New Virginia Tech baseball pitching coach Doug Willey experienced the single-most influential trial in his coaching career as a minor league pitching coach in the Chicago Cubs organization.
He was stationed in Mesa, Arizona, to work with the Arizona Complex League Cubs pitching staff, which routinely saw Spanish-speaking only players come and go. Willey, a burgeoning baseball mind with a trove of complex, analytical strategies and ideas, found it hard to communicate with those players.
He had no choice but to learn how to pack those ideas into concise, visual instructions, all while learning a bit of Spanish on the fly.
Willey took biometric data and used that to emulate pitchers’ ideal movements with his own body, and repeated it until it made sense. He’d do this while reiterating phrases he’d picked up from talking to Spanish-speaking coaches; simple expressions like “muevete tu cuerpo” (move your body) and “mas rapido” (faster). They combined with Willey’s visual instruction for effective interlingual communication.
Four years later in 2025, when Hokies head coach John Szefc asked Willey — a candidate for Tech’s then-newly-opened pitching coach job — about the single-most valuable experience he’s had in his coaching career, Willey talked about his time mentoring non-English-speaking players.
“I was immersed in a lot in Arizona,” Willey said. “It made me a better coach. Now I can make complex ideas easy to understand, and that’s what we want to do at [Tech]. If you have a high-level knowledge of something, it doesn’t really do anybody any good if you can't explain it to somebody.”
Szefc quickly hired Willey — who had just finished his third year as Xavier’s pitching coach — even though they started off as strangers. All it took was roughly a week of lengthy phone calls, where they discussed Willey’s past, personality and philosophy.
Willey was recommended to Szefc by acclaimed Arkansas pitching coach Matt Hobbs, who coached Willey when he was a pitcher at the university in 2016 and later gave him a graduate assistant job on the staff in 2019 — a year that the Razorbacks went to Omaha.
“Doug checked a lot of boxes experience-wise that made him the right fit,” Szefc said. “He attacks it. He attacks it very individually. He knows it’s not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing.”
Willey said he knew he belonged in Blacksburg when, on a pre-hire visit, he stood on English Field and felt like he was back in Baum-Walker Stadium in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He felt like he was home.
“I loved Arkansas,” Willey said. “I spent five years of my life there as a player and a coach, and it felt a lot like home in that sense. And the whole mantra for Blacksburg is, this is home. That makes a lot of sense to me.”
Before coaching, Willey pitched at Franklin Pierce University for four years and transferred to Arkansas for a fifth; a campaign that resulted in him getting selected by the Los Angeles Angels in the 32nd round of the 2016 MLB Draft.
His pro career didn’t go as he hoped — he retired after 17 appearances in the MiLB’s rookie league — but it was always his plan to coach at the college level. For him, professional coaching was more about information-gathering than climbing the MLB coaching ladder.
“I’ve treated all the information I’ve been exposed to as a buffet,” Willey said. “I’ve taken what I liked, I’ve left what I don’t like, and then that’s how my own philosophy has kind of morphed and been created.”
That philosophy is built largely on versatility — to blur the line between a rotation arm and a reliever. The pitching staff’s mantra is “Be a Swiss army knife,” according to Willey, and many of Tech’s arms have added at least one pitch since he arrived. Key returners like Preston Crowl and Luke Craytor (1.80 ERA) have already had career-long outings as Hokies, while Chase Swift (1.35) has dominated with new breaking balls — and Willey said he still hasn’t revealed two pitches.
Willey greatly emphasizes the preparatory and mental sides of pitching, but it’s his analytical mind that has altered Tech’s staff the most early in his tenure. Willey, who has a degree in biology from Franklin Pierce, has introduced biometric data-gathering technology that’s helped the staff round its pitch shapes while improving command and health — two areas where Tech’s pitchers have struggled in years past.
His analytical conquest will receive help this week, with the Hokies installing a force plate mound in the James C. Weaver Baseball Center. Force plate mounds have plates embedded under their landing zones, which measure the force a pitcher applies to the ground and can help coaches identify inefficiencies in players’ lower halves.
“Doug uses all these analytics, which make your game even better,” Swift said. “Last year, we didn't have any of it, and I think a lot of our players have made big gains because of that stuff.”
Though Hokies’ pitching wasn’t as analytically driven before Willey’s arrival, there was no need to sell data-based strategies to Szefc and the rest of the staff.
“I wasn’t selling new ideas just to sell new ideas, since there may have been a different approach in the past,” Willey said. “I think it was more so just selling what I felt like I could bring to the table to make pitchers better.”
Perhaps even more than analytics, though, Willey values relationships. He doesn’t give any instructions without player input, and he enjoys developing the human along with the arm. That’s why he picked college coaching in the first place.
“In the pros, I could have a player for two weeks at spring training and then not see him for another 11 months, which is tough,” Willey said. “Here I have more time with every guy, and I don’t want to give drills to give a drill. I want to tell them why I think it’s going to help that specific guy.
“And that’s coaching. I think the relationship with the guys on the staff, the back and forth, is very important. They know that I care about them genuinely. I’m always asking these guys, ‘Hey, are we good on this? You guys feel good with this? You guys feel like this is helping?’ And I trust that, at the end of the day, that they can feel what helps them and what doesn’t.”
That trust extends to Szefc, too, who isn’t pulling pitchers for the first time in recent memory. Willey has captained both mound visits and pitching changes so far this year.
“I told Szefc that I pulled pitchers in the past and did mound visits, and he’s been open to that,” Willey said. “It was not like I wanted to do it and he wanted to do it. It’s just a matter of whatever we need to do to make our guys in the best position to be ready to pitch in that moment.”
Willey and the Hokies’ pitching staff will get their biggest challenge of the season to date this weekend as they head to Arlington, Texas, for the Amegy Bank College Baseball Series. They play No. 23 Texas A&M on Friday (8 p.m. ET) before No. 4 Mississippi State on Saturday (4 p.m. ET) and No. 20 Tennessee on Sunday (11:30 a.m. ET). All games will be televised on FloSports.
“I think we’ve been prepared for it,” Willey said of the upcoming gauntlet. “We’ve talked about being the best pitching staff in the country, and we want to get tested against the best teams in the country and best programs.
“This is definitely the best pitching staff that I’ve worked with, and I’ve had some really good staffs at Arkansas. We had major leaguers on those staffs. The depth of this staff is really exciting for me, and the sense of knowing that you have some top-end guys. I just want to see them compete freely.”