Pollard Sees 'Awesome Opportunity' at UVA

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — In late March, ACC rivals Virginia and Duke played a three-game baseball series at Disharoon Park. Little did Chris Pollard know then that, two-and-a-half months later, he’d be calling the Dish home.

“It never crossed my mind,” Pollard said Thursday afternoon.

Pollard, whom UVA hired as head coach this week, was leading the Blue Devils then. His counterpart in the Cavaliers’ dugout was Brian O’Connor.

“When we got up there in March, Oak and I were commiserating,” Pollard recalled. “Both our teams were struggling. We had just been swept by Stanford and we were really scuffling. We were 2-4 in the ACC, and we had not gotten off to a good start overall. Our pitching was a little bit in disarray, and UVA was kind of going through it a little bit too.”

The Blue Devils swept that series at the Dish, turning around their season in the process. Duke made the NCAA tournament and then advanced to a super regional for the fourth time in 13 seasons under Pollard. Virginia surged late in the season but ended up missing the NCAA tournament, and O’Connor left early this month to become head coach at Mississippi State.

Over the years, Pollard said, he’d marvel at Disharoon Park every time he visited  the stadium. “What an amazing place. The facility is beautiful, and it’s always such a great atmosphere. So you always are a little envious when you show up at that place, but the thought that the job was going to open didn’t cross my mind.”

Pollard, who was born in Lynchburg, grew up in nearby Amherst County and graduated from Virginia Episcopal School. He never attended a Cavalier baseball game as a schoolboy, Pollard said, but in 1990 he took part in the Best in Virginia Showcase Camp in Charlottesville.

Dennis Womack, then the Wahoos’ head coach, ran the camp at what was then called the Virginia Baseball Field, a facility that was considerably less than state of the art.

“It had wood and metal bleachers, and at the time, there was an astroturf infield and a grass outfield,” Pollard recalled, laughing, “and the astroturf infield was the old turf from Scott Stadium. It still had the hash marks, the yardage markers, and those had been painted over in green so that it was just two-tone carpet. And you could still visibly see that the hash marks through the paint.

“To see how far Disharoon Park has come since those days, it’s really incredible. And it’s always been a fun place to bring teams whether it was that 2012 Appalachian [State] group or over the years bringing our Duke teams up. It’s always one of my favorite destinations in the league.”

Virginia athletic director Carla Williams and Duke AD Nina King are good friends. When UVA’s search committee reached out to Pollard, “the first thing I said is, ‘Hey, I’m really only comfortable having this conversation if Carla and Nina have spoken and everybody is OK with this and on the same page,’ ” he said. “And Carla and Nina were both gracious enough to do that, and that gave me peace of mind.”

Before his Zoom call with Williams, Pollard said, “I had no preconceived ideas about where the University of Virginia was going to land post-House settlement in terms of its commitment to baseball and really being able to compete on a national landscape.

“It was a fact-finding mission, because around our league we’ve all kind of wondered who’s getting what. You try to do a little bit of benchmarking, but every coach likes to keep his cards kind of close to the vest. And so we just didn’t know for sure what each school was doing in terms of their investment now that this settlement has been signed and there’s more opportunity to invest with scholarships and revenue-share. But I was blown away, when I had the opportunity to Zoom with Carla, at the real investment [in baseball at UVA]. And I know that that’s because of their hard work [of the athletic department], but that’s also a lot of donors and friends of the program that have stepped up to allow that to be possible, and I’m just incredibly grateful for the position they’ve put the program in.”

A graduate of Davidson College, Pollard spent three years an assistant coach at his alma mater before getting his first head job, at Pfeiffer College in North Carolina. In 2004, he moved to Appalachian State and stayed there for eight seasons.

In June 2012, Appalachian State defeated UVA in the NCAA regional at what was then known as Davenport Field. Later that month, Duke hired Pollard as its head coach.

It was a different time in college athletics.

“It’s unreal how much has changed,” said Pollard, who returned to Grounds on Friday for the first time since that March series at Disharoon Park.

“It is night and day. I can remember riding down Highway 421 from Boone to Durham after accepting the job at Duke in June of 2012 and feeling like we’ve got plenty of time, I’ll get to everyone, I’ll connect with everyone eventually, but there’s no rush and we can take your time.

“It’s just a blur right now. Guys go in the [transfer] portal and they’ve got 20 offers in an hour and they’ve got hundreds of thousands of dollars of NIL or revenue-share opportunities. It’s great that our athletes have those opportunities nowadays, but in terms of trying to recruit and retain, it’s challenging and it moves so fast.”

His top priority this week has been putting together a roster for the coming year. Many of the UVA players with eligibility remaining entered the transfer portal in the wake of O’Connor’s departure, and others are likely to be selected in next month’s Major League Baseball draft.

“We’re understanding that a lot of the guys are gone,” Pollard said, “and we’re certainly supportive of their ability to move on. We also understand that there’s a lot of guys that are draft-eligible that maybe haven’t officially left the program, but in all likelihood, we’ll not be back in the fall.

“The bulk of the focus right now is on adding to the roster, but trying to do it in a way where we’re also carving out time to connect with the guys that are currently on the roster that’ll be back. I had a Zoom with the returners and the incoming class, the 2025 class, on Tuesday night. And then I’ve been chipping away and trying to get to those guys ever since, one at a time.”

Making his job easier, Pollard said, is that fact his Duke staff is following him to UVA. “I can’t imagine doing this if you were trying to manage two rosters—the roster you’re leaving and the roster you’re coming to—and trying to get a staff hire. We’ve been really blessed that our staff is going to stay together.”

His staff in Durham, N.C., consisted of associate head coach/pitching coach Brady Kirkpatrick, hitting coach/recruiting coordinator Eric Tyler, infielders coach/recruiting coordinator Derek Simmons, director of recruiting, analytics and player development Brian Sakowski and director of operations/pitching development John Natoli.

All are joining him at UVA. Pollard said he’d like Natoli, whom he called a “brilliant, brilliant guy,” to focus on player development with the Cavaliers.

“The goal is, once we get the dust settled, I really want to bring in a true director of operations who would run camp and also be a point person for logistics,” Pollard said. “I’m really hopeful that we can hire a UVA baseball guy, somebody who played in the program, wants to be in coaching, who knows the community and has a lived experience in the program. But probably we’ll start to worry about that here in a couple of weeks when we can get this roster thing hammered down.”

On his Zoom with UVA players and recruits Tuesday night, Pollard said, he mentioned how as a boy he often made the 50-mile trip from Amherst to Charlottesville.

“It was Lynchburg or Charlottesville,” Pollard said. “You would go one direction or the other. And my uncle worked for years and years in Charlottesville. He was a carpenter and he made that commute [from Amherst] every day. He lived in the house right beside my mom and dad.”

Pollard and his wife, Stephanie, have two children: sons Thomas and Brady.

“When Steph and I got married, for years when we would come up to visit my folks for the holidays, their holiday gift to us was always, ‘We’ll keep the boys, and you two go up and have a getaway together in Charlottesville,’ ” Pollard recalled. “This was an annual tradition. We’d get a room at the Omni right at the Downtown Mall. We’d enjoy sitting outside in a nice restaurant and having a glass of wine. We just fell in love with the city.”

His parents still live in Amherst in the house in which Pollard grew up, so “this is very much a homecoming to Central Virginia,” he said.

Pollard and O’Connor have been in contact with each other recently.

“First off, I’ve been unabashed about saying that Brian is, more so than any other guy in my tenure at the ACC, the guy that I respect the most, and the guy that I’ve learned from the most and the guy that I’ve leaned on for advice and understanding the most,” Pollard said. “He’s been a great resource and been willing to do that, and through that process, we’ve become friends. And so right after he got the job at Mississippi State, we traded texts. And then he sent me a text [Tuesday] and just said, ‘Hey, I know you’re drinking from a fire hose, but let’s catch up when the dust settles.’ And I look forward to having that conversation.”

In his 13 seasons at Duke, Pollard won 420 games, the most of any coach in the history of that program.

“Coach Pollard’s impact over the past 13 years has been nothing short of transformational,” King said in a statement. “He built a championship-caliber program grounded in integrity, resilience and the development of outstanding student-athletes. We are deeply grateful for this leadership and the legacy he leaves behind.”

At UVA, Pollard is succeeding a legend. In 22 seasons under O’Connor, the Cavaliers went 917-388-2 and advanced to the College World Series seven times. Virginia won the NCAA title 10 years ago this month.

Pollard knows well what O’Connor accomplished in Charlottesville. His challenge is to uphold that standard of success.

“It’s an awesome responsibility,” Pollard said, “but it’s an awesome opportunity too.”

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