Tuesday’s 14-3 win over Virginia Commonwealth in front of a state-record baseball crowd at The Diamond pushed top-ranked Virginia’s record in 2011 to 43-5. The grind of a season that began back in February will now come to a screeching halt as the schedule has come to the annual nine-day exam break that coach Brian O’Connor has had eight years to figure out how to turn into an advantage for his team.
“I’ve tweaked it every year on how we handle this time. I think that we’ve found the winning recipe of what we need to do over these nine days and have it figured out pretty good, and that is to have practices on about half the days, keep it short and concise and intense when they are out there, and try to make it as game-realistic as possible,” O’Connor said.
From the outside looking in, the last thing the coach of the hottest team in America would seem to want is nine days off before a pair of weekend series with top-flight ACC foes (Miami at home May 13-15, on the road at UNC May 19-21) and then the beginning of the postseason. Not that O’Connor has a choice in the matter. “That’s just the way it is at UVa.,” he said of the exam break, an anomaly among top-tier D1 teams.
O’Connor has put together a schedule of practices and intrasquad games around study and exam time aimed at keeping his weekend starting rotation (Danny Hultzen, Tyler Wilson, Will Roberts) on their normal throwing schedule. There’s an obvious added benefit to keeping his pitchers on a schedule. “Looking at all the guys who had at-bats tonight and all the different pitchers that we have, our intrasquad scrimmages are pretty darn competitive. Our hitters get a chance to face one of the top pitching staffs in the country. So it can be a really good thing for us,” O’Connor said.
The players are sold on the break being a positive and not a drawback to their effort to reach their second College World Series in three years.
“I think it will be good for us. It will give some people some time to recover, some guys who maybe are banged up a little bit will be able to get some rest,” said junior catcher John Hicks, who is second on the team in hitting (.359) and RBIs (44) and tied for the team lead in homers (5).
“It’s a big time of the year for us as students,” Hicks said. “We’ve got to take care of our exams. We’ve got to take care of stuff in the classroom before we can worry about being on the field. We’re going to have practices a couple of days, and we’re going to go at it hard those days, and we’ll be ready to go.”
O’Connor is confident that his team will come out of the break ready for its stretch run.
“I just talked to the team about it after the game, and I told them that this is a real advantage for us, and that this is the way we have to look at it. We have a chance coming out of final exams to have fresh legs and be well-rested for basically the second part of the season. I know the players will look at it that way, and hopefully it’s something that will work to our advantage,” O’Connor said.
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