In a May 2006 article for TheSabre.com I quoted former Cavalier Robby Robinson (94-97), who played on the 1996 ACC Championship squad. Following the 2006 home series against North Carolina where 7,367 fans attended the three-game series, Robinson said, “They had 2,600 at the game on Saturday. It would take eight home games in the 90’s to get close to that number.”
On Thursday night, 4,000-plus people packed into the John Paul Jones Arena to see the baseball team. Not for a game. They were there to welcome home the 2015 College World Series National Champions.
Virginia baseball – you’ve come a long way baby.
Fans were rocking the arena from the moment the doors opened, including joining in the now famous, Virginia synchronized overhead run-scoring clap. There were plenty of dignitaries on hand for the event hosted by Channing Poole, the Voice of Cavalier Baseball, including Director of Athletics Craig Littlepage and University President Teresa A. Sullivan.
Both administration officials gave tribute to a Cavalier team that survived certainly the most difficult season in Brian O’Connor’s 12 seasons.
President Sullivan called the season “magnificent.”
“I think it was wonderful for the team but also for this university and I think for the community as well,” Sullivan added. “You showed us what it means to have a lot of heart. We suffered with you through the adversities, now we want to rejoice with you in the triumph. It’s a really great thing for the University of Virginia and for the ACC, our first championship [for the conference] in 60 years in baseball.”
After going wire-to-wire in 2014 as the consensus No. 1 team in the nation, the Hoos fought through an ongoing list of adversity in 2015. The challenges included injuries, four freshmen thrust into the starting line-up, spending most of the first month of the season playing in the nearest available ball park (usually somewhere in the Carolinas) due to weather, and even a suspension for O’Connor.
Asked if in his more than four decades of college athletics as a player, coach and administrator, if he’d ever seen a team pull off what the Hoos were able to accomplish, Littlepage, admittedly tired from a late night Wednesday night, travel, and little sleep, said he was hard pressed to think of one.
“My brain right now, because of everything we’ve been through, travel back, is racing 100 miles per hour. I can’t think of any,” Littlepage said. “I think the unique aspect of this team was we not only had these disruptions and distractions in terms of injuries, but they were injuries to multiple key players. Time after time, somebody stepped up, somebody stepped in, somebody moved from the outfield to the infield, somebody moved from the bench to a pinch-hitting role. Everybody seemed to kind of get it, everybody stretched themselves to be able to accomplish what they accomplished this year so from that standpoint it’s unique. So from that standpoint I can’t think of any other team right now but this one is real fresh in my mind.”
Virginia’s issues this season have been well chronicled and there is no denying this has been a very trying season for the team and the coaching staff.
“It didn’t come easy,” O’Connor acknowledged. “This baseball program was humbled this year. Through humility it learned a lot, the players learned a lot, the coaches learned a lot and this program rose to a level that it’s never been before.”
For a program that has been virtually assured of an NCAA Tournament berth for the last five to six seasons, it was humbling to the point of nearly missing the tournament. In mid-April, UVa was not in position to even make the ACC Tournament but they rallied to qualify for pool play in Durham. After going 0-3 in the ACC Tournament, the Hoos waited, assuming, with no guarantees, that they would hear their name called for the NCAA field.
The Cavaliers made it. They were announced as the three seed in the Lake Elsinore Regional in California. Senior third baseman Kenny Towns said the team saw it as a second chance to have the kind of season the team expected to have when the season started.
“We looked at it as a great opportunity,” Towns said. “Nothing was guaranteed for us like it has been the last couple years, so I think we were just really more excited about it. Just getting in that tournament as we showed here, good things can happen if you start playing well. Getting the opportunity to get in [the NCAA Tournament] was kind of uplifting for us.”
Then the magnificent part of the journey began.
The Hoos battled through and swept the regional, coming from behind in games two and three to sweep the regional. UVa then rallied in both games of the Super regional against Maryland. Digging deep week after week to find ways to win.
“The one thing that Coach O’Connor and the other coaches kept preaching to us is you’ve just got to grind through it,” Towns said. “We had a lot of ups and down as you mentioned, during this year, but they didn’t expect less out of us. They kept their expectations high on us, and just told us to grind it out.”
The Hoos kept grinding all the way to Omaha and then through double-elimination pool play against offensive juggernaut Florida. They battled all the way to a decisive Game 3 in the title series against the same Vanderbilt team that defeated the Hoos for the title a year ago. And while the team was certainly playing for a national title Wednesday night, pitcher Nathan Kirby says this team was playing for each other, the Wahoos who left the program last year either by graduation or had been drafted, and all the players that came before.
“We were playing not only for the guys on the team, the coaching staff and the fans but for everyone that’s walked between the lines before us in this program,” Kirby noted. “I think that was probably the most gratifying thing, knowing that all our hard work and their hard work paid off.”
O’Connor says it was that humility, that desire to play for something more than a title, something more than yourself, that made what everyone outside the UVa family (and likely many inside the family too) felt was improbable, reality.
“It’s an unbelievable example to people that if you stay together as a group, if you’ve got a group of guys that work hard, a group of guys that really love each other and care about each other and are passionate about what they’re trying to accomplish and just fight and won’t go away,” O’Connor said.
The unbelievable run in the face of adversity is what made Thursday night’s College World Series National Championship celebration event so memorable. It wasn’t just a celebration of the 2015 champions, it was a celebration of the growing legacy that is Virginia baseball.
