Dallas Baptist Baseball Recruiting: What College Coaches Look For | Tyler Johnson | Episode 92

What You'll Learn in This Episode

Host Ross Hawley sits down with Tyler Johnson, recruiting coordinator and assistant baseball coach at Dallas Baptist University. Johnson played junior college ball and then Division III at Concordia in Austin, spent a year working for the Rangers, coached at McLennan Community College, and is now in his ninth year of coaching. He grew up at ball fields, the son of longtime coach Skip Johnson, and spent a decade sitting beside Augie Garrido with a notebook.

Most of this conversation is about evaluation: what physicality actually means to a Division I staff, why the consolation game tells them more than the championship game, how a player's response to failure gets graded, and what a selfish player looks like in both success and struggle. Johnson also walks through what December looks like inside a Division I program and what he tells young coaches who ask how to start.

The highlights:

• What physicality means to the DBU staff, and why it comes first
• Why they watch how a player carries himself in a game that does not matter
• Moving on fast: how coaches evaluate a player's response to failure
• Playing pitch to pitch, and why the past and the future both cost you
• What a selfish player looks like in success, not just in failure
• Where a player places his identity, and why that determines how he handles adversity
• Being relentless in every phase instead of scoreboard-watching an opponent
• Honest, patient coaching advice for the next generation of coaches

Division III, Junior College, and the Same Job

Johnson went from junior college to Concordia in Austin largely because he wanted to play every day, and because a group of friends from the Austin area and from junior college ball were already there. His head coach was the late Tommy Boggs, a former high draft pick out of the area who also founded a longtime Austin summer program, and the pitching coach who came in behind Boggs to pick players up is now the head coach there.

He is straightforward about what Division III offers. There are no athletic scholarships, the schools tend to be smaller and academically driven, and his classes ran about 14 students, which is why one of his professors is still a good friend. The baseball tick gets better as levels go up and teams get deeper, but at Concordia the experience was pure: a roster of junior college guys who wanted to keep playing because they loved it, not because anyone was paying them. He came out of it convinced that every level serves its purpose, and that if a player is good, someone is going to see him.

The work has not changed much as he has climbed. At McLennan he had players who were all 18 to 20 years old, a full fall season, and plenty of opportunity, and the staff developed them to go play Division I baseball. At DBU the same development work points at professional baseball. Either way, he says, you are preparing them for what comes after you — whether that is ten years in the big leagues or a career, a family, and being a husband.

Raised at the Ballpark

Johnson never really decided to coach; he just never knew anything else. He was at a baseball field nearly every day of the year, either for his own team, his brother's, or his dad's. Looking back, he says his father was grooming him from an early age — coaching him on how to talk to teammates and encourage them, and modeling one rule above all others: show them how much you care as soon as you join a new team. He was throwing batting practice to people by eighth grade and catching bullpens while his dad taught pitching out loud.

The other formative piece was ten years around Augie Garrido while his dad was an assistant at Texas. Johnson would finish whatever he was doing on his own field, get driven over to the ballpark, and sit next to Garrido during practice with a sheet of paper his dad told him to fill with everything Garrido said. He was 14. Garrido stood back, watched, took notes, let his assistants coach, and interjected when he needed to, and eventually the two of them started trading ideas.

After Concordia he spent a year with the Rangers, hired to do front-office and analytics work. He did that work, but he also ended up on the field every single day catching bullpens and throwing BP, and the staff told him to come help wherever he wanted. That was the answer: he did not want to watch from the stands. Away from baseball he ranks duck hunting first, then deer hunting, then fishing, and he makes the case for all of it as something close to meditation — hours in nature where real conversations happen, whether with a fellow coach or with your own thoughts.

What His Dad Taught Him About Coaching

Asked what he learned most from his father, Johnson does not mention strategy first, even though he picked up plenty of it. He goes to the player's experience: how guys feel around you, whether you are still there for them after they stop playing for you, and whether they know you care regardless of what the results say. When a pitcher gives up the lead, the job is to be with him.

"You're in the trenches with them at all times as a coach. You're not sitting there and you're not above them. You're not putting your ego above them. You are there to serve those guys while they're around you, not the other way around."

He admits that is harder than it sounds, because a coach wants to win and wants to be good, but the players are the ones out there going through it.

Relentless, and Playing Against the Ball

Ask what he wants his teams to look like and the word is relentless — on the mound, at the plate, on the base paths, on defense. His McLennan team last season was the model, a group that stayed in games regardless of the opponent or the conditions.

"No matter who we're playing, no matter the conditions we're playing in, we're going to be in the game, because we're playing against ourselves. We're playing against the ball."

The way the staff said it to players: we are going to execute what we execute, and we cannot worry about what they execute. Do the first part and the wins take care of themselves often enough.

Why Dallas Baptist

Two things pulled him to DBU. The first was head coach Dan Heefner, who cares about far more than baseball, which was Johnson's requirement for leaving the role he had. The second was years of evidence from his own players. McLennan sent guys to conferences all over the country, and plenty of them came back and said they wished they had stayed at McLennan for four years. The ones who went to DBU never said it. They said the junior college had prepared them well and asked him to send more guys over.

He also noticed the growth and the maturity in those players, and how they talked about the place without being prompted. Winning matters — 40 wins and a regional is the goal of any season — but DBU does not define success only that way, and that registered with him while he was still on the other side of the recruiting conversation. The campus does not hurt either. He drives across the bridge over Mountain Creek Lake every morning, pulls into Horner Ballpark, and hears America the Beautiful at 4:30 and taps at 7 o'clock from the national cemetery behind the outfield.

December Is for Developing Tools

In the middle of December the players are taking finals and heading home, with no coach contact. Everything before that was individual work, roughly eight weeks of it, aimed squarely at tools rather than results: get quicker, get stronger, raise the motor, and try to work above game speed. Johnson runs the catchers, so his list is range on blocks, more mobile hips, a stronger glove hand, and arm strength.

The timing is the point. With no games on the calendar, nobody has to worry about a player being too tired, and more importantly nobody has to compete while rebuilding a skill — because changes make you fail at first, and that is easier to accept in December than in April. He likes this group's competitive edge, too. The staff spends less time telling them to giddy up and more time pulling the reins back, which is the problem a coach would rather have when it is time to let them loose in the spring.

What Gets a Player Noticed

The first filter is physicality, and Johnson says a lot of people repeat the word without understanding it. DBU teams are big and strong, and that starts with recruiting big, strong kids. After that, the evaluation is not about collecting hits.

What the staff wants to know is whether a player is the same player in every setting. Is he going about it the same way in a consolation game later in the weekend, with nothing on the line, as he was in a championship game? Nobody actually rises up on command for the big one — you are either a guy who plays hard or you are not. And does it look like he enjoys it?

"I get it. It's 100 degrees outside. This is probably your 50th game. But you look like it's your 50th game, and it looks like it's 100 degrees outside. We don't want to know that."

The reason is practical, not sentimental. If a player has fun playing, he will enjoy how DBU works, and the staff can trust him in a big Friday night or a regional with Omaha on the line.

Handling Failure, Pitch to Pitch

The second filter is failure, and Johnson wants to see it. A player who succeeds in summer ball and then walks into college baseball is going to struggle, because the next level is hard by definition. What he is grading is recovery speed.

"If you're sitting there concerned about your failure, that means truly you're concerned about yourself, and you're not trying to help your team win."

The framing he uses with players is that you always have a job to do. Strike out with the bases loaded and you still have to go play shortstop the next half inning, and every pitch out there is a chance to help the team win. Being upset for a short stretch is fine; the requirement is a routine to move on. He puts a sharp point on why: a player focused on the past is essentially sitting in a depressed state, a player focused on pitches that have not happened yet is anxious, and the only thing anybody controls is the pitch they are on.

That is also how he defines a selfish player, and his definition includes success. A selfish player keeps the attention on himself when things go well and feels sorry for himself when they do not — and both, Johnson argues, are the same instinct to be looked at. The antidote DBU preaches is serving your team, because it is nearly impossible to think about yourself while you are focused on the guys around you, and a player who credits teammates after a big hit is not building the kind of expectation that sets up the next collapse.

All of that sits on top of the question he thinks matters most: where is your identity? He runs it on himself first. If he is Tyler Johnson the baseball coach, a loss follows him home to his wife and family.

"If your identity is in you as a baseball player, that's something built on sand, and when a storm comes it's going to wash it away."

At a Christian university he can answer that question directly with his players, and he says the same principle would help any baseball player: build the foundation on rock so you can stand through failure and adversity. The staff then backs it up with deliberate routines for moving on, every single pitch.

Advice for the Next Generation of Coaches

Johnson gets this question a lot now from former players who want to coach youth, high school, or college ball. His first answer is to remember why you are doing it — you love baseball, but more importantly you love helping people, and that is easy to lose once ego creeps in and the team starts feeling like a representation of you.

His second is patience, and it comes from Mitch Thompson, his head coach at McLennan. This is a coach's ninth time through a season and a freshman's first. Even a senior has only done it four or five times. That gap is obvious when you say it out loud and almost impossible to remember in the moment.

His third is to make it enjoyable: good experiences, creative drills, things the team does together. Players come to get better and move on, but the ones who enjoy where they are and who they are around improve faster than the ones dragging themselves through another day. And his last one is the hardest.

"Be honest. You don't have to be brutal, but be honest."

Most players who need to fix something — a skill or an attitude — do not know it, and do not understand how it affects the people around them. Tell them, be transparent about what you are seeing, and take it one-on-one when that is the right setting. When a player asks what he needs to do to get where he wants to go, tell him the truth, because the path is not wide. It is a series of narrow, singular decisions in a straight line.

What Johnson enjoys most is the part that makes all of it necessary: players arrive at DBU from California, Canada, the Midwest, Florida, and all over Texas, at wildly different stages of maturity, and the group still has to do something together. Getting everyone pulling the same rope is the fun part.

Music is on everywhere he works, in his office and through a speaker he carries to the field. His summer-ball walkout song was always George Strait's "All My Ex's Live in Texas," and he went back to George Strait his senior year, which tells you he was never after a pump-up track. These days he leans on contemporary Christian and easygoing, bluesy music, having grown convicted that what a person listens to and watches shapes who he becomes.

As for the spring, he is careful about how he frames expectations. Every Division I program in the country says it wants to win a national championship. What the staff actually expects is that the team focuses on what it takes to win one, makes the narrow choices day after day, and stays in the moments — because nobody controls wins and losses, only the process that gives you a chance.

Episode Timestamps

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

• 0:00 — Introduction
• 3:00 — Concordia, small classes, and playing for the love of it
• 7:27 — Junior college versus Division I development
• 10:12 — A dad who groomed him to coach
• 11:55 — A year with the Rangers that put him back on the field
• 12:50 — Taking notes next to Augie Garrido at 14
• 14:11 — Duck hunting, deer hunting, and fishing as meditation
• 16:45 — The biggest lesson from his dad: the player's experience
• 18:42 — The stamp he wants: relentless in every phase
• 19:52 — Why Dallas Baptist
• 23:08 — December at a Division I program: finals and tool work
• 26:14 — Horner Ballpark, the lake, and taps behind the outfield
• 28:39 — What it takes to get noticed by the DBU staff
• 30:57 — How they evaluate the way a player handles failure
• 32:20 — Playing pitch to pitch instead of the past or the future
• 34:08 — What a selfish player looks like
• 36:35 — Where a player places his identity
• 40:51 — Advice for the next generation of coaches
• 46:47 — Walkout music and what he listens to now
• 48:54 — Expectations for the spring

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Tyler Johnson is the recruiting coordinator and an assistant baseball coach at Dallas Baptist University. Subscribe to the Baseball Forward Podcast for more conversations with the players, coaches, and leaders elevating the next generation of the game.