No shortstop, no problem, Illinois State found Aiden Huggins
Prospect Academy grad SS Aiden Huggins (Edmonton, Alta.) was the Illinois State Redbirds
Huggins grinds despite tough conditions
After a historic season in 2019, advancing to the regional final and finishing the season with 36 wins, Illinois State University team set a new precedent that it hoped to keep improving upon. Last year, the Redbirds never got a chance to follow up due to the cancellation of spring sports because of COVID-19. Aidan Huggins was still an underclassman during the 2019 season, now — a red shirt senior — he hopes to help lead the Redbirds back to postseason success.
“I think we are in a really special situation. We’ve been working very hard and I am very excited to see what we can do in the spring,”
A native of Edmonton, Alta., Huggins grew up expecting to play hockey, but in the ninth grade he made the decision to dedicate himself to baseball with goals of playing in college. However, being from Canada, the process was different from his American peers.
“We don’t actually play for our actual high school,” Huggins said, “so a lot of guys will go off and play in academies and things like that, so I played for Prospects Academy in Alberta.”
Another difference is the factor the winter weather plays in the structure of the competitive season.
“We had to play a lot of our games over a long period of time,” Huggins said. “We would play starting in September, have an early fall, play for maybe a month or two and then immediately we’d have to go back inside because right around October or early November is where we get a lot of snow. From that point on there it will be snow until — at least where I’m from — until sometimes late April.”
Huggins’ big break came when he was selected for Tournament 12, a national amateur tournament with the goal of exposing players to pro and college scouts at the Rogers Centre. After the tournament he started receiving recruitment offers.
Huggins attended Cisco Junior College for one year, utilizing his red shirt season before transferring to Cloud County Community College a NJCAA Division I program. Huggins played shortstop for the T-Birds before being noticed by a newly hired coach Steve Holm at ISU.
“When I took the job it was basically — give or take — July 1 the summer of ’18 … they handed me the roster and said the shortstop that was on the team went in the third round and the [recruit] coming in to be the shortstop got out of his NLI and is no longer signed to come here so just FYI you don’t have a shortstop. We started scrambling … what about this guy? What about that guy? Finally, we got some video of a guy playing shortstop at a junior college that was from Canada and we thought the video looked all right so we started doing some check in and talked to the coach and at that point I flew up to Canada to see him.”
_ Steve Holm, Illinois State head coach
Since joining the Redbirds, Huggins has been a versatile resource and big part of the team’s success. His first season here, that historic 2019 season, he appeared and started in all but one game, slashed .246/.339/.329 and tallied eight doubles, three home runs, 27 RBIs and 39 runs.
Following the success of that season, Huggins and the rest of the Redbirds wanted to keep the momentum going into 2020, despite a slow start they showed their potential with a victory against the then-13th-ranked Arkansas before getting the news the remainder of the spring season was canceled.
“I was in shock. I couldn’t believe it,” Huggins said. “We were in Florida, actually, we were getting ready to play on Friday because when our season actually got cancelled it was on Thursday.”
“It was tough on a lot of guys because you took baseball away from them, you took school away from them, you took the social life away from them, stuff like that,” Holm said.
For Huggins, the March cancellation of baseball and school meant he had to go back home to Canada.
“[Huggins] did a good job of staying in shape while he couldn’t play,” Holm said. “I mean he went back to Edmonton in March. That’s not exactly San Diego at that time of year so he had to find places to do stuff and when he got back here had to play himself back into shape I would imagine.”
During his time home, Huggins made the best of his situation and proved his commitment to improving by doing what he could to continue training with the resources he had.
“There was snow on the ground I knew I couldn’t obviously field ground balls or throw outside in the cold. I have a tee in my garage and a little net so I would go inside my garage and hit. Then when the weather started getting nicer, I was able to move outside a little bit and play catch — I have a couple of friends that were back home so I would play catch with them. I had weights at my house so I’d just get little at-home workouts in, do whatever I could, go on runs, stuff like that,”
_ Aiden Huggins, Illinois State senior short stop
Now on campus, Huggins and the rest of the Redbirds are eager for the upcoming season and hope to not only improve upon the successes of the 2019 season but also make up for the lost 2020 season.
Kevin Koski is a sports reporter for The Vidette. He can be contacted at vidette_ckoski@ilstu.edu Follow him on Twitter at @_Koski_
(Reprinted with the kind permission of The Vidette, Illinois State University.)