The UVA Baseball team has been playing like it has in six of its previous seven College World Series seasons.
And yet, I heard the whiners walking out of Davenport Field after last weekend’s sweep by Duke, saying, “This team is difficult to watch,” saw the message boards talking about Drew Dickinson being on the hot seat, and even some of the D1 talking heads questioning how the ‘Hoos had “fallen”.
Really?
Anyone saying these things or throwing shade on the staff or players has apparently not followed UVA Baseball since 2009.
The Cavaliers went to their first College World Series that year, ending the regular season with a 43-12-1 mark overall and a 16-11-1 ACC record. But from March 21-April 18, the ‘Hoos managed only a 10-8-1 record (.526 win %). That stretch of play has a lower winning percentage than the current Cavalier .577 mark (15-11).
Two years later, the 2011 edition of Virginia’s second CWS club was better than the 2009 team with a 45-9 regular season record and 22-8 ACC mark. But even this stellar crew experienced some turbulence, losing six of their final 13 regular season games, dropping five of the last nine.
At the ACC Tournament, no one wanted any part of the ‘Hoos as UVA posted four consecutive victories en route to claiming their third ACC Tournament championship.
There’s no question that head coach Brian O’Connor’s club has not lived up to the lofty expectations of the polls and the media. The home series loss to Boston College was a shocker, and last weekend’s sweep by Duke was certainly humbling.
“In college baseball, it’s an offensive game,” O’Connor acknowledged. “Sometimes you go out there and you give up three runs in the first part of the game, if you can hang in there and keep your team within striking distance you got a shot.”
Regrettably, Virginia’s pitching has not been able to stifle opposing offenses to that point in the season.
“Duke opened it up real big on us,” O’Connor added. “You see this all over college baseball. You see 10-run games and 10-run rules. We saw it last year, and we did it to other teams.”
The UVA skipper, who claimed his 900th career victory on Saturday in a 9-8 walk-off, sweep-securing win over No. 20 Stanford, sees the most crucial factor when a club is not firing on all cylinders, is their adaptability and pliability.
“It’s matter of how we bounce back and respond and for our guys to step up and show what they are made of,” O’Connor said.
That was the sentiment of the players I spoke with after the Duke series last weekend.
“Just stay together,” counseled pitcher Jay Woolfolk. “Obviously, we’re in the middle of a rough patch, but we’ve got to stay together as a team. We’re going to figure it out. It’s still early.”
“When you’re faced with adversity you have two options: you can back down from it or attack it aggressively and that’s what we’re going to do,” stated slugger Henry Ford. “It might take a little while, but we’re going to attack it every day, and we’re going to keep working.”
Some fans may have forgotten that on April 1, 2021, the Hoos were dealing with some below .500 adversity with a 11-13 overall record and, no fooling, a 4-11 conference record.
That Cavaliers unit went 14–7 in the league in April and May, ending the regular season with and 18-18 conference mark while improving their overall record to 27-22. That group went 4-1 in the Columbia Regional and took two of three from Dallas Baptist to earn the program’s fifth trip to the College World Series.
Adversity comes early in the season as it did in 2021, and there are times when things are falling apart late.
“Ninety-eight percent of this league goes through a rough patch during the year,” explained Woolfolk. “Whether that’s at the end of the year, whether that’s in Omaha, or rather that’s at the beginning of the year, and right now we’re in the beginning of it.”
A late-year swoon happened to Virginia’s 2023 College World Series qualifiers. Despite winning another Coastal Division title and posting a 44-11overall record and a 19-11 league tally, the ‘Hoos did not go wall-to-wall to claim it. In April, Virginia lost nine of its 20 April contests, dropping series to Pitt, Duke and Virginia Tech and getting swept by Notre Dame in frozen South Bend.
Ford says the key to pulling through losing streaks and tough stretches is accountability.
“The word’s accountable,” says Ford. “That’s what it has to be. Every little detail. It’s leaving the locker room the way it’s supposed to be, better than you found it, every little thing that matters.”
Ford and Woolfolk were both part of last year’s team that had a bit of a lull late in the season when they went 16-10 to close out the 2024 campaign. Again, this crew turned things around ending the year 9-3, with the final two losses coming in the CWS.
Woolfolk made it clear he has 100 percent confidence in the team turning things around.
“Our hitters are going to figure it out,” says Woolfolk. “We have too talented a lineup, and once they figure it out, once they do, everything is going to be clicking, and that’s when it’s going to get scary.”
A Cavalier trademark for the last several years has been the ability to grind an opponent down and not chase balls out of the zone. They make you get them out in the strike zone, and it’s been a tough equation for the opposition to solve. They not only grind you down physically, but they also ground you down mentally. But that wasn’t occurring as frequently as in past seasons in the first third of 2025.
Against Duke, Virginia went 12-for-54 with runners on, 6-for-30 with two outs and 7-for-41 with runners in scoring position.
It appears that the lights might have come on this weekend against Stanford.
“We have a ton of guys here who have won a lot,” Ford noted. “We have a ton of winners in that locker room. They’re setting a great example, were holding each other accountable and continue to push through this. It’s tough, it sucks to lose. Everybody hates to lose and it’s how you respond from that and that been the message.”
Sounds like the Virginia College World Series title team of 2015.
After opening the year with 10 straight wins, the team proceeded to go 10-14 from March 7 through April 12. Losing four of the six ACC series during that span, they finished the season with a 10-7 record but won their last five regular season games to go into postseason at 33-19 overall and 15-15 in the league.
That year, the ‘Hoos barely made it into the NCAA Tournament as a three seed coming off a lackluster 1-3 ACCT. UVA made it count with a 3-1 opening CWS round win, including two wins over No.4 national seed Florida, and then taking two-of-three in the championship series from defending champion Vanderbilt
Nobody saw that coming in March.
“The experience definitely helps a lot, guys understanding that it’s still March,” grinned Luke Hanson. “We’re going to come through. We have too many great players and I believe in our team. We went down a lot this weekend but the poise from the team especially in the dugout, the ‘let’s go,’ ‘bring it on’ mentality was awesome to see.”
I think some folks might have jumped the gun prematurely and possibly forgotten about the pelts on a lot of these players’ belts. Catcher Jacob Ference added an additional trait – grit.
“This team’s got grit,” he said. “Before this weekend we weren’t playing how we wanted to play, and this shows what we are capable of. We go down; we fight back. We take punches, we give punches back. It shows the kind of mentality we’re bringing to the games in the future.”
“After last weekend we were like, we need to step it up and I think we did a great job of putting at bats together and playing more as a team and bringing energy to every single and every single inning,” added Ference.
It worked. The difference in situational at-bats from Duke to Stanford was considerable.
The ‘Hoos were 28-for-76 with runners on, 17-for-40 with two outs, and 19-for-46 with runners in scoring position. O’Connor said his club needed this performance.
“We’ve been talking a lot over the last two or three weeks about what it takes, and you knew it would come at some point, and it happened to show up this weekend. And we needed it and got ourselves back in a good position in this conference.”
What’s really interesting is that last weekend after being swept by Duke, I heard the players say things like, “Just stay together,” or “faced with adversity you have two options: you can back down from it or attack it.”
This weekend, after sweeping the 20th ranked team in the country, you know what I heard, similar sentiments. “We have too many great players,” or “putting at bats together and playing more as a team” or “This teams got grit.”
Looking back through Virginia’s seven previous College World Series events, six of them came in seasons where the ‘Hoos were victimized by some up-and-down play.
In fact, the only time in seven College World Series seasons where the ‘Hoos did not have an extended stretch of inconsistent play was 2014. Virginia lost 16 games that year but never lost back-to-back games.
And the coach that guided the Virginia Cavaliers through all six of the adverse seasons as well as 2014 liked what he saw this weekend.
“I was really impressed all weekend with our team, their attitude, their stick-to-itiveness that they showed in every game,” O’Connor said. “Every game we fell behind and kept fighting back and that’s what we’ve been searching for 20-some ballgames. That kind of fight, that kind of competitive spirit, that kind of togetherness that it takes. That’s been the trademark, the standard of our program, playing that way, playing aggressive and playing together. It’s refreshing to see it again and we saw it all weekend.”
Share
