Connor Jones believes it was Alec Bettinger who brought it up first, although his former Virginia baseball teammate isn’t sure he deserves the credit.

The two right-handers still remain in daily communication, largely through a group text thread that also includes fellow former UVa pitchers Jack Roberts and Matt Doughty. They were only teammates as a foursome for one season with the Wahoos but it was the kind of season they wind up making documentaries about: Virginia’s unlikely run to the 2015 College World Series championship.

Six years later, at some point in the midst of this 2021 Cavalier baseball season, someone on the thread—Jones says it was Bettinger—first made the comparison between the current UVa midseason turnaround and the one that the eventual 2015 champs successfully pulled off.

“I was like, ‘You’re not kidding, man. This is kind of crazy,’” recalled an enthusiastic Jones, now pitching for the St. Louis Cardinals’ Triple-A team in Memphis.

Even if Bettinger, who made his Major League debut with the Milwaukee Brewers last month, wasn’t the one who first noticed the parallels, he certainly didn’t dispute them.

“It’s just hard not to think about 2015 when you look at this team this year,” Bettinger explained. “They definitely have scuffled at times, like we did in ’15. And then all of a sudden it’s getting closer to the end of the ACC season and they catch fire. They have guys starting to step up, very similar to how we were in ’15. The rest will just lay out how it will, but we’ll see.”

The four former pitchers on that group text are just a few of the players from that 2015 team who will be watching intently this weekend when the current team takes the field at the Columbia Regional of this year’s NCAA Tournament. The No. 3 seed in the region, Virginia opens against host South Carolina at noon Friday. Old Dominion, the No. 11 national seed, and No. 4 regional seed Jacksonville round out the four-team double-elimination bracket.

The last time the Cavaliers were a No. 3 seed in a region? The 2015 postseason.

Both this year’s ballclub (No. 5) and the 2015 Cavaliers (No. 4) began as preseason top-5 teams in the country according to Baseball America. Both endured midseason swoons that included getting swept at home in unceremonious fashion. Both eventually rebounded to climb back up the ACC standings and then earn spots in the 64-team NCAA Tournament.

Kenny Towns, the third baseman in 2015, now lives just north of Charlottesville. He has tried to watch this year’s team on the ACC Network whenever possible but gets most of his updates on Twitter. He has seen a familiar script unfold.

“Kind of down in the dumps a little bit, and right now they’re playing good baseball,” Towns explained. “Exactly like we were doing in 2015, they turned it around when their backs were against the wall, when they weren’t even sure or promised they’d be playing in the postseason. There’s definitely some comparisons there, and not a bad omen by any means to have those comparisons.”

When asked about the lowest point of that 2015 season, Towns and several former teammates harkened back to the three-game series at home against Louisville over Easter weekend in early April. The Wahoos weren’t competitive that weekend, losing all three to the eventual ACC regular-season champs by a combined score of 23-5.

“We got our butts handed to us,” admitted right-hander Josh Sborz, now a pitcher for the Texas Rangers. “At no point do I remember us having a chance of winning. They just brought it and they beat us bad.”

Those three losses dropped UVa to 19-12 overall on the season (the Wahoos opened that year with 10 straight wins, all away from home because of snowy weather in Charlottesville) but just 5-10 in the ACC. In the midst of the sweep, head coach Brian O’Connor and his staff held a heated two-hour meeting with the team, calling them out for going through the motions and not carrying themselves properly. Players were given the opportunity to address their teammates as well.

“Oh yeah, I got put on a pitch fork,” Towns recalled. “That was definitely a time where reality set in and we were like, ‘We need to start playing some baseball.’”

“They definitely weren’t babying us,” Ernie Clement, the primary second baseman on that 2015 team as a freshman, said with a chuckle. “It was more of, ‘We either need to wake up and get going or our season is going to end.’ It was definitely a heart-to-heart meeting with our team and we had to be real with ourselves. It ended up being the difference and making us kind of realize we needed to get going.”

Any margin for error had evaporated by the time Virginia went to North Carolina six weeks after that Louisville series. The Hoos had won three of four since returning from the exam break, including a pair of conference wins against Duke. But they still sat at 30-19 overall and just 12-15 in the league going into the regular season’s final weekend. Not only were the Wahoos on the NCAA Tournament bubble, but there was work to do just to clinch a play-in spot in the ACC Tournament, which was then still a 10-team field.

Prior to the opener in Chapel Hill, O’Connor again had a frank conversation with his team about what was at stake, though his tone this time was more encouraging than confrontational.

“Oak just laid it out for us like, ‘Hey, this is what we need to do. We’re going to tell you straight up that we need to win this series to even have a shot at postseason baseball,’” Bettinger recalled. “And that’s just kind of what we needed. We knew that, but it was nice that Oak wasn’t hiding it and we just embraced it.”

The Wahoos took all three from UNC that weekend, earning the program’s first-ever sweep in Chapel Hill and clinching a spot at the ACC Tournament and, ultimately, an NCAA regional.

This year’s team endured a rough March that included Notre Dame, the ACC’s regular-season champion, outscoring the Cavaliers 30-12 amid a three-game sweep in Charlottesville. Virginia was just 11-13 overall and 4-11 in the ACC when it went to Atlanta to open April with three games against Georgia Tech.

O’Connor chose the lead-up to that series for this year’s candid conversation. His tone was encouraging, like the one he used six years prior, and his message was simple: Their backs were against the wall. The goal became a .500 finish in ACC play, and to get there they needed to win at least two of three in each of their seven remaining conference series.

The Wahoos bottomed out with a loss in the opener of that Georgia Tech series but rallied to take the final two games. It was UVa’s first conference series win of the season. It got the turnaround started.

“It seems like they fell harder, and then got it rolling earlier and faster and better than we did,” said Jones. “I mean, they had to, really. That gets me excited for them.”

Virginia ended up winning six of those final seven ACC series. The lone series loss, at home against Louisville, was countered in the standings by a three-game sweep of Wake Forest. The Hoos carried that momentum into last week’s ACC Tournament in Charlotte, where they reached the semifinals after a pair of wins in pool play, including a 14-1 drubbing of top seed Notre Dame.

“All of a sudden it was like, man, these guys can’t lose,” said Jones. “Just following along it really never made sense to me because I know there’s a lot of talented guys over there. At least the older guys that I’m more familiar with, and I’m sure they brought in a bunch of good recruits. So it just didn’t make sense to me how this team couldn’t be better, and all of a sudden they are.”

From what Sborz had been able to watch, he saw a team that was following the same template as the 2015 Cavaliers.

“You see the older guys sort of take over,” he explained, singling out the “complete and utter dominance” of senior left-hander Andrew Abbott, who enters this weekend’s regional with a 5-0 record and 0.79 ERA in his last five starts. Abbott hasn’t been scored on in his last 24.2 innings; Sborz finished his college career with 27 straight scoreless innings, including 19 out of the bullpen during the Wahoos’ NCAA Tournament run.

Sborz was part of a veteran UVa core that had reached the College World Series the previous season. A few of those 2015 veterans had also contributed to the Cavaliers’ super regional team in 2013.

With the COVID-19 pandemic impacting both last spring’s college season and last summer’s MLB Draft, this year’s Virginia team is also loaded with veterans. But it’s a group that lacks the postseason experience of that 2015 core; UVa’s last NCAA appearance came in 2017, when the current seniors were still in high school. Clement compared the situation for those veterans to what he and the two other first-years in the everyday lineup, first baseman Pavin Smith and center fielder Adam Haseley, endured in 2015.

Smith and Haseley started all 68 games that season, while Clement started all but seven. All three were at their best in the postseason. Clement’s walk-off hit against Maryland in the super regionals sent the Wahoos back to Omaha, Haseley hit a team-best .364 in the three-game CWS Finals against Vanderbilt, and Smith smacked both a game-tying two-run home run and the go-ahead single in the Game 3 win that clinched the Cavaliers’ title.

Clement, who is back with Cleveland’s Triple-A team in Columbus after spending one day on the big league roster this weekend as the extra player for a doubleheader, says this year’s team will need similar contributions from players who enter this weekend’s regional without previous postseason experience.

“Pavin, Adam, and I, we had been tested all year long, and at the end of the year it all came together,” he explained. “All that failure and adversity we faced early on, we really benefited from that because we weren’t afraid of anything at the end of the year.”

The current players are familiar with facing similar adversity. They’ve spent the past two months playing what amounted to playoff baseball, chipping away after that slow start to play their way back onto the NCAA bubble and ultimately into the tournament. They believe that carrying that approach into the postseason can only help this weekend.

Six years before watching this year’s team build that momentum while the season was at stake, players from the 2015 team lived it themselves. Those former Cavaliers agree that their postseason run was built on a combination of that back-against-the-wall approach that was forged down the regular season stretch, and the confidence that came from finding success with that approach.

Sborz believes this year’s team similarly found its identity as it started winning more ballgames.

“I think they stopped pressing as much, and started to create their own idea of who they are. And now the wins just started rattling off,” he said. “Our issue was we put so much pressure on ourselves, trying to win every single game like we had been doing the year before, and it just wasn’t working out that way. When we started having fun and enjoying the time we had together, we just started whooping up on everybody.”

“In your mind, you can’t play tight, pressure-filled baseball for the past three months, or whatever it’s been,” said Jones. “At this point it looks like they’re having a ton of fun, and I think that’s so important. But the position they’ve been in, they’re used to this now. They’ve been playing do-or-die baseball for a while now, but they’re not looking at it like that.”

One last common thread between the two ballclubs: a veteran coaching staff anchored by O’Connor and associate head coach Kevin McMullan, who have both been in the dugout for O’Connor’s entire 18-year tenure at Virginia. Assistant Matt Kirby is in his 10th season with the program. The lone difference on the staff is at pitching coach, where Drew Dickinson is in his second season at UVa after succeeding longtime assistant Karl Kuhn, now the head coach at Radford.

O’Connor’s UVa teams are 48-32 in NCAA Tournament games. He has four College World Series appearances on his resume, including that 2015 championship. Virginia’s current players have been benefitting from the staff’s experience all year, veterans from that 2015 team say, even if they may not realize it yet.

“The stuff that the coaching staff puts you through to prepare you for this kind of stuff there,” said Bettinger, “it’s no surprise that those guys are tough and are able to do what they’re doing right now.”

“All throughout the year, the coaches really tested us. They made it really hard on us, they put a lot of pressure on us. At the end of the year they backed off,” Clement recalled. “And I think that was really important because we kind of got to ease off and just have fun, and let everything take care of itself. I think it’s really important to just enjoy the moment and have fun with it.”

The finish to the 2015 team’s story is well chronicled. The Wahoos survived a 14-10, 11-inning win against USC that ended at 4:18 a.m. ET to clinch the Lake Elsinore Regional. Back in Charlottesville for a super regional, they took two in a row from Maryland, capped by Clement’s unforgettable walk-off. In Omaha, the Hoos beat No. 4 national seed Florida twice as part of a run to the CWS Finals, where they rallied after dropping the first game against Vanderbilt to win the best-of-three series and the championship.

Virginia went 10-2 during the NCAA Tournament. Ace left-hander Nathan Kirby returned from a two-month injury layoff to record the final six outs against Vandy. Sborz and his scoreless inning streak earned College World Series MVP.

This year’s team will author the final chapter of its story at some point in the next few weeks, whether it comes in Columbia, in a super regional, or once again in Omaha. They may not always be able to watch every pitch but members of that 2015 club will be following along as best they can, whether that’s on social media or by checking box scores or through group texts with former teammates.

And those former Hoos have a pretty good idea of how they’d like to see this year’s story end.

“This is the most I’ve been engaged in a while just because the storyline is so interesting,” Jones admitted. “I’m excited for Coach O’Connor, and Drew and Mac and the staff up there. I’m proud of what they’ve done, and we’re really fired up to watch along and follow.”

“This is the best time of the year to be playing your best baseball, so you really can’t beat it,” said Towns. “I think they’re 10 wins away now. If my math is correct, if everything’s the same, just 10 wins away.”

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