Chris Pollard, the new UVA Baseball coach, grew up in Amherst County, a couple of counties down Route 29 south of Charlottesville, living and dying, as a kid, with the guys in orange and blue.
“I grew up in the mid-‘80s watching Terry Holland coach Ralph Sampson, and you know, I can remember being in my grandmother’s house and UVA getting bounced in the NCAA Tournament, and they ran a little highlight montage on WSET, and I went and sat in the basement, and I was so disappointed because it got knocked out of the NCAA Tournament,” said Pollard, who was in elementary school, like I was, when Ralph’s last team, the 1983 group, was upset in the Elite Eight by NC State.
Pollard went on to star as a pitcher at Virginia Episcopal School in Lynchburg, and played his college ball at Davidson, where he was 11-6 as a junior in 1995, with a 3.60 ERA and 1.19 WHIP.
The athletics department at Davidson, at the time, was run by a certain Terry Holland.
“I still remember my dad and I being there on my official visit and getting a chance to interact with Coach Holland. So, you know, this is a full-circle moment for me and certainly my parents, for sure,” Pollard said Wednesday, as he was being formally introduced to the UVA Athletics community.
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The local kid-done-good has the task of trying to follow in the footsteps of the guy who oversaw the rise of UVA Baseball for the past 22 years, Brian O’Connor, who led Virginia to seven College World Series appearances and the 2015 national title.
O’Connor figured into Pollard’s rise through the coaching ranks. Pollard’s first head-coaching job was at Appalachian State, where he won 244 games from 2005-2012.
His last App State team, which finished with a 41-18 record, defeated UVA in a 2012 Regional, and it was that season, and the upset of Virginia, that raised his profile ahead of landing the job at Duke that summer.
The next spring, he took his Duke team to Charlottesville for a three-game series with the ‘Hoos, who went on to win 50 games in 2013, “and we were swept resoundingly,” Pollard said – the record book actually shows Game 1 was close, a 6-5 Virginia win, but the other two were 17-8 and 14-6.
“We got home that Sunday night, and Stephanie (his wife) said to me, and this is almost verbatim, I’m not sure how you’re ever going to compete with those guys,” Pollard said.
On the return trip to Charlottesville in 2015, “I literally had a notepad and a pen in my hand, and I said, I’m going to learn everything I can learn from this program and this man,” Pollard said.
“Brian was kind enough to be a resource to me, and I would reach out to him when I had questions about the league or about how things should work at this level, and somewhere along that way, Brian became a friend, and I can tell you wholeheartedly, we want to honor his legacy, and I am so excited about the awesome challenge that comes along with trying to fill those big shoes,” Pollard said.
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When Pollard took the job at Duke, the program hadn’t been to an NCAA Tournament since 1961. He had Duke in a Regional by Year 4, in 2016, and two years later, Pollard took his team in a Super Regional and finished with a 45-18 record – the first of four appearances in a Super Regional for Duke Baseball under Pollard.
“Coach Pollard is a proven winner, exceptional at recruiting and developing talent, exceptional at leading young men on and off the field,” said Carla Williams, the athletics director at Virginia, at the Wednesday rollout event at Disharoon Park.
Williams was in touch with Pollard early in the search process, knowing it wasn’t a guarantee that he’d even be interested.
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Miami reached out to Pollard about its job opening in 2023, and South Carolina was interested in him last summer, and he turned both high-profile programs down to stay at Duke.
What drew him to consider the Virginia job, he said yesterday, was the resources the school puts toward baseball.
“Candid, honest answer, positioned amongst the very best in the ACC. I don’t know that I could have felt comfortable taking the job if it hadn’t been,” Pollard said.
“I think all of us in the world of college baseball have sort of spent the last year benchmarking, you know, you’d stand around the turtle and go, Hey, you know, where are you guys going to land after the settlement, I don’t know, where are you guys going to land, you know? And so, there was a lot of that back and forth.
“I’ve told several people this: when I when I jumped on the Zoom two Mondays ago with Carla, I didn’t have a preconceived notion of where the University of Virginia was positioned. I just knew where I thought that the program needed to be positioned if they were going to continue to compete for ACC championships and be in a position to host Regionals and Super Regionals.
“When we got on the Zoom, boy, it was exciting to hear all of the effort that has gone into building the scholarship resources so that we are in a position to compete at the top of the conference. And it’s a credit to Carla and all the work that she and Jim (Ryan) have done, but it’s also a credit to everybody in this room that’s invested in the program,” Pollard said.
UVA Athletics spent $6.0 million on its baseball program in the 2023-2024 academic sports year, according to data from Sportico, which ranked second in the ACC, and Williams and the Virginia Athletics Foundation have been working to secure additional monies to fund scholarships to get baseball into the mid- to upper-20s and to provide more lucrative NIL opportunities for the student-athletes.
To that end, it was announced on Monday that UVA alum Tim Smith and his wife, Jennifer, had made a $5.5 million donation to UVA Athletics, with $4 million designated for scholarships in baseball and five women’s sports, plus additional funds for baseball operating expenses.
Williams has made it known to her head coaches that they’ll need to be willing to commit some of their time to fundraising, and Pollard is hard at work there – he said yesterday that he’s been in contact with prominent UVA Baseball alum Ryan Zimmerman, Mr. National, Employee #11, among other alumni who went on to long careers in MLB that have made it a point to give back to the program that helped them along the way.
“That’s super important, right? It’s bridging the past and the present, and that connection creates opportunities in the future,” Pollard said. “I’m fully cognizant of the fact that, like, I’ve got a job to do, to earn their trust and respect, and no shortcuts for that. We’ve got to be great relationship builders, and we’ve got to show them how dedicated we’ll be with hard work and doing things the right way.”
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Pollard was hired last week, “and he hit the ground sprinting,” Williams said, finalizing his staff before the end of the week – he’s bringing with him the staff that he’d had at Duke the past few years, headed up by pitching coach Brady Kirkpatrick, hitting coach Eric Tyler and recruiting guru Derek Simmons.
He’s also been able to bring along with him some of the top guys from his Duke roster, led by AJ Gracia, a power hitter who Baseball America rates as the #8 prospect in the 2026 MLB Draft class, and left-handed pitcher Henry Zatkowski, rated by Baseball America as one of the top pitching prospects in the 2025 Cape Cod Summer League.
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“I had no sort of preconceived notion that any one player from Duke would make the journey to UVA,” Pollard said. “I’m excited about the opportunity, once guys get into the portal, to have conversations and to sell them on what the opportunity at University of Virginia is all about, the unique combination of a world-class university still playing baseball in the ACC.
“The easy part is, all those guys have been in this incredible facility just a couple of months ago. They had hit in the Zimmerman facility, they had trained in the weight room, and so, knowing that you have that unique elite combination of academics and athletics and this facility to train in to become the best version of yourself, it didn’t take a lot of arm-twisting,” Pollard said.
Another point of focus will be on re-recruiting O’Connor guys in the portal who have yet to make a final decision on where they’re going to be going to school next year – chief among the names there, shortstop Eric Becker and left-handed pitcher Evan Blanco, the staff’s #1 starter in 2024.
Henry Ford and Chris Arroyo have also put their names in the portal, but both are expected to be second- or third-round draft picks next month, and it’s assumed if they go that high, they’ll be headed off to professional baseball.
There’s also key guys like Luke Hanson and Matt Augustine who, we’re told, are leaning toward staying.
Pollard’s message to those guys: “I’ve been really clear about, hey, like, there’s real opportunity here,” he said.
“One of the things that happens when you have these transitions is, for a lot of guys, it clears the path, right?” Pollard said. “One of the things we’ve talked about is, I’ve had these individual conversations, both guys sitting in my office, here in The Dish, which has been really fun over the last week, but also talking with guys on the phone, it’s like, you know what, one of the things about transition that’s cool is, like, we’re all going to be getting to know each other, and we’re all going to be working to develop the relationship, and we’re all going to be earning each other’s trust, and we’re all going to be earning each other’s respect, and this is, like, the truest form of meritocracy.
“There’s no bias in place. It’s, everybody gets to go out there on the field this fall and earn it, and that’s a really cool environment if you really like to compete,” Pollard said.
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Williams, in formally introducing Pollard to the UVA community yesterday, pointed to “his determination, his sense of gratitude, his pursuit of excellence and his blue-collar work ethic, which he first learned from his dad and grandfather in Amherst County.”
Those words meant a lot to our new baseball coach.
“My dad worked for post offices around Central Virginia for 33 years to give me and my siblings opportunities that he didn’t have. He’s the hardest-working person I know,” Pollard said. “I can promise you that I will bring that work ethic that I learned from watching him to the University of Virginia. Our teams will value work ethic. We call it the grind. Additionally, we will adopt a process-driven approach. Great process leads to great results.
“It’s just the attention to detail, and we call it Omaha standard attention to detail, right? Everything matters,” Pollard said. “Our guys hear me say this all the time, how you do anything is how you do everything. That was a huge takeaway in my early days at Duke, just watching that elite attention to detail.”
If you listened closely, you heard some things you may remember hearing from Tony Bennett, from Bronco Mendenhall, from, back in the day, Terry Holland and George Welsh, about building a winning culture.
“We will value servant leadership,” Pollard said. “We’ll appreciate the importance of being a part of something that’s bigger than ourselves. We’ll be accountable for the energy that we show up with on a day-in, day-out basis. We want to work hard to be that same person, day in and day out. We will weaponize gratitude in the fight against entitlement and self-pity.
“We will embrace a growth mindset,” Pollard said. “We’ll lean into struggle and adversity, recognizing that’s how real toughness and real resistance resilience are created. And in building that culture, will compete for ACC championships, and when you compete for ACC championships, you put the program in a position to host Regionals and Super Regionals and provide the most direct path to Omaha.”
Funny thing is, as a Central Virginia native, with family still in the area, Pollard said he and his wife “had conversations like, hey, when we think about where we might want to retire, like, Charlottesville has always been on that short list.”
“Just a genuine love for the area, genuine love for the community,” Pollard said. “Thomas and Brady (Pollard’s sons) and I are avid outdoorsmen. We like to fish. We like to kayak. Grew up floating so many of these rivers around here with my dad. And so, like, there’s so many things to be excited about. Talked mountain biking with Jim (Ryan) this morning. And so, like there, like it just, there’s so many things about this community that we love.”
Pollard said the UVA job is “a homecoming for me.”
“I’ll be real with you. I’ve had a huge range of emotions over the last eight days, and not to mention my fair share of butterflies. And I tell our guys, like, when you get those butterflies, that just means that it’s your body getting ready to do something special,” Pollard said.
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