By Harry Minium
It has been an extraordinary season for Old Dominion University's baseball team, and yet there is much more this team could accomplish.
The Monarchs, who won the program's first Conference USA tournament title this past weekend, watched Sunday's NCAA tournament pairings show on a 17-hour bus ride back from Ruston, Louisiana.
"We were watching on our laptops and our phones while eating Burger King," shortstop Tommy Bell said. "That's us, though. That's Old Dominion baseball right there. We're blue collar."
The Monarchs bused back in one night to meet with their fans at Hank's Filling Station restaurant. The Monarchs had barbecue, brisket and coleslaw as they were feted by ODU followers.
And this is a team with an unusually close camaraderie that has put itself into position to perhaps punch its ticket to the College Baseball World Series in Omaha, Nebraska.
The NCAA tournament committee seeded ODU 11th nationally and sent the Monarchs to Columbia, South Carolina, as a No. 1 seed. ODU was eighth in the final NCAA RPI rankings.
The Monarchs are rated ahead of Florida State, ACC champion Duke, Mississippi, UCLA, North Carolina, Miami and, of course, both South Carolina and Virginia.
U.Va., the No. 3 seed, and South Carolina, the No. 2 seed, will play in the Columbia regional on Friday at noon. ODU takes on Jacksonville, which won the ASUN Conference tournament despite a 16-32 record, in the nightcap at 7 (ESPN3).
If ODU wins, it meets the winner of the Virginia-South Carolina game on Saturday in a double-elimination bracket that ends with the championship Monday night.
The winner of the Columbia regional will advance to the Super Regionals to meet the winner of the Fort Worth regional. Big 12 tournament champion Texas Christian University (40-17), which is seeded sixth nationally is the host of the Fort Worth regional and would host the Super Regional if it advances.
Win two out of three in the Super Regional and you're among eight teams headed to Omaha.
Difficult? Yes. South Carolina has won two national titles in the last decade and U.Va. has won one. Both have also been World Series runners-up in the last decade as well.
The Monarchs almost surely will play South Carolina in front of a big, hostile crowd. The Gamecocks finished 16-14 in the SEC, which put nine teams in the tournament.
Virginia is a talented team that played itself off the bubble by winning seven of its last nine games. There are few programs in the country as consistently excellent as U.Va.
And Jacksonville, in spite of its record, won three consecutive games in the ASUN tournament.
But the Monarchs (42-14) have won seven in a row and 10 of their last 11, and beat Louisiana Tech three times in the last 13 days on the Bulldogs' home field. As a No. 16 seed, Louisiana Tech is hosting its first regional.
The Monarchs have built something of a national following not only because of their blue-collar bonafides, but because of their powerful bats. The Monarchs lead the nation with 101 home runs. And the media have become interested in the compelling story of coach Chris Finwood, who lost his wife to pancreatic cancer two months ago.
"These kids just rallied around me, they lifted me up," he said. "This is a very special group of guys. I've never coached a team like this."
The Monarchs rallied to beat Florida Atlantic in the third game of the C-USA tournament with seven home runs, then advanced to the final, where they were razzed by a noisy Louisiana Tech crowd.
Bell rallied ODU from an early deficit with a three-run home run. Then Robbie Petracci seemingly did the impossible when he hit a home run that cleared the center field fence by what seemed like a football field.
Petracci tore an ACL last month but had taken batting practice in the last few weeks and was fitted for a brace.
After Louisiana Tech rallied in the bottom of the ninth to tie the score, Kyle Battle hit a two-run shot that gave the Monarchs a 7-5 victory.
"These guys love each other, and they fight like crazy for each other," Finwood said. "Sometimes I look out there and see Matt Coutney out there with a banged-up knee and Tommy Bell with a banged-up back. There were weeks when they couldn't practice. But they were not going to not play.
"They leaned on each other. There's a lot of connectedness with this group."
Finwood said the team was disheartened when it was left out of the 2017 NCAA tournament.
"For a mid-major to be a top-11 seed and a No. 1 seed in a regional, that's unusual," he said. "That usually go to the blue bloods. That says the committee valued our season, and all the numbers we put up and who we put them up against. It's nice to get some recognition for that, especially when we felt we got disrespected a little bit in 2017."
ODU Athletic Director Wood Selig watched the on-field celebration from the Louisiana Tech press box, where he was doing color commentary with radio voice Ted Alexander. It was an emotional moment for him.
He hired Finwood at Western Kentucky, then brought him at ODU a decade ago.
"For me, it was almost a sense of relief for him," Selig said. "Because I think outside of his family, nothing is more important to him than this baseball program. Dealing with as much adversity as he did this year with his wife's death, it was so nice to see him with the championship trophy. He went through an extreme low but thank goodness he had an extreme high.
"And I don't think we're done yet. This is one of those magical seasons. I hope we find a way to keep it going."
Battle said the team's first goal this season was to win the league title. It's second goal? To make it to Omaha.
"It's going to be tough," he said. "Playoff baseball can be a menace. But we see now who's in our way to get there. I'm excited. We're going to go to work and go out and play and see what happens."
