This fall, the ASU softball team will be holding open tryouts to fill out its roster, a tactic that is unusual and a tad confusing for such a successful Division I college program.
High schools hold open tryouts and allow anyone in the school to try their hand at playing the sport and making the team. College programs, on the other hand, are able to handpick their squads and recruit players.
Assembling any college athletics team should be an art of picking and choosing the best players, not sifting through sand and looking for gold.
For a program as nationally competitive as ASU softball, there seems to be so little to gain by holding tryouts.
The Sun Devils went 50-12 last season and finished seventh at the WCWS. They return almost all of their top players and have a new head coach, Craig Nicholson, who was a three-time junior college national Coach of the Year.
If ever a team was in need for new talent and required an open tryout to replenish the roster, it would not appear to be this team.
I suppose there could be benefits to a tryout.
Athletes who performed well in high school but didn’t stand out enough to be recruited by DI schools will have a shot to showcase their skills, but for every respectable tryout, there is a risk that a random student shows up to waste the coaches’ time and effort.
ASU media relations director Doug Tammaro seems to agree with giving athletes a chance in an open tryout.
"We do this so anyone who thinks they can compete at the DI level has a chance to get their foot in the door," he said in an email.
Softball walk-ons have contributed to their team’s success in the past. Just last year, the Washington Huskies saw infielder Kelli Suguro, who made the team on a tryout, lead them to a top four finish.
It is entirely possible that Nicholson and his staff could find a good high school player who didn’t get recruited but can still make an impact, but the odds of that seem extremely low.
The tryout will last for one day on Sept. 18, and the team’s first game is just less than a month later on Oct. 6.
That means if any players make the team from the tryout, they will have three weeks to get themselves acquainted with the team and ready to play.
That said, tryouts seems to be an unnecessary venture.
From a roster construction standpoint, ASU softball seems prepared to be competitive again at a high level and make an impact at the WCWS.
Even if the team takes on a player or two from tryouts, it is highly unlikely that those players will have any significant impact on the season.
And on a one-day tryout basis, the glimpse coaches get at these athletes will be brief and potentially inadequate.
It seems like the best reason to hold an open tryout would be to make everyone feel as if they have a shot to land a roster spot on a Division I college sports team.
The worst thing that could happen is that coaches waste a day looking at a group of players who simply don’t have the talent to play softball at this level.
In a best-case scenario, Nicholson and his staff will find the next Suguro.
The most likely scenario is that a former high school player does just well enough to make the team and spends the season at the end of the bench, filling in when other players get injured or playing in a mop-up role.
It’s a long shot that an impact player will emerge from this process, but if the coaching staff thinks a player found in tryouts could be the difference between a seventh place finish like last year and a first place finish this year at the WCWS, then by all means, they should go for it.
Still, the thought nags at my mind that the tryout system just feels a little too close to high school and that the coaches are going to be wasting their time looking for a needle in a haystack.
Reach the columnist at icbeck@asu.edu or follow him on Twitter @icbeck21
