Trev Alberts reveals when Michael Earley became a legitimate candidate in coaching search

Texas A&M Aggies athletic director Trev Alberts made his first major hire since taking over in College Station when he hired Michael Earley to lead the baseball program.

At Earley’s introductory press conference, Alberts revealed when Earley became a legitimate candidate in the coaching search, emphasizing just how important it was to have a full coaching search to find the right candidate.

“The reality is I’ve been in a few of these searches before and there’s always somebody’s name thrown out and what I am really convicted about and determined about is to do real searches,” Trev Alberts said. “To me, it feels like my job is to do what’s in the best interest long-term of Texas A&M athletics, or wherever you’re at, is to really do a real search, and sometimes these don’t happen to be real searches. The reason you do a real search is you learn things in a search just by talking to other candidates. You learn things about the job, you learn things about that you hadn’t thought about.”

At that point, Trev Alberts admitted that Michael Earley was not, initially, on top of the board. Instead, it was the search that pushed him to the top of the pool of candidates.

“And if I’m 100 percent honest very early on when names come, ‘Well, that’s a great idea,’ but I can’t tell you from the moment we started the search that Michael Earley was likely the person we’d be introducing today. That’s why you do a real search,” Alberts said.

“So, there’s over the years hiring coaches, there’s certain things you look for. Again, there’s no guarantee, but just having clear vision, clear eyes around where we are today, where we think we can go, and what are the steps in between and how we’re gonna execute it, really is meaningful to me. And I knew the players respected him. That’s really, really important. You have to hire coaches, I believe, in this day and age, that the players identify with. That’s really important. It was very clear to me in talking with the players — but that’s just a small component — there has to be more to it.”

Ultimately, for Alberts, how Earley was able to present himself in the interview, with a clear vision for the future of the program and an understanding of who he is as a coach.

“So, the way that Michael just laid out the vision. He knew exactly what his staff was gonna look like, he was very self-aware, he knew what his blind spots were. He knew the fact that he hadn’t been a head coach, ‘Hey, I’m gonna need this.’ Sometimes, as a young person, you don’t have the wisdom to do that. He did. He had the self-awareness and the humility to say, ‘I need this, I need this, I need this blindspot,'” Alberts said.

“And just his overall passion and understanding after the first Zoom I did with him, just to be totally frank, I was very, very pleasantly surprised. I didn’t know what to expect, but I would say he knocked it out of the ballpark on the initial Zoom and it was after that Zoom that it became clear to me, not only was he a kind of fun candidate to talk about, he was a very serious candidate based on how he performed.”

Certainly, Michael Earley knows the Texas A&M program well, having been an assistant coach working with batters the past few seasons. That culminated in an explosive 2024 season when the Aggies hit a program record 136 home runs in 2024. The Aggies also had a slugging percentage of .543 and a team on-base percentage of .415 for the 2024 season.