Radford baseball coach Karl Kuhn was at a recruiting showcase near Philadelphia Wednesday morning when a flurry of text messages started popping up on his phone.
“I had about five or six people all at once blow my phone up,” Kuhn said, “and to paraphrase it all, ‘What a nice thing Coach O’Connor said about you.’”
The messages caught Kuhn off guard. He was unaware that a few hours away in Charlottesville, UVa’s Brian O’Connor was speaking with reporters via video-conference from his office at Disharoon Park. During that session, O’Connor took the opportunity to tip his cap toward his former longtime pitching coach.
“These arms that are pitching for us, Karl Kuhn recruited,” said O’Connor, whose team leaves Wednesday evening for the team’s fifth appearance all-time at the College World Series.
“I sent a text to my friend the other day, Karl, just to thank him for bringing these guys here and helping develop them, “ O’Connor added. “I’m forever grateful to Karl Kuhn for the work he did in this program and the help laying the foundation for these pitchers to have the success that they’re having.”
Eventually, someone sent a video of O’Connor’s remarks to Kuhn. The Highlanders coach got emotional describing the first time he watched the clip.
“All I really heard in there was Brian say, ‘I had a conversation with my friend,’” Kuhn said. “I had to step away from the event for a minute because it tugged on me. It really did. He didn’t have to do that.”
Kuhn spent 16 years as O’Connor’s pitching coach before departing in August 2019 to take the head coaching job at Radford. The Wahoos finished in the top three nationally in team ERA six times in that stretch. They had the best staff ERA in the country (2.24) in 2011 and finished second nationally in 2014 with a 2.23 ERA, the lowest for the Virginia program in 40 years. After that 2014 season, Kuhn was named national pitching coach of the year by Collegiate Baseball Newspaper.
Those 2011 and 2014 teams were among the four in Kuhn’s UVa tenure to reach the College World Series. In 2015, the Cavaliers got some legendary pitching performances on their way to the first program’s first-ever national championship.
This year’s team has followed a similar script to get the Hoos back to Omaha. Senior lefty Andrew Abbott was named first-team All-ACC in his first season as a full-time starter. The first two weekends of the NCAA Tournament have featured the postseason emergence of other UVa pitchers like Griff McGarry, Brandon Neeck, and Matt Wyatt.
Kuhn has watched it all while “living through the damn television.” He heard the ESPN microphones pick up a few of his old catchphrases coming from the UVa dugout, and couldn’t help but step away momentarily when opponents like South Carolina or Dallas Baptist would take the Hoos deep. Like other Virginia supporters watching from home, Kuhn has been impressed by the way O’Connor and current pitching coach Drew Dickinson have “pulled the right strings” with the pitching staff.
Kuhn was still at UVa when Neeck underwent shoulder surgery as a freshman in 2019 and he coached McGarry (“a damn warrior,” Kuhn called the right-hander) for two seasons as he struggled to harness his tantalizing stuff. When those two combined to strike out Old Dominion hitters 24 times—the most in a single game in Virginia baseball history—with the Wahoos facing elimination in the regional round, it struck their old pitching coach personally.
“(McGarry’s) shoving, and then all of a sudden he gets a blister and you’re like, ‘God dog, is this the way? Now what are they gonna do. Oh, they’re just gonna bring in Neeck and he punches out 16, okay,’” a proud Kuhn recalled. “They kept their guys in the ballgame, and they pitched their tails off. They really did.”
Kuhn admits it has been bittersweet watching the Wahoos’ latest run “to hallowed ground in the middle of the country.” He’s been communicating with his old colleagues at UVa throughout the postseason and also had a recent text exchange with Dickinson, lauding the Cavaliers’ second-year assistant for his work with the pitching staff.
But Kuhn has tried not to step on his successor’s toes by reaching out to any of Virginia’s pitchers. He said he made a difficult deal with himself when he took the Radford job to cut off contact with his former recruits.
“I didn’t tell anybody, and I hope the guys don’t feel like I’ve just never reached out to them. But I did it on purpose,” he explained. “They need to divorce themselves from me. This is Drew’s pitching staff and he has done a marvelous job with these guys.”
After playing just 17 games because of the COVID-19 pandemic in Kuhn’s first year at Radford, the Highlanders went 23-23 this spring in his first full season as a college head coach. He says he left Virginia with the blueprint for how to build an elite baseball program. That blueprint was on display this year, Kuhn explained, as the Wahoos rallied from a 4-12 hole in ACC play to get back into the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2017.
“These guys are constant. These guys are the bar,” he said. “They’re the bar. Brian O’Connor sets it, and the staff and the people around him are the best in the damn business, and they’re great people. It’s a hell of an organization and I was just proud as hell to be a part of it.”
Now he just needs to text his old boss back.
“That’s what we all meant to each other and it was very nice for him to do that. He didn’t have to,” Kuhn said. “That’s the program, that’s the culture. That’s Brian O’Connor, and that’s what Virginia baseball is.”
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