Fourth-ranked Virginia Tech (44-12) will host Oklahoma (40-21) in a best-of-three Super Regional series beginning at 3 p.m. Friday.
Game 2 is scheduled for noon Saturday, and Game 3, if necessary, would be on Sunday, at a time to be determined.
Game 1 will be broadcast on ESPN2. Game 2 is slated to be on ESPNU.
Neither team has announced its starting pitchers as of this writing.
Thursday presser quotes
Virginia Tech coach John Szefc
Opening statement: “Just happy to be still playing here in June. [I] feel really fortunate to be playing at home. When we don’t have to travel, I feel like our guys get a better chance to rest and recover. This late in the season, the weather is good. [We’re] playing a good team. We’re a good team. IT should be a lot of fun to watch.”
On scouting Oklahoma: “They run well [and] they’re pretty aggressive on the bases. Their pitching is probably similar to ours—similar. They’ve got one left-hand starter, but most people do. They’re good—they’re a pretty hot team. They just beat Florida [and] they beat Texas in the Big 12 Championship. Then again, most teams you’re playing this time of year are going pretty good, and they’re going pretty good and we’re going pretty good. As far as individual stuff that would concern us, outside of the fact that they’ve got a lot of guys that can run, I can’t really say there’s anything that we really haven’t seen throughout the whole year in the ACC.”
On what he would say if told in 2018 that Virginia Tech would be hosting a Super Regional in 2022: “I don’t know what I would have said. When I first went to Maryland, we went to a Super Regional in the second year and you don’t expect it to happen, but when it happens, you start to expect it to happen again. I’ve kind of seen it before where a team that maybe didn’t have a ton of national expectations became a national-level team very quickly. It has everything to do with how good the players are and how well the coaching staff prepares them, and that’s all we do. We have really good players. They’re tough and our assistants prepare them daily on a very high level. I don’t really have a—like, if we won the national championship in two weeks, it wouldn’t be overly surprising to me. I can’t say it would be really.”
On how much stock he puts into the level the team was playing at last weekend: “I don’t think our guys are—I think our guys are just as prepared now as they were last weekend. They played in front of bigger crowds; they played at home in that atmosphere. So, I think that’s an advantage for us. How much? I don’t know. As far as the competition last weekend versus this? Yeah, on paper you wouldn’t think that the teams we played last weekend are as good as [Oklahoma]. But you don’t know. You really don’t know until you roll it out there. Again, I’ve been a four seed and a three seed many a time. I’ve a two seed in 201 and beat South Carolina, who was the one seed at the time. They weren’t that good that year. They weren’t like ‘South Carolina’ good, I’ll rephrase that, as an example. Sometimes you’ll run into three, four, two or whatever seeds that are just way better than maybe what you would think. I don’t know how Oklahoma is going to be. I would imagine they’d be very good. I know Skip Johnson well. I’ve known him for 15 years, you know, since I was back in Kansas in the Big 12. I used to recruit his players when he was a junior college coach at Navarro and I was at Louisiana-Lafayette. Then he went on to be Augie’s [Garrido] pitching coach at Texas then moved to Oklahoma. Just a strong, old baseball guy, but he does a good job. He’s got good people working for him. There’s a lot of good players in Oklahoma and Texas, but there’s a lot of good players in Virginia, too, [and] Tennessee, [and] New Jersey. We feel pretty good about our players and that’s the best I can tell you. If they weren’t really good, we wouldn’t be sitting here. We’d be doing something else.”
Virginia Tech utility player Nick Biddison
On what playing a tough ACC slate does for a team in the postseason: “I think it just prepares us for whatever Oklahoma has. We don’t really know what they have, they’re in a different conference and we don’t know how good that conference is. At this stage of the game, Coach Szefc says it all the time, there’s nothing we haven’t seen yet, there’s not going to be any surprises this weekend. It’s the same game we’ve been playing for the last however many weeks. So what we’ve taken from the ACC schedule is just that we’re good enough to play with the best and this is just another weekend to do that.”
On preserving the moment and not looking too far ahead: “I think that as a team we’ve never really had to have that conversation. Though we have some younger kids, we have a lot of kids who are very mature especially when it comes to the baseball aspect of life. Honestly that’s never really come up just because we haven’t had to. Everyone kind of has their own mentality, their own mindset, but we all have a collective team mindset that’s been working, so why change it.”
On how he became such a utility player and if there’s a position he hasn’t played: “I haven’t played shortstop which me and Tanner kind of joke around a little bit about how some day I’m going to be playing shortstop he just doesn’t know it. But no, my whole life growing up I just played different positions. I just always said yes, I never really set out to be set to a certain position and then I knew that when I got to a stage like this that it was going to be really important to be able to play anywhere just to keep me on the field. I think it’s done more than just kept me on the field, I think it’s allowed the team to roll the right lineup out. It’s whatever I can do to help the team win, that’s why I do it.”
Virginia Tech outfielder Gavin Cross
On how to keep the bats hot: “I think we just prepare well, trust in each other, and play for Omaha. We just go out there, play hard, and trust in each other and good things happen.”
On preserving the moment and not looking too far ahead: “It’s just one pitch at a time, one game at a time. Like Nick said, we’ll go out tomorrow night prepared and play to win and then when tomorrow’s over we’ll look to Saturday and however many games we play this weekend. Hopefully at the end of the weekend we’re going to Omaha, but we have to take it one pitch, one play at a time and not look at it for anything bigger than what it is.”
Virginia Tech catcher Cade Hunter
On how to balance the threat of stolen bases from Oklahoma: “I don’t think we necessarily change anything. Obviously, we just want to make sure we’re switching up our looks and our timing to the plate but with a team like them with speed, you just can’t let that affect making pitches and getting guys out. So, it’s not necessarily that things are going to change, just maybe keep a closer eye on the guy on first.”
On the atmosphere from last weekend: “That’s kind of what you play for. You play for playing in front of your home crowd, a sellout crowd that is, and that just adds a different kind of energy in the ballpark. Last week was the first time at least for me where there were hundreds of people in the stands while we were taking BP. That was just an awesome feeling that made it so much more fun and made it easier to get juiced up and ready to play. I know I had a couple of buddies here this weekend in the crowd and they said it was the most fun they’ve had in a while. It’s just an awesome atmosphere to play in front of.”
On becoming the first Virginia Tech team to make a Super Regional: “It’s awesome, I think it really hit everyone last week as they were putting up banners on the wall like the 2022 that was highlighted in yellow because we’re hosting. We all kind of took a second, we were like, “wow, that’s kind of cool”. This is a team and this is a time of our lives that we’re never going to forget no matter what happens. It’s been a memorable season and it just means a lot.”
Compiled by Chris Graham
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