Virginia Tech baseball was selected to its first NCAA Regional since 2022 and second of head coach John Szefc’s nine-year tenure on Monday. The Hokies were revealed as the No. 2 seed in the Los Angeles Regional on ESPN’s selection show, joining No. 1 overall seed UCLA, No. 3 seed Cal Poly and No. 4 seed Saint Mary’s.
“There’s a feeling of accomplishment making a regional before you actually play the games,” said Szefc, who has now made nine regionals between head coaching stints at Tech, Maryland and Marist. “There’s only 33 at-large berths, and there are 308 teams in college baseball. There’s a lot of competition for those berths, and it’s gotten be more and more difficult to grab one of those.”
The Hokies open regional play as the home team against Cal Poly at 8 p.m. ET on Friday (ESPN+) at Jackie Robinson Stadium. Regionals are double-elimination style, meaning a win would have Tech play the UCLA-Saint Mary’s winner, while a loss would drop it into the loser’s bracket. Two losses would end its season.
Szefc expects ace Brett Renfrow to return in the regional after not playing last week’s pair of ACC Tournament games.
Tech’s No. 2 seed was unexpected, but not terribly surprising given parts of its résumé and a committee that appeared to emphasize supplementary metrics like strength of schedule and Diamond Sports Rating, while valuing ACC performance in general.
The Hokies finished No. 14 in strength of schedule, No. 25 in DSR and 15-15 in ACC play. NC State made the tournament at No. 50 in RPI while finishing 14-16 in the ACC with no conference tournament wins — and was not even one of the committee’s “Last Four In.”
Still, Szefc noted that Tech’s No. 42 RPI is typically that of a No. 3 seed. Was he surprised by his team’s seeding?
“Probably,” Szefc said. “All anybody looks at is the RPI, and ours was in the low 40s. ... I initially thought we would have been a No. 3 seed. It didn’t happen that way, but, honestly, the only difference is home and away.”
That said, the Hokies drew a difficult regional, especially considering the difference between a No. 2 and No. 3 seed’s experience in a regional is negligible.
The Mustangs (36-22, 22-8 Big West) are a manageable matchup, but if Szefc and Co. win, they’ll likely have to beat the Bruins twice. Plus, every school in the regional is based in California, while the Hokies must travel across the country.
That’s probably because they’re lower — if not last — on the spectrum of No. 2 seeds. They’ll have to trek roughly 2,400 miles, while no other team with the same seed will travel more than 1,500. Half of the No. 2 seeds will travel less than 500, and only Tech is in a regional with the top-seeded Bruins.
“I didn’t think we’d be going off to California or anything like that,” Tech catcher Henry Cooke said. “But it’ll be fun going out there again for the second time this year.”
The Hokies tripped to Northern California in their 2-1 series win over Cal in early May. Szefc — whose No. 3 seed Maryland team won the Los Angeles Regional over No. 1 overall seed UCLA in 2015 — did not seem concerned by the upcoming travel.
“I know the drill out there,” Szefc said. “We’ll be fine. Our guys are travel-tested and battle-tested, so we’ll practice tomorrow and head out there and prepare for Cal Poly.”
Tech did not permit media to attend its selection party, which took place at the Student-Athlete Performance Center on campus. Unlike most other programs, it did not have its watch party shown live on ESPN’s selection show.
Szefc, who took post-selection media availability over Zoom, said that wasn’t because the team feared not being selected for the tournament.
“I didn’t really put a whole lot of thought into cameras and the media part of it,” Szefc said. “Our guys are fine with that. How everything went was fine.”
Cal Poly went 36-22 overall and 22-8 in the Big West. The Mustangs are No. 74 in RPI after winning the Big West Tournament for the second straight year. Saint Mary’s finished 34-25 overall and 15-12 in the West Coast Conference and also won its tournament.
UCLA clinched the Big Ten after a 51-7 finish, which included a 28-2 conference record, and boasts the No. 2 ERA in the country (3.31). It joined Virginia Tech at the Amegy Bank College Baseball Series in late February and beat Tennessee, Texas A&M and Mississippi State, all NCAA Tournament teams that beat the Hokies that weekend.
Why was this the first Tech team to make the tournament since 2022? Nobody on the team will tell you about some seismic shift in the program between the previous seasons and this one. Rather, Szefc and Cooke said the team is simply healthy this go-round.
“Our teams have been pretty talented over the last four years,” Szefc said. “Knock on wood, we have not had colossal season-ending injuries. We had 17 major injuries over the last three years.”
“Every single team I’ve been on has been just like this one,” said Cooke, who has been at Tech since 2023. “It’s just been a matter of injuries. Now, it’s coming together.”
If the Hokies leave Los Angeles victorious, they’ll play the winner of the Morgantown Regional, which includes West Virginia, Wake Forest, Kentucky and Binghamton. That’s a tough ask, though, with UCLA likely looming if Tech is to advance to the regional finals.
Still, the team feels like it can beat anyone.
“One thing I will say is this,” Szefc started. “If you’re a No. 1 seed in a regional, you’re expected to win. And as a No. 1 seed in any regional, that’s a lot of weight on guys’ shoulders. They still have to go out there and get 27 outs. It’s always interesting to see how a team is going to perform when you have that kind of weight on your shoulders.”
“[UCLA] is just the same as any other game,” Hokies infielder Ethan Gibson said. “We know we have talent. We know we can definitely shock some people, control what we can control and have fun with it.”