Hoos Rolling With Punches in HattiesburgHoos Rolling With Punches in Hattiesburg
Olivia McLucas

Hoos Rolling With Punches in Hattiesburg

In its first game in the double-elimination NCAA regional in Hattiesburg, Miss., No. 2 seed Virginia meets No. 3 Jacksonville State on Friday at 7 p.m. ET.

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

HATTIESBURG, Miss. — With his baseball team en route to practice at Pete Taylor Park, University of Virginia head coach Chris Pollard had to call an audible Thursday morning.

After an NCAA representative informed Pollard that a thunderstorm in the area had made Southern Mississippi’s stadium unavailable, UVA’s team bus headed instead to an indoor facility with batting cages.

Driving rain continued to fall for most of the day, but the Cavaliers pressed on. They practiced Wednesday afternoon at Sumrall High School, about 20 miles outside Hattiesburg, and had a productive session in less than ideal conditions.

“A little rain ain’t gonna hurt you,” outfielder Harrison Didawick reminded his teammates as they headed out to the diamond at Sumrall, whose baseball program is a perennial power in Mississippi.

If Mother Nature’s impact on his team’s schedule bothered Pollard, who’s in his first year at UVA, he hid it well.

“I think that's something that probably I struggled with early in my career,” he said Thursday evening at the team hotel, “and when as a coach, or as a staff, you don't accommodate change well, I think your players don't accommodate change well. They tend to take on the personality of the staff. So in 2017, we started practicing it.”

Pollard was at Duke then, and his team began working on “what we call the fog of war of the season,” he said. “It started after a really lousy road trip out to play in a season-opening tournament at Surprise, Arizona.”

The Blue Devils went 0-4 in Surprise, and “ever since, we just talk a lot about embracing the inconvenience and the unpredictability of the season,” Pollard said. “So our guys have become accustomed to kind of rallying around the idea of, ‘Hey, this is a wrench in the plans, let’s accept this, let's be great at rolling with the punches,’ and I thought today was a good example of that.

“We went to one indoor facility and got a ton of swings, and then had to come back, get some lunch, and go to a really cool high school field and get in a little bit of defense ... I wasn't sure this morning, with the way the forecast looked, if we'd be able to do that or not, but fortunately we were able to kind of accomplish everything we wanted to get done.”

When adversity arises, pitcher Henry Zatkowski said during a break at the indoor facility, the Wahoos “just head on through the storm, like buffaloes.”

Buffaloes? Let Zatkowski explain.

“Coach Pollard tells the story about the buffalo, the cow and the horse. The cow turns away and runs from the storm. The horse waits out the storm, but the buffalo goes straight and through the storm. That’s how you spend the least amount of time with it. You just head on straight through.”

UVA will play its first game at the NCAA tournament’s Hattiesburg Regional on Friday night. At 1 p.m. ET, top-seeded Southern Miss (44-15) takes on No. 4 seed Little Rock (36-26) at Pete Tayor Park. At 7 p.m. ET, second-seeded Virginia (36-21) meets third-seeded Jacksonville State (46-13).

The double-elimination regional continues Saturday with an elimination game at 4 p.m. ET and a winners’ bracket game at 9 p.m. ET.

Not everyone who’ll take the field for the Hoos on Friday has NCAA tournament experience, but many of the team’s starters do. Seven players followed Pollard to UVA from Duke, which advanced to an NCAA super regional last year. Players such as Didawick and shortstop Eric Becker have been to the College World Series with Virginia.

Postseason experience is “good,” Pollard said Thursday. “I think it can also be somewhat overrated. I think where it probably comes into play is if you match up with the hosts in a winners’ bracket game. That's a different energy than maybe you get in any other situation.

“I think once the first pitch is thrown [Friday night], it's a neutral-site baseball game, and we've played six of those over the course of this spring. But in today's college baseball and today's college athletics, period, there’s certainly no substitute for experience. And to have older guys that have been through it, that have a steady pace and a steady heart rate, it certainly doesn't hurt.”

Kyle JohnsonKyle Johnson

Zatkowski, a sophomore lefthander, will start against the Gamecocks. He’s accustomed to pitching on this stage. As a Duke freshman in 2025, he started two games in the NCAA tournament: the first against Oklahoma State in the regional and the second against Murray State in the super regional.

“It’s definitely a different atmosphere,” Zatkowski said Thursday. “There’s a lot more people [in the stands], a lot more on the line, I guess. It takes more to get the job done.”

Zatkowski is 8-1 this season, with a 4.03 earned-run average. He leads Virginia with 92 strikeouts, and he’s looking to become the first Cavalier since Connelly Early in 2023 to record 100 strikeouts in a season.

His first year at UVA has “been awesome,” said Zatkowski, who’s from Clarksville, Md. “The guys here are awesome. With a bunch of us just coming in from different schools, a bunch of the returners were super helpful, telling us where everything is, telling us the history behind the school, the tradition. It’s been great.”

Zatkowski’s first five appearances this season were starts, after which his ERA was 6.04. His role changed. No. 9 moved into the bullpen for about a month before rejoining the weekend rotation as a starter.

“It’s been a little weird throughout,” Zatkowski said of his season, “but it’s been an awesome journey.”

Pollard said he believed Zatkowski “had a chance to be a really good weekend guy in this league, and it's been so impressive what he's done in ACC play. I wasn't sure after those first two starts. Pitching sometimes is a finicky, fragile existence, but what he's done to work himself back into a really good place and the way he's pitched over the second half of this year [is impressive].”

Zatkowski has pitched at least six innings in each of his past three starts, all against ACC teams, and “one of the most important things you've got to have in this opening round is for that starter to get you deeper into the ball game,” Pollard said. “If you have to go to the bullpen early in the weekend, it puts you in a position where it may compromise you later in the weekend.”

That adds a little pressure, Zatkowski acknowledged, “but it’s not really changing much that I’ve done from the start of the year. It’s pretty much the same process, same stuff that I’ve been doing, same pregame work, same mentality on the mound.”

The Cavaliers, who advanced to the College World Series in both 2023 and ’24, missed the NCAA tournament last year. Becker was a freshman at UVA in ‘24, and getting back to the NCAAs “means everything,” he said Monday at Disharoon Park.

“That was probably the best experience that I've had playing baseball, and I’m just trying to help the younger guys, help out some of the guys who haven't experienced that, just to get that taste of it,” Becker said. “And this is where it starts right now in this regional.”

Didawick, who has been to Omaha twice with the Hoos, agreed. The stakes might be higher in these games, he said, but it’s important not to “treat them any differently. Just treat them like another game, another day. Just have fun, go out there and enjoy it. Be grateful for it, because not a lot of teams get these opportunities.”

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The Cavaliers practiced at Sumrall High School on ThursdayThe Cavaliers practiced at Sumrall High School on Thursday