Tarleton baseball regroups championship roster with summer prospect camp

BY JAXON HANSARD / Sports Editor

The Tarleton State University Texan baseball team returns to campus as Western Athletic Conference (WAC) Champions. On August 25, 2024, the Texans will host their final fall prospect camp before recruitment ends for the 2025 season.

The prospect camps are run by the coaching staff and other members of Texan baseball. With 10 Seniors, one graduate student, and the transfer portal looming, Coach Fuller Smith is looking to reload their conference champion roster.

“The camps are great. We signed two or three guys in this year’s class (2024) out of it. I think maybe four commitments in the 25 (2025) class out of that as well,” said.

“We’ve sold out every camp we've had up until this point, which has been great. You know, that just shows how much excitement is for Tarleton State Baseball as well as the school itself,” Smith said on the success of the previous summer prospect camps.

The first of March is when a team can start recruiting for the next season. There are a few times in the summer that are “dead periods” where teams cannot recruit during those times but aside from the dead periods, teams are recruiting and contacting players into the middle of August.

Mid-August to Sept. 13 is a quieter period for recruitment, but from Sept. 13 to Oct. 13, teams are able to get their last bit of visits and recruitments done because after Oct. 13 they cannot go off campus until March first of the next year.

In these prospect camps, the coaching staff is looking for a lot of different skills and if the player can be versatile.

“Pitching,” Smith said. “We always need arms.”

Athletic ability and hitting prowess will always be there but Coach Smith wants to find the players that are between the outliers and work hard. The student aspect is very important to the coaching staff with these prospects.

“Obviously you're looking for the best available players but they’ve got to be good students as well. They have to be able to manage the school and baseball life because it is nonstop, 16-hour days wash rinse, and repeat every day for six months. So they have to be really disciplined in how they go about it,” Smith said.

Smith praises the student traits that he wants his players to have along with the mindset that will allow players to improve.

“The biggest thing is they’re growth-minded, you know a growth mindset. I think if you’ve got young men that want to be better and are willing to put forth the effort to be better then I think that’s number one,” Smith said.

“They got to be extremely competitive you know in anything they do. We watch them play and how they interact with their teammates. Competitive people tend to get better because they want to be good at whatever they're doing no matter what it is, and I think that’s a big big piece of a student-athlete because they will want to compete in the classroom,” Smith said.

Keeping the lesson of consistency is important for all of Tarleton of athletics and that is no different with Coach Smith and his staff.

“As a staff, we have to be consistent, in how we do our daily work, we have to be consistent in how we communicate with our kids, if you're not consistent from that standpoint you're not going to be consistent on the baseball field,” Smith said.

Winning a championship is the goal and hardest accomplishment in sports. Smith credits last year’s team for their camaraderie. They played for each other and had been playing together for a while.

“It’s not easy to win a championship and to do it a second time is twice as hard. Having new guys here that haven’t experienced it and having some guys that have, I think they're as hungry as ever right now. We've got a handful of guys still here this summer working out and training and you can tell they have that look,” Coach Smith said on how new additions through camps and recruitment can keep a team from being complacent in hopes of a repeat.