ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE BASEBALL CHAMPIONSHIP

May 30, 2021

Chris Pollard

Truist Field

Duke Blue Devils

Postgame Press Conference

Duke 1, NC State 0

CHRIS POLLARD: I'm so elated for these guys. Honestly I feel numb. It was an incredible job ballgame. What a great championship atmosphere, a tremendous crowd. Charlotte has put on an unbelievable event. We had so much fun here this week and what a great baseball game. You know, both teams really pitched, and really competed on the mound. And it was really hard to string any offense together.

Great job by Ethan Murray with two strikes, got a changeup up and hit the double and then we moved him over with a sac fly and scored him with a sac fly, and you know, after that, it was really hard to get anything going offensively. I tell you, that was my first look at Chris Villaman since he had been high school and he was as good as advertised.

Just a tremendous ballgame. I couldn't be more proud of our guys and we are going to enjoy this on the ride home.

Q. Looking back a little bit, when you first took the Duke job, a lot of people told you privately, it's not a place where you can win, and what did you see and how long honestly did you think it would take to be competitive?

CHRIS POLLARD: Yeah, a lot of my closest friends in baseball told me I was making a mistake. You know, for me, it was always about the combination of ACC Baseball, the opportunity to play in the ACC, combined with a world-class education.

I just felt really strongly that who is not going to be at least intrigued of the idea of playing baseball in the ACC while getting a Duke degree. We've had an unbelievable recruiting coordinator now for nine years, now an associate head coach, who has just continued to go out there and out-hustle and beat the bushes in finding great players and guys that really do value that combination of elite academics, one of the world's best universities with a chance to play in this great baseball conference.

We felt like we could recruit to Duke and we have been fortunate to have great kids come in here, and Josh Jordan deserves a lot of credit for that.

Q. You just touched on how extremely well-pitched this game was, but if you would touch on Cooper and the performance he had, arguably one of the best I've seen this season.

CHRIS POLLARD: Yeah, and I think it was the best start of his career, and you know, he had a really rough start in his last start at Clemson, last regular season start, and it just shows his maturity and toughness.

And the one thing I love about Cooper is good start, bad start, his preparation for the next week never changes. He has a great process. He's an incredibly hard worker, and he never gets too enamored with his success and he never beats himself up too much when he struggles. He just gets right back to his work, and I think his preparation is as good as anybody's and that's aloud him to not sort of succumb to falling into the trap of losing confidence. He just gets right back out on the horse and today, he was really good with a fastball. It was up to 93 and then the breaking ball was producing a lot of swing-and-miss, and he was just really tough.

Q. Good on your pitching staff that you have a really fresh pitching staff for the NCAA Tournament.

CHRIS POLLARD: We were so efficient, we'll have to get some guys some work on Tuesday. We'll likely do a simulated game on Tuesday to make sure some pitchers get some work and are sharp going into the regional, because you never know, you may have to play four ballgames to win a regional. We've been through that in Athens a couple years ago.

So I was really impressed and I can't say enough about the job by Chris Gordon, our pitching coach. Taking over really an impossible spot just a few weeks before the season started, having so much inexperience in the bullpen, and then we hit a wall there in April where we were struggling. And it's easy at that point for everybody to start questioning everybody, right.

And he found a way to work our guys through that to get to the other side of it, and man, I think we've pitched as well in the month of May as anybody in the country, and he deserves an enormous amount of credit for that.

Q. Is that great to have it early, having hit that wall in April instead of now, because if you had that now --

CHRIS POLLARD: For sure, if we hit that wall in May, we'd probably be sitting at home right now.

Inevitably you play a college baseball season, you have those lulls. You have to survive. I tell the guys, there are stretches in the college baseball season you don't try to thrive, you survive. And we had one of those stretches in the middle of April, and you just have to work your way to the other side of it.

We have an expression in our program, we say "stay in the fight." And that's what you do, you can't give up on yourself or give up on the process. You have to keep grinding and trust that you can get to the other side of it. Our guys did that this year, and boy, that's a really satisfying feeling, just a lot of pride as a coach to see them work through that.

And not just for the success that they have had in this year, but when you learn how to battle through adversity, there's a carryover effect for everything that you do down the road. Guys will build off of this year, this season and everything that they have been through for the rest of their lives.

Q. I wanted to ask the sixth inning mound visit when Coach comes out and seems like it's a really easy time for Cooper and other guys to start pressing, and then Cooper cracks a smile, Ethan is smiling and I'm wondering what is allowing the guys to just play and look like it's backyard whiffle ball and very free out there.

CHRIS POLLARD: That's one of the things that we've really tried to make a point of emphasis down the stretch is finding the joy in competing. And I'll ask; I'd love to know what Coach Gordon said to him in that moment right there, too, but it's a great piece of coaching, whatever he said.

We talked before every game down the stretch here about just finding ways to enjoy the moment, to be loose, to have fun with it. These guys have worked so hard. We have asked more of this year's team than any team certainly in my coaching career with all the protocols and some of the difficult things they have had to go through.

So I really wanted them just to enjoy this ride down the stretch, and it's great to see them do it. I walked into the locker room this morning for our pregame meeting, and they are jamming music and they are dancing and for me is a big part of the fun of this is watching them enjoy the experience.

Q. In the sixth inning, Cooper induces a couple routine groundballs and through no fault of his own, there's a runner on third base with one out. You've got Matt Dockman, a lefty, a quality lefty in the pen. State has a couple of good left-handed at-bats coming up. What made you decide to leave Cooper in? Talk about his ability to work his way out of that jam.

CHRIS POLLARD: I tell you what, man, that is an awesome question, and there was a lot of conversation going on in the dugout during that period of time.

You know, if I'm being honest with you, if you play that situation by the book, you play the percentages, Matt Dockman should have been in in that moment.

We talked about that, and we even had, if I'm being honest with you, we had some disagreement in the moment about how to manage it. And ultimately decided that Cooper deserved the opportunity to work himself off the field right there. He pitched such a great ballgame, and you know, we felt like he had pitched that part of their lineup tough, and we gave him a chance to work through it and get off the field, and he was able to induce a ground ball to Tatum and get us off the field.

But it went against my -- you know, we try to coach based on the analytics, and it absolutely went against the analytics to leave him in to face those guys right there.

Q. One quick follow-up. A factoid they said on TV, I assume they are correct, but in four ACC Tournament games, not one of your opponent the attempted a steal. What does that say about not just Mike Rothenberg's ability, but the ability to get rid of the ball quick.

CHRIS POLLARD: Yeah, that's pretty specific. It says a lot about Mike Rothenberg and the job he's done, and he did it time and time late in that game where he had to block an executed two-strike breaking ball when it would have been really easy to take a chance and try to advance a base to get into scoring position and put the tying run at second base.

Again, I want to highlight, it says a lot about the job that Chris Gordon has done, because that wasn't a strength of ours early in the year, and it certainly wasn't a strength for Cooper Stinson early in the year.

Today, we were intentional about slowing the game down and picking to first base often. We just said, look, you know what, nobody is going to like it, but we're going to force the issue with this because if we don't, we feel like State could get the run game going. They have been really aggressive taking extra bases earlier in the tournament.

We talked about that with our team this morning, and you know, we just said look, if we have to pick five or six times during an at-bat, that's what we'll do, but we'll just try to wear them down a little bit by holding them tight at first base.