The National Team Championships in Arizona may be over, but the work to assemble a set of National Teams worthy of gold has only just begun.

Each year, over 2000 players are scouted at USA Baseball’s National Team Championship events. As the primary identification event for filling USA Baseball’s international squads with the premier amateur talent from around the country, finding the best players to represent the stars and stripes is the ultimate mission for USA Baseball's scouting task forces.

The 15U task force, captained by 15U National Team manager Rob Shabansky, worked diligently at the 15U National Team Championships to scout hundreds of potential players for his national team. As the first step in the long, laborious, and intense process of assembling a national team, Shabanksy and his task force started their 15U journeys at Champs Arizona.

Once they land in the desert, Shabanksy and his team get right to work scouting players competing for a title at the event. Throughout the week-long competition, the task force narrows down the list of players that can compete for a national team spot in their daily meetings.

“So always at the beginning of the week it's very broad,” Shabansky said. “We're seeing guys that look the part, they've played really well, they've played really hard. Physically, they can play at a national team level, and the meetings go pretty quickly… And then as the week goes on, we start to really kind of hone in on a lot of the details.”

The task force consists of a dozen coaches and scouts of all levels of baseball with hundreds of years of experience between them. With 64 teams competing per age group at Champs Arizona, only one member may be able to scout a team or player at a time, making trust between staff members critical.

More importantly, all members need to unite and understand their shared mission. As a member of past task forces and now assistant coach for the 15U National Team, Steve Butler knows exactly what it takes to work as a team to assemble the best national team possible.

“I came here with the goal that when I left, I wanted to make sure that the four guys that were on staff and that we're going to have to coach these kids — we gave them everything, that we gave those guys everything we had as coaches,” Butler said. “Because that's the process, that's the trust that they have, and that's the trust that we have in these guys.”

This is Shabansky’s second consecutive year managing the 15U team, so he and his staff are already on the same page when it comes to what it takes to field a winning national team.

“Being in a rhythm with your staff [is important],” Shabanksy said. “This is the first time I’ve ever had a chance to kind of run it back with the same group, so we have a very good feel for who we are and what we look for and how we evaluate, and I think that helps us just kind of process things a little bit quicker even.”

As the force progresses through the week, the team will invite players to an invite-only workout in order to get a closer look at players.

“The workout is huge for us because it allows us some one-on-one interactions,” Shabansky said. “We’re able to talk to guys and know their personalities and kind of control the environment and see what they can and can't do, what they're comfortable with, what they're uncomfortable with.”

National teams face off against their international opponents in just a few months time, so Shabansky, Butler, and the rest of the 15U task force engineers their team with a heightened level of urgency.

“We wake up today with that mission, we're gonna wake up tomorrow with that same goal in mind,” Butler said. “We're evaluating players tomorrow to win a gold medal, hopefully, in a couple of months. That's the other part of it. It's not a development thing. It's a win-now thing.”

That win-now mindset impacts nearly every decision made by the team. However, the most important element the task force considers is a player's intangibles.

Traits like maturity, the ability to handle adversity, and mental toughness are all traits needed by players hoping to make the team and traits that the task force specifically scouts for. Included in these qualities are how a player handles adversity and failure.

“I think the biggest thing when we're evaluating players is — how do they handle failure?” Shabanksy said. “How do they handle adversity? Because when you go to play international baseball, there's going to be failure and there's going to be adversity, and if you can't handle it at [Champs Arizona] you probably can't handle it when a gold medal is on the line too.”

At the end of the day, there are many players with the skills necessary to represent their country. Many fill their statlines and engineer results that impress. However, not all have the intangibles required to succeed at the international level. The task force pays attention to off-field interactions players have with teammates, coaches, and family members in order to find those that can best represent Team USA.

“It's looking for the intangibles and trying to find the players that look like national team players, who carry themselves like national team players,” Butler said. “I think a lot of players now think it's about results. And results are great. But at the core of what we do, results can't drive our decisions.”

Ultimately, the path to making and competing for a national team is a challenging one.

“The process is grueling,” Butler said. “It's difficult — it should be. The World Cup is not a walk in the park, it's very difficult. We have to find a way, I think, to show these kids how difficult that will be.”

Once the task force’s list is narrowed down to the top list of players from a week of Champs, those players are then invited to training camp. From there, the 44 training camp invitees battle for one of the 20 coveted spots on the finalized roster for the team.

“They have to know that being there is a huge honor,” Butler said. “They were selected from a pool of 2000 players to be at this training camp and that's some of the best baseball that we see all summer. Those guys come together, and you can feel the fight to be part of Team USA, and you can feel them coming together. You can see these guys battling each other.”

Iron tends to sharpen iron at training camp. Additionally, it gives players a space to not worry about their in-game results and statistics. Instead, they learn to pivot their focuses to invaluable attributes such as selflessness and teamwork. Most critically, their desire to represent the red, white, and blue has to be high.

“They're kind of in this window of opportunity to just go and work and play and not really have to worry about who's watching,” Butler said. “It's like, ‘No, I'm gonna go, and I'm gonna try my hardest to be on Team USA, because I want to go represent my country, and I want to be part of this.’”

Wanting to represent their nation is one thing, but understanding the honor and importance of representing it is something else entirely, something that many players truly start to grasp when they arrive at training camp and compete for their spot.

“We don't have names on the back of our jerseys — it doesn't matter who you are, we're there for the same goal,” Butler said. “We're there, we're bound by the mission that we have at hand, to go and compete and play hard and do it for the guys next to you.”

Once players start to understand that part of their duty as a national team player, the culture within and around the team is solidified. From there, all that’s left is continuing Team USA’s gold-caliber legacy on the international stage.

“But if you're able to do those things, that builds the culture of that team,” Shabanksy said. “And building culture in the team is a really quick process, but if culture starts to be built, we're all bought in on something and we're all pushing towards the same goal, you're gonna win.”