Episode #73: Kevin Brooks on Recruiting

Bonus Episode – Significant Recruiting w/ Kevin Brooks: What College Coaches Are Really Looking For

In this Significant Recruiting bonus episode, Matt Rogers is joined by Kevin Brooks, the legendary Head BaseballCoach at Angelo State University. With over 800 career wins, seven College World Series appearances, and a 2023 national championship, Coach Brooks brings decades of experience and insight into what it really takes to be recruited at the college level.

In this episode, Coach Brooks shares:

• What he looks for first when evaluating a recruit
• Why honesty and fit matter more than hype
• How parents can help — and hurt — the process
• The role communication plays in building trust with a coaching staff

If you're a high school athlete or a parent navigating the recruiting journey, this episode is full of real talk and practical advice from one of the best in the game.

📬 These bonus episodes will soon be subscriber-only, so make sure to follow and subscribe today to keep getting the full experience.

🎧 Visit CoachMattRogers.com for free resources, recruiting tools, and your copy of Significant Recruiting: The Playbook for Prospective College Athletes.

Transcript

0:06

Welcome to Significant Recruiting with Matt Rogers, the bonus edition of the Significant Coaching Podcast where we go deeper into the recruiting side of the game. Today I'm joined again by Coach Kevin Brooks, head baseball coach at Angelo State, and one of the most respected names in Division two Baseball with over 800 career wins and a national championship under his belt. Coach Brooks knows what he's looking for in a recruit, and today he breaks it down for us. Before we get started, a quick reminder. These significant recruiting bonus episodes will eventually be for subscribers only, so if you're enjoying them, make sure to subscribe today so you don't miss out. And as always, visit coach matt rogers.com for free Tools, the weekly newsletter, recruiting resources, blog posts, and your copy of significant recruiting, the playbook for prospective college athletes. Alright, let's get after it. Here's Coach Kevin Brooks talking recruiting. Coach, thanks so much for being a part of this my book's called Significant Recruiting as a college coach for so long, and then I was a college Scout for 10 years and I worked with about 4,000 families just on recruiting and trying to get their mind right. The idea of significant for me was. Taking mere chance out of the equation. There's a lot of coaches that'll say, Matt, if they're good enough, somebody's gonna find them. I wanna remove that from kids because I don't want'em just playing baseball. I want'em going somewhere where there's a coach they love. There's an academic program that can help them with their future. So for me, that significance is really having a plan and a strategy to do it right for you as an individual. You and I have both seen plenty of kids that were good enough to play division one, but really where they were gonna blossom was D two or NI or D three, because they needed a smaller environment. They needed that one-on-one coaching. They needed more of that family atmosphere. Do you have some core philosophies on how you wanna recruit every year? I would say our core philosophies are, what type of player we want. That's the biggest thing. But on how I think it comes back again to relationships. And so also where we are located, okay, so we're three hours away from anywhere in Texas. And so when we go recruiting, it's a day. So if we go in the spring, that's a day we miss practice, with our current players. Summer wise we're gone for four or five days at a time, but we do not get as much personal evaluation as we would like to make decisions upon these people, and for me, as I've gotten older, unfortunately a lot of the people I have relied upon throughout my career have either retired or passed away, Yeah. my connections. But it's always become people that you trust, word of mouth, and that goes a long way, The same people that have, helped us with really good players. And so that's the biggest thing. Then obviously we go to games and we see player X and go, Ooh, really like him, talk to his coach, et cetera. And maybe he becomes somebody too. And then the third way we do run, showcase camps. For players that are interested in Angelo State, come, we're gonna do the pro tryout deal, but we're gonna play games too.'cause we wanna see you play. Love that. Because a lot of guys that are good baseball players that are not good showcase guys. Yeah. Good showcase guy, but maybe not that good a player and but they can get around us. Coaches and Sierra campus, all that stuff. I would say on our roster we'll probably get five guys a year from that. I'm assuming you carry, what about 40, right? About 40. We're hoping, maybe get it down to 35, but, we're at 43 this year. Are you a 50 50 guy? Pitchers in, PL in? Yes. we want everyday guys, we generally don't want more than 20. So we won't be too deep everywhere. three catchers, and then you know you're gonna have some injuries. So you always want to be able to enter squad, which that requires, you have at least 16. Eight and eight. and then 20 pitchers. Okay. And having that extra four or five that makes up for those injuries and Right. Class time that may, you may lose. And yes, being able to scrimmage when you want a scrimmage and always having that, having the bodies right and the arms. Absolutely. Yep. I love that. Let's dive into camps. Okay. I feel like I am constantly talking to moms and dads about camps.'cause my philosophy is. You go to a camp for one of two reasons. You either go to a camp because you know they're really good teachers and you're gonna get, you're gonna get better. You're gonna learn how to play the game, and you're gonna get better hitting, fielding, throwing the ball. The second reason is you really like that school. You can see yourself going to school and getting education there, and you want to put yourself in front of that coaching staff. Get coached by them. See if there's a relationship there. See if there's something they like. See if you can learn something and build some answers. How many kids will come to your ID camps? we try to cap it at 60. Okay. so that way, so we have a unique setup where we go do, we've got a big old intramural field behind. Nice. And we do all the metric stuff there. And then we play a game with two teams. So we try four teams of 15 is, and anyway, so that's we're about 60, that it's, it seems ideal. I had a mother and father, they were talking to me about helping their younger son with being recruited for baseball. And they go, we, a kid was late in his junior year. Nobody was talking to him. Good player. And mom and dad go, we don't know what the problem is. Our other son got an offer at the end of his sophomore year and that was it, and I go how, tell me how the offer worked. He go we went to the camp at University of Louisville. And he was walking off the field and the coach came up and said, Hey, we're gonna offer you. we're gonna pay half education, half baseball and we're gonna take care of you. And that was it. And that's where he went. And I go, mom, how many other kids were at that camp? And she goes, Lela, she looked at her husband and she goes about a hundred and 160, I think. And I go, how many other kids got that same offer? And they looked at each other and I go, as far as we know, our son was the only one. I go, that's what you have to understand about recruiting right. You gotta understand there's only so many kids that are gonna get an offer at a camp, if any, at all. Because I would imagine of that 60 that come to your camp, there might be 25 that you're like, I'm not sure they could play dead in the Cowboy movie, let alone play baseball at our level. You're generally pulling aside two, maybe three, five. If five, if it's great. How are you and your staff dealing with 60 kids? Because how long will a camp last? we start at 11. We're generally done. We're done when we're done. But generally anywhere four to five o'clock. So you're spending five to six hours with these kids? Six kids. Talk to me like a parent that's going through this for the first time. What can I expect from a visibility standpoint for my kid in terms of you and your staff, the recruiters of your program? Working with my kid, getting their eyes on'em and getting a true valuation in five hours. and that's always such, I get those questions right? When people call,'cause they're like, is that just a money grab or Yeah. Whatever. And I'm like we do make money off of it. However, we really are looking for players. Now is your son. Good enough. And I don't know the answer'cause I hadn't seen him. For example, we run sixties. For us, if you look at, we're the fastest team in NCAA baseball. We're regardless of division. So if you can't run below a seven that's a you can do other things. You gotta cover for that. And then you go out and you run a six, six or something. Now all of a sudden our eyes light up then, throwing velocity. And so everything really is metric based. And that's where we talk about the showcase guy. So you may have a guy that shows up, he runs a six five, he throws 92 exit velocity, 97, a hundred, yeah. Everything's there. And then you go put'em in the game and you're like, oh. Then you may have the guy that runs the seven two that throws 78 miles an hour across the infield. And then you watch him play and he's in the right place backing up. He is hitting the ball where it's pitched. He can handle the bat. He lays down a drag bunt,'cause the third base one's back, his baseball iq. And you're like, Ooh, that dude actually knows how to play baseball. Yeah. Now we can get him here, we can make him stronger. We can make him faster. He may not throw a hundred. Yeah. But we can get him where he is, a level to play'cause his baseball iq and so we try to give them a chance to show what they can do. As you said though, vast majority are not at the numbers that are required to even get in the conversation. I think for some of'em they just enjoy going and playing against some different people. So I think it depends on your reasoning, but it's always really difficult to answer that question. Yeah, because I don't know how good your son is'cause I hadn't seen him. But we're gonna know. the other thing we always invite. The other local, schools and stuff to come and then we've got all the data and we give that to them in order they can use that to send to other schools. And it's verified by us. So we're trying to do everything we can. to help them in their journey towards trying to play college baseball. Fantastic. and going back to what you were saying, you don't wanna miss out on Bartola Cologne and Kevin Ulus walking onto your field, either that don't have the body type, I surely aren't gonna run a right. Six, six, and I would imagine those numbers changed a little bit for corner infielders and catchers. They changed for everything. For us, we really, we want, we don't want anybody that can't run. Yeah. it doesn't matter if you hit 40 home runs. Now, if you hit 40 home runs, then we gotta think about it, so there are always outliers, but we would everybody be able to run. But we've got guys that can't run here that play And are huge contributors and they do different things, but. You can't teach speed, which is funny'cause you know how as slow as could be generally, most coaches recruit players that were like them. Thank goodness I recruit way better than me. And for anybody out there that's when you hear coach talk about 60, it's 60 yard dash. Tell me if I'm wrong with any of the 60 yard dash time. Right under, under seven. Talks a lot about. How quickly you can move laterally and how quickly you can get to a ball in the outfield not just running the bases, but how much space you can run up and get those gaps on the infield. Yeah, I mean there are so many more tools. Sixties, probably, a little more antiquated with all the stuff that we have access to, but right in a camp setting, being able to get a large number of people and get accurate data, that's probably still one of the better ones to measure. It's just, and these are such easy things for a family to get their hands on now, to get tested a little bit is really a smart idea, I would think. Test your 60 yard dash with your track coach. If the baseball coach doesn't have that ability to get, find a cop in your neighborhood that'll check your speed on your fastball if that's what you gotta do, but get radar, yeah. what is there that mile per hour for your pitchers that are that. Yeah, he hits the strike zone. He can paint that, he can paint that strike zone and, but man, he only throws, I don't know if yeah, it's changed. So like when we first started, actually he is, he's, golly, I think he may be. He's one of our top pitchers, but he was a high school kid. big kid, six four, probably one 90 coming outta high school, 82, 84. But our mark and he could pitch and he pitched it and one of the better, the high school programs in Texas and, and one, one in that district, and, so we got him, when he left. Here he is. 9 2, 9 4. Nice. but you Wow. Head. Yeah. You could see that. just he needed to get stronger. Yeah. He had the body, the arm worked, all that stuff. Since we've gotten more scholarships and we've gotten better, and I hate this, this is still one of the things that I go back and. Go, but obviously those guys aren't gonna hit as much. So for high school guys now, we don't have anybody that throws slower. 90. We got 20 guys that are 90 plus, they could all hit 90. Yeah. and then can throw strikes and pitch too, the numbers just moved up and so even a high school guy we'd locked to have hit 90, they don't got a pitch at it, but hit it. for righthander, now Lefthander, throw everything out the window. I always tell lefties, You got the gold ticket and you didn't wanna license it. Yeah. Left-handed. You can throw 76 and if you can pitch, you got it. But, and I hate that because. Back in those days. We've had five guys that were walk-ons that were similar to the guy I described. Yeah. that all got drafted, and so I know we can develop and I think that's the strength of our program, but it's just harder when we don't have to take that chance anymore. A lot of that is a little bit of victim of our own success. Yeah. we don't as often as we used to, even though seeing somebody, so if I see a six four string bean guy, it's throwing an 84 and go, okay I can put 50 pounds on that guy. Easy. And the arm works. That would be somebody we'd probably take a chance on still. okay. Just not, probably not any money. It'd be like a recruited walk on type guy. How do you go about putting 10 mile an hour on a kid? Obviously the weight and the strength making a difference, but a lot of that's gotta be learning how to throw from your lower half, right? It is. I think mechanics are part of it and then just, strength, playing strength. But we're still old school. So all. Pretty much every pitcher that comes in now has been doing some type of weighted ball training or all that. So we don't take it away from'em because we don't, want to do that. But we have still found the best. It's just gradual. And, Trent Baker, actually, he did great last night in AA start, was one of our guys outta high school. He was that big old strong guy that was a 86, 88 guy. He gained, he was by the end, towards the tail end of his freshman fall year, he touched some nineties. Then that spring he pitched at 90. Then the next year he jumped up a little bit to 92. Then eventually when he left, he was mid nineties and could pitch And so that's a guy that's knock on wood, never had an arm surgery, never had anything, which is super rare in today's game. so we found when you do the weighted ball, it does work. There's no doubt. But you tend to get a pretty big jump. With that big jump tends to come injuries. Yeah. and so just'cause your body's not made and equipped yet to handle it. And so we found just long tossing and doing the regular stuff, the old school stuff, we're gonna get it. We just gotta be a little more patient with it. but we have found that has led. To way less arm injuries. We're really blessed, with the health of our staff, year after year. And I think a lot of that is what we do in the weight room, but then more. you know what I did when I was a kid, I got up every morning at nine o'clock, played, baseball with my friends till lunch. Went and ate lunch, went back, played till dinner, went and back ate dinner. Came back, played till dark, and I probably threw, I'm guessing, six to 700 pitches a day. Yeah. Yep. My arms never hurt because I asked it to do that. But, you don't see a lot of Sandlot games anymore. I didn't hurt my arm till I became a high school coach and I was throwing BP every day and I wasn't lifting and I wasn't in shape and all of a sudden my, I'm throwing 200 ball at practice and I couldn't lift my arm up anymore'cause I wasn't doing it. No, we still take our breaks. what's a break look like for your pitchers? I would say break. so we've got three segments. We've got, fall, you've got summer and spring. Those are the three segments we want our pitchers to actively participate in two of the three. So we're not gonna, does that mean on a mound throwing two out three? Yeah. Yeah. Two out three. We're playing and getting after it. Okay. And then, and the third, so we'll generally take maybe a two week break from not throwing at all. And then we like to refer to it as active rest the next six weeks. So we're still going out and playing some catch. And, but we're not really letting it go long tossing any of that stuff. and then we start coming back, it's probably a month period of building back up, of playing catch. and not getting on a mound. Once we've been going for about a month, then we'll start and we start with 25 pitches to the next week, 35 45. We go up 10 or 15 and just go from there. so maybe three. And then we throw a lot too in between. So when we get in the spring, so our pitchers touch the mound every day. Every day in between starts, it's 10 pitches, it may 70%, but we're on it every day. Technique still there? Yeah. Push off mic. Still there through, yeah. Different. Different, intensity levels, we're not necessarily getting on throwing a hundred percent every day. let's say I've got a 16-year-old boy in my house that's a pitcher and he's playing a hundred games in a year. Take most of December off. Oh gosh. yeah, if he's playing fall, spring, and then he's played like a hundred. I would say summer and go play. just wiffle ball even, whatever. Just throwing stuff, playing catch in the backyard with dad. Throwing it against the wall. Any of that stuff. Do you need it, do you want them to have a week or two, like between those seasons where they're just not picking up a ball at all? we do. Okay. I don't think the total rest can be too long, and that's just been our experience, but. the body is an amazing thing. And it generally does what you ask it to do. You just gotta continually to ask it. and train it to, oh, this is what you want me to do. Yeah. And it's hard not to look at a guy like Bob Gibson and Nolan Ryan and go, those guys just threw. All the time they were constantly playing catch and throwing a baseball. And there's a reason they had 20 plus year careers as pitchers. And I think, one, the players today are so much better athletes. Yeah. I don't drive a real nice fancy car, but if I did, I can imagine, if. This one thing gets a little off. It really affects the performance of a super high powered car. We got a lot of super high powered cars as athletes in all the sports nowadays. Yeah. And so I do think, whereas the of a different generation, our bodies just weren't in such good shape and so something a little off, we didn't even know it. Whereas they're so good at shape, I do think that affects it more. Coach, you've been great. I put you in a room or a field with 300 parents who are all trying to help their kid get to that next level. Is there a couple pieces of advice you want these parents to understand as they start that recruiting journey? Is there things that they need to really grasp as they start this process? The one thing, and this is so hard for parents, but it, having been in it as long as I have changes. Changes in the players, changes in, in everything. And obviously now parents are a lot more involved than they were say when I went. It was like, all right, see ya, and off and figure it out yourself. And the reason is love, which is a great reason. That's the reason all these things'cause parents love their children and they want the very best for their children. but I still think again, and that's the hardest thing I got. My last one's graduating. here in two weeks. So she's off to college and, I gotta, we'll see how I handle that, but, good. I, you should, read my blog from that last night. I got a daughter that's going through it too, yeah. I'll send it to you. Yeah but we gotta let'em, it's so hard to let. Your kids fail. Yeah. it's the hardest thing as a parent to sit back and go, man, I don't think, but they got to. Yep. and so I think you've gotta be there to guide, because a lot of times maybe they don't. So for example, we're offering you a scholarship, okay? And we're saying, Hey, we're gonna give you, we give actual dollar amount, so we're gonna give you$2,000. School costs 20,000, you're gonna owe 18. But parents do know some questions to ask on that. Okay, can I get academic now? We're gonna tell you all that we're gonna try to get you as much as we can. But, I think being there to ask that. the other thing, and parents sometimes when I am in front of a group, they're like. This is the part that's crazy. So I've been doing it 30 years. I've got 75% of our dudes that I've coached at all different schools come in wanting to major in X and like I say, only about 25% end up majoring in that. That's, so you wanna make sure you're going to a good school with a lot of different opportunities. But let's say you want to be an oceanographer. Okay. There aren't a lot of schools that have that. That's right. But there's a really good chance you're gonna show up unless it's just been a passion since you've been five years old, you're pro. You may not end up majoring in that, so make sure they got some other things at that school. That interests you as well. that, that's the biggest thing on the academics. Choose a good school with a wide variety of majors because odds are, I was a business major, I didn't, I took business classes like I hate this and I changed. And ended up political science, which I'm really using. But anyway, you're using it more than you think. Deal with all these kids and these parents. but be there to help guide. Yeah. But at the end of the day, you've gotta let'em go make a decision. It may be the wrong one. Yeah. it may. and with the transfer portal, then get it right. But I always say this. To anybody if I were given advice. Don't make this a bigger decision than it is, but here's the deal. Once you make that decision, make it the right decision. Yeah. That's the biggest key. Once you get there, get bought in, and make it the right decision. Yeah. That is the key. And you seem like the type of coach that's got a line of guys outside your office right now waiting to talk to you. I've actually got one that's funny. and they want to have a relationship with you that goes beyond. Bats and balls. Yeah. I think that's great. And that's one thing I will say the smartest thing I ever did when we got to build new facilities was, my office is in the locker room along with our other coaches. Great. So they do. They're around me, a bunch. And so they don't, they see Coach Brooks on the field and that's a little different guy. Yes. But they see goofy Coach Brooks, a lot more than they see Coach Brooks on the field. So they, they know, if the Texas Rangers are playing bad, I'm screaming at the tv, yeah. Anyway Marcus Simeon still hasn't broken 200. No, gosh. Get the ball out of the air. He's dropping me crazy. coach, it's been a fantastic conversation. I hope you don't mind me calling you a friend.'cause I've learned so much and had so much fun today and I hope this was good for you. Oh, it was, honored to be here and thank you so much. That's a wrap on this bonus episode with Coach Kevin Brooks. I hope you took as much from it as I did. Whether it was insight into what coaches are really looking for, or a reminder that fit, character and communication still matter in the recruiting process. I hope it motivated you and I hope it motivated your son or daughter. If you found this helpful, make sure to subscribe. Now I. Because these bonus episodes will soon be exclusively for subscribers. And don't forget, you can always find more tools, templates, and weekly guidance for your recruiting journey@coachmattrogers.com. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time on significant Recruiting with Matt Rogers.