How a pro basketball tryout works, from the $200 check-in to the training camp invite

Every minor-league club in America runs, or has run, some version of an open tryout. The archived official Sea-Kings site had a Tryouts page and an Employment page among its earliest files, which is how a club at that level fills a roster. This site is an independent record of the team. It does not hold tryouts, take registrations or forward names to anyone, and the club's status is covered on the history page. What follows is a description of how the process works at three levels, drawn from published tryout notices and league pages, for readers who searched the phrase and want to know what they would be walking into.

The pattern across the table is consistent. The fee rises with the level and buys a few hours of evaluation, a shirt and, at the G League level, a couple of tickets. Nobody at any level promises a contract. The best-case outcome is an invitation to the next stage, which at a G League club means training camp and at an ABA club may mean the roster itself, because the roster is where the club finds out whether it can afford you.

Read enough tryout notices and the same shape emerges, whether the logo on the shirt belongs to an NBA affiliate or to a club playing in a high school gym. Registration is online and closes a day or so before, and at the door each player gets a number, which is how he will be referred to for the rest of the morning; the Cleveland Charge print it on the shirt. There is a stretch and a warm-up, and then the coaches run drills that isolate the things film cannot fake: full-court sprints and defensive slides that expose conditioning inside ten minutes, shooting drills off the catch and off the dribble, ball handling under pressure, closeouts and help rotations. After the drills come the scrimmages, five on five, short games with the clock running and the coaches rotating players through so that everyone gets a look, and this is the part most players think of as the tryout and the part the coaches have often half decided by, because the drills have already told them who is in shape and who is not. Evaluators are the club's own people: the Charge lists its coaching and athletic performance staff, the Squadron its coaches and basketball operations staff, and at the TBL combine the general managers and coaches of the teams that will draft. There are no agents on the floor and usually no spectators. At the end of the session the coaches thank everyone, tell the room that selected players will be contacted, and mean it, though contacted is a smaller set than the room hopes. The Charge's 2024 notice mentioned that one player from the previous year's tryout, a forward named Dibaji Walker, had made the roster through this route, and the notice offered him as proof that the door is real. One player, out of whoever showed up that year, is also the honest size of the door. The whole thing lasts two and a half to three hours. Then the gym is somebody else's.

Coaches are not shy about this, and the published advice is plainer than the mystique around it. Brad Zellner of the Derby City club, quoted on TBL's site before a combine, put it in three lines that every evaluator at every level would sign:

• Be in shape when you arrive. A combine wasted on poor conditioning is a wasted fee.
• Compete and play hard every minute of every game and drill, and do not take it easy on another player.
• Treat it like a job interview.

Underneath those lines sit the things the notices imply rather than state. Eligibility comes first: the Squadron's notice requires participants to meet the G League's rules, which include a minimum age of 18. Size and position matter because a club is filling specific holes, not collecting talent. A player who can guard, run the floor and hit an open shot is worth more to a coach on a 24-game schedule than a scorer who needs the ball, because the coach has no time to build around anyone. And the film matters after the fact. TBL's CEO has said the league exists to give players video and statistics for overseas agents, and a combine performance that ends up on tape has a value even when it does not end in a roster spot.

The tryout is a job interview where the job pays in gas money.

The odds are long at every level and they get longer as the money gets better. A G League club invites up to three players from its open tryout to camp, and Wikipedia's account of the league says each team's local tryouts produce one player assigned to the team. From there the numbers improve: Front Office Sports reports that more than 30 G League players have signed NBA contracts in each of the past nine seasons, and that in 2023-24 half the players on NBA rosters had G League experience. But the open-tryout walk-on is the smallest slice of that pipeline. The draft, Exhibit 10 deals and NBA assignments fill most of the roster before the tryout shirt is printed.

The ABA and TBL run the model differently because they have to. Neither has an NBA parent to send players down, so both rely on open sessions to find bodies. The ABA's website speaks of opportunities for over 2,000 players and coaches in more than 50 American cities, and it delivers those opportunities mostly through team-run tryouts with fees in the $55 to $125 range in the examples above, plus a league-branded event in St. Louis. Each owner decides whom to keep and what, if anything, to pay. TBL centralizes the first step: a league combine at The Factory in Indianapolis feeds a draft weekend, 76 players went to teams that way in one recent cycle, and clubs follow with their own workouts, mini-camps and exhibitions before training camp. The fee for the TBL combine was not published on the page fetched for this article, and this site will not guess at it.

For a club like the Sea-Kings in their ABA years, the tryout was the recruiting department. A page on the old site, a gym in Monterey County, a Saturday, a fee and a roster that had to be built from whoever showed up and could make the drive to Stockton. That is not a criticism. It is how the bottom of the professional ladder has always worked, and it is why a club that survived 11 seasons of it deserves the record this site is trying to keep. If you are reading this because you want to try out somewhere, look for a current notice from a current club. This page is not one.