The Rangers have taken an interest in former Carroll players, signing Tyler Alexander this offseason and recently drafting Paul Bonzagni and Owen Proksch.
The Rangers have taken an interest in former Carroll players, signing Tyler Alexander this offseason and recently drafting Paul Bonzagni and Owen Proksch.Southlake Carroll head coach Larry Vucan sends directions to his players from the team dugout during the bottom of the first inning of play against Flower Mound Marcus.
The two teams played the deciding Game 3 of their Class 6A Division ll Region l final baseball series at Horner Ballpark on the campus of Dallas Baptist University in Dallas on May 24, 2025.A little speck on the metaphorical Southlake Carroll wall that’s been historically dominated by its eight-time state champion football program. He also knows that the strides the program has taken since he threw his last high school pitch — which include widescale renovations, more than a dozen players drafted, titles won and national prestige gained — have created something that he couldn’t have imagined. “It’s cool that, hopefully, Southlake isn’t just a football town now,” Texas Rangers left-handed pitcher Tyer Alexander said. “They’re finally a baseball town.”His employer has taken notice. Three of the six Carroll alums active in professional baseball play in the Rangers organization.Rangers selected left-handed pitcher Owen Proksch — the only one of these three with a Carroll state championship on his resume — out of Duke in the ninth round of last year’s draft Texas Rangers pitcher Tyler Alexander delivers during the fourth inning of a spring training game against the Cleveland Guardians on Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2026, in Goodyear, Ariz.is expected to miss the entire season after elbow surgery. Proksch, a reliever, posted a 3.09 ERA in his first seven professional games last season.“The fact that they are where they are is a testament to their buy-in, hard work and their talent,” Carroll head coach Larry Vucan said earlier this month inside of the team’s state-of-the-art clubhouse. “They have achieved this. It just makes me more proud than you can imagine.”Carroll has produced 51 professional players, per Baseball Reference’s database, which is the most in the state of Texas and the 36th-most among traditional high schools nationwide. Twenty-six of the schools who’ve produced more than Carroll are located in the California or Florida hotbeds. Sixteen Carroll alums have been drafted in Vucan’s time on staff.“It’s definitely a motivation thing to be the next guy up,” sophomore left-handed pitcher and infielder AJ Bonnette said. “It’s just really cool to watch them and know that they were in our shoes at one point, and now, to fill their shoes.” The school lies in the heart of a talent-rich baseball region of the metroplex and is adjacent to Grapevine , Flower Mound , Colleyville Heritage and Keller . Southlake is an affluent community with illustrious support.“How does this happen?” Vucan, who was named the 2022 National Coach of the Year by the American Baseball Coaches Association, asked rhetorically. “There’s talent everywhere. There’s some great, great talent, but the challenge is, what are you doing with it? Yes, you have resources, but what are you doing with the resources?” Vucan, now in his 10th season as Carroll’s head coach and 15th overall with the program, left his home city of El Paso to test his skills in a more competitive baseball region of the state. He moved his entire family to the metroplex for the opportunity and was admittedly nervous for the seismic professional and personal transition. “Tyler, in all honesty, is the reason why I’m still here,” Vucan said. “I had done what I did in El Paso, but I wanted to test it in this market, and he transitioned it. He was so good — his personality, his agreeableness, his willingness — to accept what was being coached. There were some things that we did that were different. He was open to those suggestions." Vucan, as Alexander said, was “ahead of his time” as it pertained to workouts and practice habits. He was a shortstop at New Mexico Highlands University and in the Italian Baseball League, but while on staff at El Paso High, he realized his quickest path to a varsity gig was as a pitching coach. He initially had an “old school mentality” toward pitchers and how they should be trained, which inevitably led to a higher rate of injury, and it forced Vucan to brush up. He attended renowned pitching coach Ron Wolforth’s boot camp — which then consisted of all of eight coaches in a convention center at Houston Hobby Airport — where he learned the concept of “weighted potential.” Southlake Carroll shortstop Ethan Mendoza fist bumps head coach Larry Vucan after reaching third base on a wild pitch during the fourth inning of game 2 of the Class 6A Region I final series against Keller at The Depot in Cleburne, Texas, Friday, June 3, 2022. Carroll defeated Keller 4-0 to advance to the state tournament.That philosophy states that pitchers should do 100 reverse throws with a weighted ball to build shoulder strength for every 100 traditional throws they take off of an incline. It was the first tenet of a multi-pronged doctrine that’s laid the foundation for a program that’s had nine pitchers drafted since Vucan took over. “It’s not run like a normal high school,” standout sophomore left-handed pitcher and outfielder Cam Dean said. “It’s run more, from what I’ve heard, like a college practice.”Pitchers throw every day in season between competition days, bullpens, flat ground sessions and box drills off of an incline from 35 feet out. They participate in what’s called “extreme long toss,” which is often twice the distance of standard long toss, to build arm strength. The staff creates individualized plans for each pitcher that takes into account how many innings they’ve logged in a calendar year between the spring, travel ball and fall camp. If the workload exceeds a certain threshold — a mark that is different for each arm — they’re shut down to avoid overuse. Frequent glenohumeral internal rotation deficit tests, which reveal how far back a player’s shoulder can rotate, are strong indicators of potential arm injuries. “I don’t know if that’s even always the recipe for success,” Vucan said. “But I think, what is, there’s a system in place where the kids understand what they’re supposed to be doing and what the end result is supposed to look like.” Said Alexander: “He’s disciplined in what he expects out of players. It’s kind of honing all the great talent that we had. It wasn’t just saying, ‘Hey, you’re good, go play,’ right?”pitcher of the year in the 2013 season after he posted a 0.66 ERA and 177 strikeouts in 94⅔ innings and was drafted by the Detroit Tigers out of high school. He opted to pitch at“Still to this day, in 37 years, I’ve never had anybody who had that kind of command on his fastball,” Vucan said. “Just,PITCHER TO WATCH: Tyler Alexander, Southlake Carroll – A rare four-year varsity player for Carroll, Alexander threw a no-hitter against Keller Fossil Ridge in his last start. The TCU signee is 8-0 with an area-best 0.35 ERA, 113 strikeouts and just 13 walks in 60 innings.It led the Rangers to Alexander this winter when they prioritized elite strike throwers in their rebuilt relief staff. It’s why Vucan demands that pitchers “pound the zone,” as Bonnette said, even in offseason workouts that include “high-pressure bullpens” in which the head coach isn’t afraid to call pitchers out for a lack of aggression. “That carries from high school to college to pro ball,” Bonnette said. “That’s really stuff he pounds in our heads.”Vucan hasn’t been afraid to remind the generations that have followed Alexander of his command.Bonzagni, who grew up a Rangers fan and idolized outfielders David Murphy, Craig Gentry and Josh Hamilton, didn’t make Carroll’s varsity team in any of his first three high school seasons. He always had a “decent arm,” as Vucan described it, but commitment to his head coach’s program and a pre-senior year growth spurt fast-tracked him to acedom. Texas Rangers minor league pitcher Paul Bonzagni stretches with teammates during a spring training workout at the team’s training facility on Thursday, Feb. 26, 2026, in Surprise, Ariz. Pitcher Izack Tiger it at right.“Like, oh man, I’ve got to be able to live up to these standards to be actually able to play on this Southlake team,” Bonzagni said. “It kind of elevated my mindset to where it’s like, okay, I’ve got to work a little bit harder to actually earn these opportunities. It’s not like I was blessed with all these amazing talents right off the rip.” Carroll’s roster included four players who were eventually drafted in Bonzagni’s senior season. He could’ve been among the headliners had the COVID-19 pandemic not wiped it out. He pitched all of 7⅓ varsity innings in his Carroll career before he bounced between Weatherford College and Southern Illinois. Vucan estimates that Bonzagni, whose two-seam fastball ran in the mid-90s before“When he walked in here in August, I went, ‘Oh my god, what did you eat, man?’” Vucan said. “He would have been the dude. He would have been the number one.” Bonzagni missed Carroll’s state championship window on both ends. Vucan won his first two 6A state titles back-to-back in 2018-19 and took home his third in 2022. Proksch pitched 5⅔ innings and drove in two runs in the program’s most-recent championship game victory when it finished fifth in MaxPreps’ national team rankings. Southlake pitcher Owen Proksch pitches against Keller Timber Creek during the first inning of a District 4-6A high school baseball game in Southlake, Texas on Tuesday, April. 19, 2022.Proksch had a fine arm but “no command” when he made Carroll’s varsity team as a sophomore, Vucan said, but a funky delivery and plus arm side run from the left side intrigued the staff. He, like Bonzagni, benefited from a growth spurt. The biggest improvement came by way of the extreme long toss program that helped increase the southpaw’s velocity.He was the District 4-6A MVP in his senior season, pitched out of the bullpen and rotation at Duke and returned to the metroplex last summer when the Rangers drafted him.“I definitely pitched in some games at Southlake where there more people in the stands than some of the games I pitched in at Duke,” Proksch said after he was drafted. “I think it just settled me in there. It’s still 60 feet, 6 inches.” Even if the state of affairs look a little different than they did when Alexander toed the rubber in high school. The field now features synthetic turf, indoor and outdoor batting lanes, a renovated dugout and a locker room that resembles something closer to what professional players might call home. Vucan, when in need of a motivational speech, is quick to remind his current players that the draftees and champions of the past “are the ones that got them this locker room and this facility.” “I will never believe we are ever going to usurp — nor do I want to — football at Southlake Carroll," Vucan said. “But we’re pretty close, right? And it’s because of what they’ve done.”Texas Rangers top 30 prospects: No. 5 Yolfran Castillo could be a real player at shortstopShawn covers the Texas Rangers and college sports for The News. He joined The Dallas Morning News after covering UConn basketball, football and high school sports for The Hartford Courant. A Boston area native, Shawn graduated from Springfield College in 2018 and previously worked for The Boston Globe and Baseball America.Dallas County wants to borrow $350M for slew of projects, including land for new jail
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