UVA Baseball coach Chris Pollard finalizes his new coaching staff, with familiar names

Chris Pollard brought the band with him from Duke to form his new UVA Baseball coaching staff.

You’d expect this, of course. Dance with the ones that brought you there, being the operating principle.

The big get is Derek Simmons, who was only with Pollard for a year after a nice run at Indiana, and was rumored to be a top candidate for the open job at Duke, maybe second in line, if Josh Jordan, who was with Pollard for 10 years before taking an assistant job at LSU, passed on the opportunity.

This seems to signal that Jordan is Duke AD Nina King’s top choice, and that she’s just waiting for LSU to be done in Omaha.

Simmons is an ace recruiter, and had two Top 25 classes in his brief tenure at Duke, including Perfect Game’s #12 class in 2025, which we’re now trying to mine as much as possible.

I also like the hitting coach, Eric Tyler, whose 2025 Duke squad set school records in runs (516), home runs (115), RBIs (488) and walks (408).

Tyler has been with Pollard since 2023.

The pitching coach, Brady Kirkpatrick, led a staff that was seventh in the ACC in team ERA in 2025 (5.05; for reference, Virginia was second in the ACC with a 4.68 team ERA).

The fundamentals were good: Duke’s pitchers were second in the ACC in 2025 in WHIP (1.37), third in strikeout-to-walk ratio (2.58) and sixth in strikeouts per nine innings (9.6).

His 2024 group was second in the ACC in team ERA (4.50), and his first season at Duke had the team with a 4.29 ERA, which ranked third in the conference.

The other guys making the move to Charlottesville with Pollard are John Natoli and Brian Sakowski.

Natoli will be the director of player development, after two years on Pollard’s staff at Duke handling baseball-operations duties.

Sakowski’s title is director of recruiting.

Before joining the Duke staff in 2024, Sakowski had spent the previous six years with Perfect Game as a national crosschecker and national scouting supervisor.