UVA Baseball | Extended Stay in Omaha Eludes Cavaliers

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

OMAHA, Neb. — As U2’s “Beautiful Day” played over the sound system, Virginia’s players lingered in the outfield, in no hurry to start packing up their gear at Charles Schwab Field Omaha.

The upbeat music did not match the Cavaliers’ mood. A season capped by the program’s seventh trip to the Men’s College World Series ended Sunday afternoon with a 7-3 loss to ACC foe Florida State in front of 23,989.

Two days earlier, in the opening game of the eight-team MCWS, Virginia had given up a run in the bottom of the ninth and lost 3-2 to another ACC rival, North Carolina. And now reality was sinking in as players, coaches and staffers embraced in right field. For graduate transfers Jacob Ference, Bobby Whalen, Angelo Tonas and Joe Savino and, in all likelihood, juniors Griff O’Ferrall, Casey Saucke, Ethan Anderson and Jay Woolfolk, the game marked the end of their college careers.

“You go out there and you realize there’s certain guys that you’re not going to play with again, and it gets really emotional,” sophomore Henry Godbout said outside UVA’s locker room. “It’s really not the most fun thing, honestly. We all love each other, and it’s tough.”

The MCWS starts with two four-team, double-elimination brackets whose winners meet in a best-of-three championship series. Every year in Omaha, one team in each bracket goes 0-2 and heads home early. That was the Wahoos’ fate last year, too.

“That’s frustrating, disappointing,” head coach Brian O’Connor said. “Nobody likes to go two-and-out.”

The Hoos, who finished 46-17 in their 21^st season under O’Connor, went 5-0 over the NCAA tournament’s first two weekends to advance to Omaha for the third time in four seasons.

In the NCAA tournament, every team except the champion ends its season with a loss, O’Connor noted. “Today it was us, and we’ll deal with that and move on. But it doesn’t take away from how proud I am of the young men that wear our uniform and how they fight and compete every day and represent themselves, their family and this baseball program. They represent it with class all the time. They play the game the right way. And sometimes the game can be tough and cruel to you, like it was this weekend. But it doesn’t take away from the season that Virginia baseball had and who…