Ep. 30 | Tim Huber, Augustana University

What You'll Learn in This Episode

Host Ross Hawley sits down with Tim Huber, head baseball coach at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and the architect of one of the most consistent programs in NCAA Division II. Huber is in year 17 at Augustana, won a national championship in 2018, and was back in the Division II World Series last season. When his staff ran the numbers for an upcoming banquet, they found only two programs in the country had won more games since 2018.

Recorded in early December, this is a long, unusually candid conversation between two friends who played against each other. Huber talks about what actually drives him, why he refuses to hand out empty praise, how he evaluates a hitter, and the two former players — one now in Double-A, one now a Navy SEAL — who explain his job better than any philosophy statement could.

The highlights:

• Year 17, a program in its sweet spot, and how hard it is to stop and enjoy any of it
• Why hating to lose drives him more than winning does, and the cost that carries at home
• The mental block he keeps confronting with 18-to-22-year-olds, and what ownership looks like
• Carter Howell: a 155-pound recruit who became a Double-A offensive player of the year
• Why honest conversations beat pats on the back, and how redshirt talks actually go
• Building a staff entirely out of former players, and what an assistant has to be able to do
• Bat speed, the eye test, and why exit velocity can lie
• What he would change about the game, starting at the top and ending in the backyard

Seventeen Years in One Place

December for a college head coach is hotel blocks, bus schedules, and, this year, a first-ever first pitch banquet that has to be fundraised like everything else. Pulling the banquet together is what sent the staff digging through their own record, which is how Huber learned that since 2018 only Tennessee and Angelo State have won more games than Augustana.

Ross brings up the idea that coaches climbing the ladder get so busy looking for the next thing that they forget to notice where they are, and Huber agrees without hesitation. Recruiting gets easier as you win, so you go looking for new recruiting areas. Fundraising works, so you add an event. The one exception in his entire career was 2018: because Augustana won the last game of the year, the season actually ended instead of stopping, and he had no choice but to sit down and look back at it.

What Drives Him

Huber's honest answer about motivation is not about trophies.

"I hate to lose, with a passion — probably more than I like to win."

He traces it back to being a player who was never satisfied with where he was, and says the quality matters more than the field you apply it to. The flip side comes out a moment later, when he says out loud something he admits he probably should not: that you wish you could be as good in your personal life as you are in your professional one. Work consumes the hours, and being a better person can quietly slide down the list.

Fatherhood shifted that. Wrigley, who turns five in January, arrived and did exactly what one of Huber's mentors — Paul Blanchard, the retired Southwest Minnesota State coach he calls Blanche — had warned him a kid would do. Players from a decade ago might say Coach Huber has gone soft. Huber's answer is that the expectations have not moved an inch; the perspective has.

The one regret he will name from his own playing days fits the same pattern. He could hit, he was never a big league prospect, and he was good enough to go play independent ball — and instead he took a job and moved on from the game for reasons he still cannot explain to himself. By the time he thought about going back five years later, the window had closed.

The Mental Side of Coaching 18-to-22-Year-Olds

The most frustrating part of the job, he says, is the mental side — and specifically the unwillingness to name it. He recounts a team meeting where he met his players halfway: he will absolutely recognize that mental health is real and that sometimes a break is warranted, but he wants the same acknowledgment in return, that the thing wrecking a player's season is usually between his ears rather than in his swing. Once a player can identify that as the problem, the staff can actually help with it. What does not work is wanting it both ways.

The payoff for that kind of coaching arrives years later. Huber recently mailed letters to players from his first head coaching job at Dakota County Technical College and heard back from a man he had not spoken to in 19 years, who told him he had helped shape his life. Huber's reaction was disbelief — he was in his mid-20s and just trying to win games. Now it is deliberate, and he thinks it wins more games too, because players who grow as people are the ones who are present in the moments that decide a season.

Carter Howell, and Why Development Is the Payoff

What satisfies Huber most is watching a player become unrecognizable. His example is Carter Howell, who arrived at Augustana as a 155-to-160-pound high school kid, played JV as a freshman, and then made the call himself to redshirt his second year. The staff raised the idea; Howell owned the decision. He got to 195 pounds, dropped his 60 time from 6.6 to under 6.4, broke out in the shortened 2020 season, and became one of the best players in the conference. The Giants signed him as an undrafted free agent, he went to the Arizona Fall League, and last season he spent the whole year in Double-A and was named the organization's Double-A offensive player of the year.

Huber tells the story from Howell's wedding in Spearfish, South Dakota, over Thanksgiving weekend, where a striking number of former teammates turned up in a remote place on a holiday — which told him plenty about the player. What he saw in Howell originally was athleticism, foot speed, and tools, plus swing mechanics that needed real change. Huber is unapologetic about that last part. Plenty of coaches now treat swing mechanics as overblown, and he thinks a broken swing is still a broken swing. A 160-pound hitter compensates for what he cannot do, the same way a small kid heaves a basketball at a regulation hoop. Get him stronger and the swing changes have something to work with.

Honest Conversations Beat Pats on the Back

Telling a young player the truth about his ceiling is one of the hardest parts of the job, and Huber's reasoning for doing it anyway is simple arithmetic about human nature.

"If I'm the guy that just pats you on the back and tells you how great you are all the time, how hard are you going to keep working?"

He points out that these are 18-to-22-year-olds who will not hit their physical prime until a couple of years after they graduate, so there has never been a player in his program he told to just hang out for an offseason. He is careful about the framing: it is not that you are bad, it is that there is improvement sitting right there in front of you. He also does not ask everyone to redshirt — that conversation is reserved for a player he genuinely believes will become a difference maker.

Mentors, and a Staff of Former Players

Huber keeps his own mentors for the same reason he pushes his players. He leans on Blanche for X's and O's and organizational thinking, and on his former college coach at Minnesota State Mankato for a model of how to care about people, a man he describes as far more competitive than anyone outside the program ever realized. He is blunt about coaches who coast: a few programs Augustana plays have been successful historically and have stopped growing, and Augustana has simply passed them.

Every coach on his current staff is a former player of his, which he jokes means they did not hate him that much. Loyalty and familiarity are the starting point, and then two requirements: you have to be able to teach the game, because at the Division II level you cannot out-recruit your teaching, and you have to think like a head coach about how the program gets better rather than waiting on assignments.

The Portal at the Division II Level

Ross does not hide his feelings about the transfer portal, and Huber does not entirely disagree — he thinks it should not be as easy as it is. In practice, though, it has been close to a non-factor at Augustana in both directions. They lose very few players, and Howell is his proof: a sixth year of eligibility available, the talent to play anywhere in the country, and no interest in leaving. Incoming portal players are occasional and usually come through an existing connection.

Where he gives ground is money. The opportunities available to genuinely talented players did not exist when he and Ross were in college, and he is not going to argue with a life-changing offer. His response is to take care of his own guys — a few thousand dollars here, a scholarship covered there, and eventually growing into the NIL piece the way some Division II programs already have. If a player is at a national-level program in a city he likes, is having a good experience, and is being looked after, he has no reason to go looking.

Bat Speed, the Eye Test, and What the Numbers Miss

At the college level, Huber's evaluation starts with bat speed and the ability to move the barrel. Strength can add some bat speed for an undersized hitter, but if the bat speed is very low to begin with, weight gain will not rescue it. From there he is looking at whether the swing simply works — his actual shorthand at a showcase — plus extension, whether the hands can get away from the body through contact, and bat path, which he believes a coach can genuinely change.

Asked whether bat speed is a number to him, the answer is an immediate no. A bat sensor measures what it measures, but he trusts his eyes, and he is pointed about why.

"A bat sensor is not going to lie, but the exit velocity can absolutely lie."

Exit velocity requires squaring the ball up, so a hitter with real hand speed and poor contact will post soft numbers. Ross translates the eye test for parents in the audience: when a coach with decades of reps says a player passes, what he means is that he has thousands of swings banked in his head and is comparing yours against them. Huber's addition is that the easy cases are easy — anyone can spot big league bat speed — and the skill is separating the merely productive high school hitter from the one a notch higher on the spectrum, because those are the players a Division II staff actually has to decide on.

Playing the Game the Right Way

Every winter Huber tells his team to play the game the right way, gets blank looks, and then defines it: hustle down the line, and run on and off the field. He uses himself as the example. He is 47, played amateur ball again last summer, and spent a game in right field with a sore back not wanting to jog in after the third out — and jogged in anyway, because that is what the game is supposed to look like. He also pulled a hamstring that summer stealing home in a playoff game, which tells you most of what you need to know.

The player who embodied it was Ryan Nickel, who left college early to become a Navy SEAL and had only two seasons at Augustana. Huber did not recruit him first; Nickel recruited Augustana, and every time Huber went to watch him play, he played so hard that the staff decided they had to take him. He hit fifth as a freshman on the national championship team. The moment Huber still tells is from a cold November conditioning day when the strength coach offered the team a choice between running outside and running in the gym. The team wanted the gym. Nickel said he had not won a national championship to run inside, and they went outside.

That kind of energy, Huber says, is not something a coach can install. He can pull a player back if there is too much of it, and he can help young kids grow up with the mindset, but the performative version is easy to spot — the guy who is first out of the dugout for high fives because he heard college coaches are watching. Nickel never did any of that. He loved his teammates and wanted to win, and he did not know another way to play.

What He Would Change About the Game

Given one thing to fix, Huber starts at the top, because whatever Major League Baseball and Division I adopt eventually lands on everyone below them with no vote. The pitch clock is his example — he has a keepsake he gives players at their weddings describing baseball as the best-designed sport, played without a clock, and that line is no longer true. He is even less charitable about proposals to let a team insert a hitter anywhere in the order.

"There's nothing wrong with the game of baseball. Let's quit trying to change it."

His second answer is about kids. Huber's own passion for baseball did not come from a parent throwing to him; it came from the backyard, competing against older neighborhood kids, making sock balls and rag balls out of duct tape and whacking them across the yard. He recognizes that letting kids roam a town unsupervised is largely a thing of the past, which makes the problem harder, and he lights up about friends who have built wiffle ball fields in their backyards as one answer.

For Parents and Young Players

Huber's advice for parents of young players comes down to two things: enjoy it or do not do it, and play hard while being a great teammate. He extends that to the part most families dread, which is a kid who is not one of the best players on the team.

"It doesn't matter if you're the best player or if you're the worst player. You've got to be part of something."

A player who measures his experience purely by his own results in a sport built on failure is not going to enjoy it. A player who invests in the team can look back years later and say he had a great time, with the highs and lows almost beside the point. And if a kid gets cut and still wants to be involved, Huber wants the kid — not his mom or dad — to go ask the coach what he can do to improve and whether there is a role, even scorekeeper or team manager.

As for what teammates actually remember, it is not batting average. Huber hopes his own would say passion, competitiveness, and fire, along with a willingness to grab a teammate by the jersey and tell him to figure it out. He learned from older players who did that for him as a freshman, and he thinks the message always lands harder coming from a teammate than from the coach's chair.

Episode Timestamps

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

• 0:00 — Introduction
• 1:55 — What a college head coach actually does in December
• 4:09 — Year 17, and only two programs have won more games since 2018
• 5:23 — Climbing the ladder and forgetting to enjoy it
• 8:07 — What motivates him: hating to lose
• 10:15 — How becoming a dad changed his perspective
• 14:16 — The most frustrating part of coaching 18-to-22-year-olds
• 14:54 — Mental health, mental blocks, and taking ownership
• 16:51 — More to it than baseball: a text message 19 years later
• 20:43 — Carter Howell, from 155 pounds to Double-A
• 26:12 — Why honesty beats a pat on the back
• 28:53 — Why coaches need mentors of their own
• 32:22 — Building a staff out of former players
• 35:16 — The transfer portal at the Division II level
• 39:26 — What makes a good hitter: bat speed is king
• 40:56 — Is bat speed a number? The eye test
• 47:07 — Regrets from a baseball life
• 49:31 — One thing he would change about the game
• 51:10 — Let kids be kids: backyard games and sock balls
• 53:17 — Playing the game the right way
• 54:35 — The player who recruited Augustana harder than they recruited him
• 1:01:36 — Advice for parents of young players
• 1:03:08 — Being part of something, even as the worst player
• 1:05:53 — What teammates actually remember
• 1:08:07 — Final word: staying open to other perspectives

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Tim Huber is the head baseball coach at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he won the 2018 NCAA Division II national championship. Subscribe to the Baseball Forward Podcast for more conversations with the players, coaches, and leaders elevating the next generation of the game.