an automatic no, because at the travel level everyone can play and the separators are everything else.

Taking Charge of Your Own Development

Asked what he wishes he had known, Callaghan does not soften it: he coasted on raw talent for a long time and was lazy as a freshman.

"Everybody is really, really good at this level, Division I, II or III. It is truly on you to take charge of your own development."

The practical version at UMass Boston is fifty extra swings on a day with a gap between classes. Across sixteen fall practices, that is seven or eight hundred swings nobody made him take. His own turning points were a diet overhaul between his freshman and sophomore years, and a shutdown stretch with facility access where he lifted six or seven days a week and pushed through a throwing program of his own design. He came back a different player, and says the weight room changed his life as much for the confidence as for the strength.

Confidence, Breathing, and the Two-Minute Mind Up

Confidence, in his telling, is downstream of work: it comes from knowing you outworked everyone that day. It also travels. When the best and most confident players on a roster are also the hardest workers and the best students, younger players inherit the expectation.

UMass Boston backs that with structure. The program has a performance coach players can go to when the plate is not feeling right, and every practice opens with a two-minute mind up — players on their backs, eyes closed, a timer running, working on active breathing to bring heart rates down before anything else happens. Callaghan also coaches an intensity scale: not a ten, where a hitter is squeezing the bat and a pitcher is choking the ball, and not a one, where nobody cares. Somewhere between a five and a seven.

"The progress is made when nobody is watching. We want our guys to work when the lights aren't on, and that is what lets them perform when the lights get bright."

The Case for Summer Ball

Callaghan played four summers, starting in a league in upstate New York before moving to the Northwoods League, including a pandemic year spent in cabins at a campground in Traverse City, Michigan. The wood bat is the piece he points to most. After a summer of a hundred or two hundred at-bats with wood, the aluminum barrel felt bigger, the ball traveled farther, and his hands worked better.

There is also the grind itself — something like seventy-two games in seventy-six days teaches a player to hold a process together when the body is tired, and scouts show up because the talent is concentrated and the bats are wood. The staff builds a plan per player rather than chasing prestige. A pitcher who threw ten innings as a freshman needs thirty or forty over the summer, and if a roster spot means two innings a week, they would rather see him pitch forty in a local men's league and hold a summer job. Those conversations start well before fall practice does.

What Division III Really Looks Like

For players carrying a Division I or bust mindset, Callaghan has a simple assignment: go watch a Division III game, then a Division II game, then a Division I game, and be honest about the difference. His ace from last season earned a full ride to a Division I program. He points to a Division III infielder who hit .450 across four years and then started at second base on a College World Series team.

Having played at both levels, he offers the sharpest version of the comparison he can. From the top down — everyday lineup regulars and weekend starting pitching — he thinks the quality is Division I caliber. The real difference is bullpen depth, which thins out fast and is where the high-scoring games come from. He also notes that Division III players who spend a summer in the Northwoods League regularly out-hit the Division I players next to them, and expects the gap to keep narrowing.

Being the Same Player Every Day

His first filter on a recruit is the eye test, which he is careful to define as conditioning, speed up the line, and smoothness in the field rather than a body type. His second filter is consistency, and he tests it deliberately by showing up in a plain polo, sitting in the outfield, and watching a player who does not know a coach is there.

He learned that from a teammate who went on to be a high-round draft pick, a player nobody could read from the dugout — four-for-four with four home runs or zero-for-four with four strikeouts, same person either way.

"I love watching a kid fail. Let me see how he responds in the second inning, or in his third at-bat. Because if you can't handle failure, you're not going to be a good college baseball player."

For players trying to get seen, Callaghan is blunt about the arithmetic. Two or three coaches cannot be everywhere, video only goes so far, and a staff can evaluate fifty players in one afternoon at a prospect camp. He is not telling anyone to spend thousands on camps — that money is better spent on development — but for a school a player genuinely wants, the campus visit and the live look are worth more than another email.

Discipline, and Playing to Your Strengths

The best advice he ever got came in a letter from his father before he left for college: WIN, for what's important now. The companion idea is one he repeats to his own players.

"Motivation only gets you through the first week. Discipline takes over from there — discipline is the best form of self-love, because you are actively pushing off something you want right now."

His coaching advice is the same shape. Let the staff scout the other team's weaknesses; a player's job is to lean on his strengths. A strong arm should be visible between innings. A hitter who can drive the outside fastball to the opposite field should do it repeatedly until someone stops him, because college pitchers live on that outer third to get ahead, and the inside mistakes — and the power numbers — come later. What he does not want is a player with no plan, popping up pitch after pitch with nothing behind the swing.

A Purist's Take on the Pitch Clock

Asked what he would change about the game, Callaghan answers as a hitter and a purist: scrap the pitch clock, at least below the levels where broadcast windows matter. He built his own at-bats one pitch at a time — step out, get the heart rate down, decide what is coming and what he would spit on — and eight seconds does not leave room for that. He also suspects the constant pace contributes to arm injuries for pitchers who used to take twenty or thirty seconds between pitches. There is beauty in the slowness of a game that cannot be run out on a clock, and he would like to keep it.

Episode Timestamps

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

• 0:00 — Introduction
• 1:25 — A new New Balance deal, and a shout-out to the Burris family
• 2:44 — Trading a playing career for a coaching career
• 4:03 — What a UMass Boston fall is built around
• 6:39 — Why grades and between-inning reps matter to recruiters
• 9:17 — The red flags that end a recruitment
• 11:52 — What he wishes he had known as a freshman
• 13:12 — Nutrition, the weight room, and where confidence comes from
• 17:04 — Preparation, breathing, and the two-minute mind up
• 20:59 — Four summers of summer ball and the case for the wood bat
• 24:52 — What most players misunderstand about Division III
• 28:47 — Being the same player when nobody is watching
• 36:40 — Discipline over motivation, and playing to your strengths
• 42:06 — Why he would scrap the pitch clock

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Garrett Callaghan is the recruiting coordinator and assistant baseball coach at UMass Boston. Follow him on X at @gmancallaghan10 and the Beacons at @BeaconsBaseball. Subscribe to the Baseball Forward Podcast for more conversations with the players, coaches, and leaders elevating the next generation of the game.