Shaping the future: An inside look at baseball recruiting and WVU’s rebirth

In times of jubilation for the West Virginia baseball program, it’s not unusual for Steve Sabins to find himself having flashbacks to recruiting trips where he was far from the luxury of Monongalia County Ballpark.

Whether it’s seeing the program become NCAA Regional hosts for the first time in over six decades, witnessing the team’s ace pitcher get selected in the first round of the MLB Draft or watching one of the team’s best hitters finish the season with a batting average over .300, Sabins’s reward from all of the long, excruciating summer days evaluating players and serving as the team’s recruiting coordinator is seeing the very players he recruited to Morgantown achieve success and take the program to new heights.

“I mean you can’t hope but to have flashbacks all the time,” Sabins said. “You’re watching Alek Manoah get drafted by the (Toronto) Blue Jays and you’re thinking it wasn’t that long ago I was in Miami watching a high school game where grandparents and parents and cousins are screaming at hitters in Spanish and it’s an intense playoff game in inner city Miami.

“You have flashbacks to that. And then you have flashbacks of watching Tyler Doanes at Whitewater High School (Georgia) during a practice and making a decision — this guy can play for us, he can help us do special things here.”

A typical summer day for Sabins begins at 6 a.m.

After waking up and eating some breakfast, Sabins then goes over his schedule for the day and tracks the teams and players he plans on watching that day.

The information Sabins receives from talking regularly to scouts, advisors, recruiting services, scouting services, high school coaches, select baseball coaches and junior college coaches throughout the year regarding certain players is stored in a spreadsheet and a database used to watch specific players.

The summer is a heavy recruiting period for college baseball programs since it allows them to evaluate talented high school baseball players competing against other talented ball players in the form of travel teams, different from your usual high school baseball which can be sporadic as far as dates and talent goes depending on the state.

However, this process can be a grueling one and it’s not exactly uncommon for the day-by-day schedule to be altered.

Sabins could be planning on watching a pitcher at 8 a.m., but if that pitcher were to have a sore arm, he could be pitching on a different day. This would then force him to change his plans.

“You might have to make the decision to go watch a local team that’s based out of West Virginia that’s playing in Atlanta, you’re going to go watch all those players to see if there’s local talent,” Sabins said.

“Or maybe you got a call from a select ball coach that’s based out of New Jersey and you’re going to go watch their shortstop because you know you have a need in the 2022 class for a left-handed hitting shortstop.”

This time of year is indeed a tiring one. According to Sabins, he believes that between himself and two other assistants, they spent a combined 20 days at home during this evaluation period that lasts from two and a half to three months.

Sometimes during this season, Sabins has found himself asking whether he should not scout a certain game during the second week of recruiting to get dinner just so he can get off his feet.

But despite the long hours, hot summer days and constant evaluations and traveling, Sabins values the entire process and the desire to find players who’ll help the program achieve success.

“It’s coolers in your car and it’s sunscreen and floppy hats and taking a nap in the parking lot after the starting pitcher finished his outing and the guy behind him isn’t going to be able to play for us. Those kind of things,” Sabins said. “Literally it’s what you dream of and what you want to do and how rewarding to be able to find the players that are then going to play for this university and have success for this university.”

Sabins has indeed found himself having rewarding moments and appreciation for all of those recruiting trips and evaluations when he sees the players he recruited to West Virginia thrive with the Mountaineers.

A look at WVU’s program

Long before the program’s historic ride last season which marked West Virginia’s second NCAA Regional appearance in three seasons, the Mountaineers were mostly an afterthought.

West Virginia won the Big East Conference title and made the NCAA Regionals in 1996 during head coach Greg Van Zant’s first season.

But after the 1997 season, the Mountaineers finished in the top three of conference just twice through Van Zant’s final season with the program in 2012.

Mazey’s first season with as the program’s head coach was also West Virginia’s first in the Big 12, a conference that features several top-notch baseball programs like Oklahoma State, Texas and TCU.

The program also ran into a problem with its stadium, Hawley Field.

Hawley Field’s quality and amenities were in decline and didn’t meet Big 12 standards which resulted in West Virginia having to play most of its Big 12 home games between Charleston and Beckley. Hawley Field didn’t have locker rooms, leaving players to change clothes at their cars in the parking lot and use the same restrooms the fans did.

These trips for “home games” along with long trips to face Big 12 teams presented a combination not so favorable to the program, being the eastern-most team in the conference.

“If you’re in a profession where you have to travel a lot, you guys know how tired you get,” Mazey said prior to the team’s regional in May. “It’s just the fatigue that sets in with what we go through early in the year and the way our kids overcome it, you just can’t understand how hard that is.”

But even with these travel arrangements and the outside world believing West Virginia wouldn’t be able to compete in a tough baseball conference like the Big 12 one year removed from not qualifying for the Big East Tournament, the Mountaineers were able to finish in a tie for third place in the conference in 2013.

It was a promising start for West Virginia, but more work needed to be done.

A dinner at Mazey’s house

Sabins’s journey to West Virginia began when he was working his way up on the Oklahoma State staff, one of the four schools he played at in five years.

He was with the Cowboys during West Virginia’s first season in the Big 12 and was impressed with what the program had accomplished in the tough conference considering its facilities at the time and location.

“I just remember having so much respect for what they were doing,” Sabins said. “It was kinda one of those things where it was like, ‘Man, what was going on over there?’ So I kinda watched them in the other dugout. I come here and played at Hawley Field, I got to see what they were building. It was very blue collar. There was very few fans. The stadium was clearly the worst facility in the league. But the coach factor and the player factor, you’re going, ‘These guys are working their ass off and they’re great coaches and they’re great players.’”

It was during his second trip to Morgantown when Mazey invited the entire Oklahoma State coaching staff for dinner inside his home — something that Sabins found unusual at the time. This was also Sabins’s first and only interaction with Mazey prior to his hiring.

“It had never happened at my five years of being at Oklahoma State,” Sabins said regarding having dinner at Mazey’s. “So I was like this is a normal guy with an awesome family, two beautiful kids and a very sweet wife and we were eating dinner there and I had felt like I made it, like I was in the big time.”

A couple years later, Mazey was looking to hire an assistant coach after Steven Trout departed for Texas State. That’s when Mazey would give Sabins a call following the recommendation of Marty Lees, who had just left Oklahoma State to become the head coach at Washington State at that time.

However, the conversation between Sabins and Mazey didn’t go as you’d think as Mazey, according to Sabins, seemingly attempted to scare the then-27-year-old Sabins out of the job. At that time, Sabins was searching for a full-time assistant position, but didn’t really expect it to come considering his young age and the time period which was during late December.

According to Sabins, most of the job openings in college baseball open up following the spring.

“He said it’s cold here and he asked me if we planned on having children, my wife and I. I said yes. He said, ‘Do you think your wife can handle pushing a stroller uphill both ways in snow when it’s 12 degrees outside?’” Sabins said.

“The most attractive trait for him is he just wants to be around people that want to be here. I remember thinking on the phone that he was relatively stern and I could really tell he was clear about the kind of candidate that he wanted to interview.”

Sabins wound up getting the job and hit the ground running.

But his desire to come to Morgantown was not only because of the opportunity that was offered to him by Mazey, but also to help the program achieve something it had never achieved before.

“I really fell in love with the idea of being able to do something that had never been done at WVU before and that was go to the College World Series,” Sabins said. “Coach Mazey really sold me on the fact that they had beautiful facilities, an unbelievable fanbase, one of the most special college towns and environments in the country and that we could win here and win on a regular basis.”

The plan

Before the new Monongalia County Ballpark opened its gates for West Virginia’s home opener in 2015, Mazey and the Mountaineers were splitting time between Hawley Field as well as Charleston and Beckley.

As the new ballpark was being built, Mazey crafted a new vision and plan for the program’s recruiting. That plan was to sell players on an idea to build something special at West Virginia and create a new winning tradition, rather than join a program that’s already known for its winning ways.

This approach helped land recruits such as Texas natives Ivan Gonzalez and Darius Hill as well as Manoah, a Florida native. Each of these players were selected in the 2019 MLB Draft.

“I remember the very first bullpen (Gonzalez) ever caught was down the right field line (at) Hawley Field and those guys took a leap of faith,” Mazey said. “When we started recruiting those kids, we were selling them on an idea at that point because the stadium wasn’t finished, we were selling them on an idea.”

“They bought in to the commitment that we had as coaches, what the administration had, the vision of the stadium and the conference and they took a leap of faith and I think, I don’t want to speak for them, but I think it’s worked out pretty well for those kids,” he later added.

When Sabins got on board, the plan was simple: Recruit talent and players who will buy into the culture.

A heavy focus for the program became recruiting regionally, which means landing commitments from players in-state and nearby states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

“We knew we had to work from the inside out and so that meant starting to capitalize on quality regional players in West Virginia where the school meant something to them,” Sabins said. “Winning has been the biggest component to being able to keep regional talent.”

During Mazey era at West Virginia, the Mountaineers have been able to do just that with the consistent growth they’ve shown on the field and in the win column.

Northern schools, such as West Virginia, often find themselves at a disadvantage with cold weather being a factor which is why conferences like the SEC and ACC, warmer climate schools, have become powerhouses. This why you’ll see more northern baseball players head down south to play college baseball.

But according to Sabins, the growth of indoor facilities is helping change that trend. Something else that could help change the trend is seeing a school like Michigan this past season come one win away from winning the College World Series.

And with the Mountaineers beginning to achieve more success and gain notoriety, more regional players are choosing to stay either in-state or within the region to attend West Virginia.

“I think you could ask any recruiting coordinator, no one wants to go recruit a player across the country, they’d rather recruit a player in their backyard because you get to watch that kid grow up and develop and he has passion for his home and his region,” Sabins said.

How baseball recruiting operates

College baseball recruiting has its differences from that of college football and basketball recruiting.

In today’s college football recruiting world, it’s common for a recruit to commit to a program only to later back off and commit to another. In other words, no commitment is safe until that recruit signs his letter of intent.

It’s the exact opposite in baseball.

Programs recruit young in the world of college baseball. For example, West Virginia is actively recruiting its 2022 and 2023 classes and finalizing things with the 2021 class.

“For whatever reason in baseball, the player’s commitment and the coach’s commitment is amplified by a thousand,” Sabins said. “You’ll lose out on a lot of the top end players by not being in the mix with recruiting early in their careers.”

According to Sabins, college baseball teams have 35-man rosters where 27 of those players are on scholarship and between those 27 players that are on scholarship, baseball is allotted 11.7 total scholarships. The average scholarship for academic money is about 41 or 42%, meaning eight players are paying their own way.

Programs are allowed to hold 25 official visits a year, meaning the program can pay for their experience. Per NCAA rules, high school recruits can’t take an official visit until Sept. 1 of their junior year.

There’s no limit on unofficial visits where the program can provide recruits tickets to sporting events. The fall is a heavy visit period for West Virginia.

“We have a lot of unofficial visits so kids come up and watch football and basketball and obviously a lot of baseball games during the spring,” Sabins said.

There are times where Sabins does both recruiting and evaluating and that could come during the season in the form of staying an extra day on the road after West Virginia plays a three-game series so he can catch a potential recruit’s baseball game.

A common challenge that the program runs into is replacing players that were either incoming recruits that got drafted and signed into the MLB or juniors and seniors who achieve the same fate.

It can be difficult for coaches to get a real sense of what a recruit or current junior in the program may do if their name gets called in the draft and there’s no real easy solution.

The program faced that challenge for this upcoming season with eight players from last season getting drafted and signing professional contracts.

“A big part of our job is to try and project who you're going to lose a year or two in advance,” Mazey said. “We kinda figured when Manoah got here that he was only going to be here three years instead of four. When (Nick) Snyder, a 6-foot-7 left-hander with an arm like that started pitching well, you kinda project that he’s not going to be back as a senior and sometimes you get surprised at the end, but part of our job which makes it difficult is trying to figure out the draft two years in advance.”

There’s the choice between of filling those gaps with young players already in the program or junior college players. Junior college players offer programs experience who can fill immediate needs.

But Sabins prefers the developmental side and building the program through high school recruiting.

“With transfer players, sometimes you don’t recognize your own culture after a couple years,” Sabins said. “We want to try and get the best possible players that we can, that want to be here and love to wear the WV flag.”

Part of that player development includes strength training and the utilization of technology as showcased in a video that was published on the program’s social media platforms.

Just like Sabins while he was a member of Oklahoma State’s staff, some recruits will be hosted by Mazey at his house for dinner.

Not only is Mazey welcoming them into his home, he’s welcoming them into a program heading into a new direction with a tradition of winning.

“He’s having recruits over to his home and welcoming those players and their families into his home just to show what our culture is and the things that we value,” Sabins said. “They traditionally head home Sunday morning after their visit is done and then they say yes they want to be Mountaineers the next day. That’s the goal.”

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