As Postseason Nears, Notre Dame Baseball Not Losing Sight Of Its Fast Rise
With a three-game series Thursday through Saturday at Virginia Tech, followed by the ACC Tournament, then the NCAA Regionals and a potential trip to the College World Series after that, Notre Dame baseball coach Link Jarrett clearly understands the meat of his season looms.
But before his Irish begin their postseason feast, Jarrett wants his players to understand the “magnitude” of what they have already accomplished in the regular season.
Picked in the preseason by the ACC coaches to finish last in the Atlantic Division and with a three-game series remaining — which will wrap up the regular season — Jarrett’s No. 3 Irish (26-10, 22-10 ACC) have already clinched the division.
And win or lose this weekend, they have also already secured the best regular-season record in the deepest conference in the country. At some point this season, 13 different ACC teams cracked the Baseball America top-25 poll.
“There’s obviously way more left to do but nobody can ever take away the fact that this team was ACC Atlantic Division champions, the No. 1 seed, the overall ACC regular-season champion,” Jarrett said. “They separated from the pack and that is very, very hard to do, especially in a 36-game schedule against the caliber of teams in this league.”
This marks the first time since joining the ACC in 2014 that the Irish claimed a division title and it is also the first time since 2006 as a member of the Big East that Notre Dame baseball won a regular-season league championship.
Though idle last weekend, Notre Dame still leads the ACC with 22 conference wins, which are the most for the program in a league season since it recorded 22 Big East victories in 2001. No other ACC team has 20 wins, heading into weekend play.
“That’s really something that you don’t see in sports very often but that’s what this conference is about,” Jarrett explained of surviving one of the toughest schedules in the country. “And our guys got through the gauntlet better than anybody else.”
Jarrett said his team separated from the rest of the ACC field by winning when it shouldn’t have. The Irish coach highlighted two particular games that best showcased his team’s resiliency.
On April 9, the Irish trailed 7-0 to Georgia Tech before rallying for a 10-9 win. And on April 24, Notre Dame trailed Boston College 9-0 but came back for a 13-9 win.
The Irish are also 6-1 in games decided by one run and won their only extra-inning game March 19 against Duke.
“If you don’t win four, or five or six games that were very difficult and didn’t look like games you should win,” Jarrett said, “then you’re just going to be there right in the middle of the pack.”
Notre Dame enters its technically meaningless three-game series against Virginia Tech today coming off of a bye weekend and with 11 days between games. And given the advantages being the top seed in the ACC Tournament will bring — Jarrett is even provided some of his team’s scheduling input — the Irish are positioned well to claim even more hardware in the weeks to come.
“This is an accumulation of how hard they’ve worked, probably going back to last year,” said Jarrett, who started 11-2 as a rookie Irish coach in 2020 before COVID-19 shut down the season. “The transition to us as coaches, it’s just challenging. You’re putting in a whole new way of doing things and sometimes it takes a little while to see the fruits of that labor.”
The ACC Championship runs May 25-30 in Charlotte, N.C. ACC officials announced this week plans to allow 100 percent spectator capacity inside of Truist Field.
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