High School Baseball Tryouts, College Camps, and Recruiting Tips | AaronCunningham | Episode 95

What You'll Learn in This Episode

Host Ross Hawley and Baseball Forward recruiting advisor Aaron Cunningham open the year with a Recruiting 101 episode built for the middle of January: high school tryouts are days away in Texas, and the two biggest college camp weekends of the winter are right behind them.

Cunningham has worked tryouts on the travel, high school, and college sides, and most of the hour walks through the list of tryout advice he hands out every year at this time. Almost none of it is about talent. The last stretch covers how to pick college camps once the recruiting window starts to narrow.

The highlights:

• Why a tryout evaluates far more than a player's tools
• Control the controllables: hustle, attitude, effort, body language, being on time
• Dressing the part, and treating a first impression like a job interview
• What coaches read into a player's response to a bad rep
• Be you: no skill appears on tryout day just because you want it to
• Eye contact during instructions, phones left in the car, and why the cool guy gets cut
• Shaking the coach's hand afterward, and when that tips the scales
• Choosing college camps where the interest runs both directions

A Tryout Is an Evaluation

The obvious part of the evaluation is the tools: how fast a player runs, how he fields the ball, how he swings the bat, what comes out of his hand on the mound. Cunningham says that part is the easy part, and coaches who have been around a while can see it in a few ground balls and a couple of swings. The rest of the evaluation is how a player carries himself, how he handles success and failure, how he treats teammates, and whether instruction has to be given twice.

Talent usually carries the day. A player who is clearly one of the best on the field can survive some questions about makeup. For everyone else, Cunningham says, that second list is what decides the roster. Hawley frames it the same way for a player walking in the gate: somebody is always watching, whether it is a teammate, a coach, or someone from the next level, and that includes how a player speaks to his own parents in the parking lot.

Control the Controllables

Nobody makes a physical mistake on purpose, and nobody controls a bad hop. Running on and off the field, keeping a good attitude, giving effort, carrying decent body language, showing up on time — those are different.

"You can control your hustle, you can control your attitude, you can control your effort, your body language, you can control showing up on time. And if it's within your control, then it needs to be an A-plus."

Cunningham has watched average players make teams and talented players get cut over exactly that list. Sprinting on and off the field is the cheapest way to make a coach ask who that is. Hawley's youth teams ran a ten-second rule in both directions, and he remembers a college staff that tried to have the whole team off the field before the other club got one player to his position.

Dress the Part

Crocs and socks, basketball shorts, oversized headphones, a cutoff shirt, no belt, no hat, the same white socks a player wore to school — Cunningham has seen all of it, and once saw blue jeans at a high school tryout. His standard is simple: show up in uniform, belt on, shirt tucked in, hat on straight, sanitaries instead of ankle socks, and long sleeves under the jersey when it is 40 degrees rather than a hoodie on the sideline. If a player does the eye black, do it in the parking lot.

The framing both hosts keep returning to is a job interview. An employer who meets a candidate with an untucked shirt and two weeks of stubble decides the job does not matter much to him. A coach reads a late arrival and a sloppy uniform the same way. Hawley's version: how you do anything is how you do everything, and if a player genuinely does not know what a ball player is supposed to look like, ask somebody before tryout day rather than complain afterward.

Failure Is Part of the Evaluation

Nobody has a perfect tryout. A hitter fouls a few balls off in the cage, a pitcher spikes a couple of fastballs, an infielder kicks one. What Cunningham wants to see is the next rep: flush it, stay engaged, and show a coach that a mistake does not take a player off the map for the rest of the day.

"I can't give you a total evaluation on a kid until I see the kid have a bad moment, because everybody handles themselves the right way when things are going well."

Bad body language is the easiest thing in the world for an adult to read — slumped shoulders, a smacked glove, rolling eyes. Hawley adds the other half of it: nobody thinks about a player's mistakes as much as he does. Half the time the coaches did not even see the play he is still carrying two stations later.

Locked In: Instruction, Phones, and the Cool Guy

Eye contact while a coach is giving instructions is both a sign of maturity and a practical advantage. When a staff spends two minutes explaining a drill to 50 or 100 players, the second player in line asking how it works has already made an impression, and so has the one who clearly heard it the first time.

Phones are the other easy giveaway. Cunningham tells players to leave it in the car, not in the bag, because nothing on it helps during a tryout and a phone in hand tells a coach this is not the most important thing happening today. Adults do not pull out a phone in the middle of a job interview. The same goes for clowning: the players who need attention at a tryout are a known quantity to a coaching staff.

"Your 14-year-old buddies might be laughing, but your 40-year-old coach is going to think you're a clown. And if you're on the bubble, he ain't taking you."

Hawley pushes that further. Leaders in any setting are not the cool guy. They are not managing how they look; they are managing their effort, how they serve teammates, and how coachable they are. He also has little patience for posting the work — the exposure side of social media is useful, but the best players Cunningham has been around never needed a post to prove they trained that day.

Be You

The mistake Cunningham sees most often at tryouts is players trying too hard. A pitcher who throws 75 does not throw 90 because a radar gun appeared behind the screen; he sprays the ball and loses the one thing he had, which was strikes. A hitter who produces line drives does not need to swing for the lights.

High school coaches also have realistic expectations of freshmen. They are not looking for a ninth grader who resembles an all-district senior, and there are only ever a handful of freshmen ready for varsity. If the player ahead in line puts on a show in batting practice, that does not change what a coach needs from the next player. Hawley's ideal is the infielder who fields a ball with rhythm, gets rid of it on line, and retires the runner by ten feet. An out is an out, and the best compliment in the game is still that a guy was a baseball player.

Have Fun, and Prepare So You Can

Cunningham has coached and played long enough to notice that the players having the best days are usually the ones enjoying themselves. There is a line between good energy and being a joker, but he wants a player to look like he loves being on a field.

"I'd rather pull the reins back on a thoroughbred than have to kick a mule."

Anxiety is usually a preparation problem. Hawley's read is that a player who is nervous about the day often has not done the work, and Cunningham compares it to walking into a test: if you studied, you want the test, and even a bad grade is easy to live with because you gave it everything. Prepare harder than anyone, then let it go on tryout day.

Finish With a Handshake

The last item on the list is to find the coaches afterward, shake hands, make eye contact, and thank them for the opportunity. Cunningham is clear that it will not rescue a bad tryout, but he remembers the players who did it, and at bigger tryouts that memory is worth something when the staff is down to the last roster spot.

There is also a respect argument. A high school coach does not need any one player; he needs to find nine out of four graduating classes who can compete on Tuesday and Friday nights, and that program is his livelihood. Hawley points out that the same habit describes the adults who end up running things later, and that one of his best long-term relationships came from a player who was not the best on the field but handled himself like that every day.

Choosing College Camps With Intention

Camps are the second half of the episode, and the advice depends on age. A freshman or sophomore who wants to see a big-time campus for the experience should go. A junior or senior has a narrower window, and Cunningham wants that weekend spent where an evaluation can actually lead somewhere. If a school has never contacted a player, never followed him, and given nobody in his circle any indication of interest, a camp there is mostly a weekend spent.

"If you show up to a D2, a D3, or a junior college camp, those coaches are going to say, this kid is intentionally here."

Hawley's standard is intention in both directions: attend camps at schools a player would actually attend, where there is enough acknowledgment that an evaluation will be followed by a decision. Players who do not know where they fit should ask the people who see them play — travel coaches, high school coaches, trainers — because there are only a couple of camp weekends before NCAA programs start practicing. Cunningham's closing note is that it is fine if the answer is not the SEC or the Big 12, since most players these days start at a lower level and work their way up, and that a baseball life is short enough to be enjoyed while it lasts.

Episode Timestamps

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

• 0:00 — Introduction
• 3:08 — Why high school baseball is still special
• 4:36 — Being a good teammate during tryout season
• 6:07 — A tryout is an evaluation, and somebody is always watching
• 8:02 — Control the controllables: hustle, attitude, effort, body language
• 10:19 — There is opportunity in failure
• 12:59 — How a player treats his parents
• 16:19 — Dress the part: a tryout is a job interview
• 19:37 — Sanitaries, white socks, and how you do anything
• 21:32 — Eye contact while coaches give instructions
• 24:45 — Be you: no skill appears on tryout day
• 29:34 — Smile and show that you love being on a field
• 33:05 — Preparation cures anxiety
• 36:36 — Tryouts are not the time to be the cool guy
• 40:24 — Leave the phone in the car
• 43:27 — Fake hustle and posting the grind
• 46:28 — Shake the coach's hand and thank him
• 50:41 — College camps: go where the intention runs both ways
• 53:34 — An open camp at a big school versus a D2 or junior college camp
• 56:32 — Closing advice: play hard, and enjoy the day

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Aaron Cunningham is a Baseball Forward recruiting advisor who has worked tryouts and camps on the travel, high school, and college sides. Subscribe to the Baseball Forward Podcast for more conversations with the players, coaches, and leaders elevating the next generation of the game.