Cavalier Corner

June 2016

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hits in high school and everybody is telling him he is the best thing since white bread, then all of a sudden you want to add things to his repertoire," Kuhn explained. "That means he has to change and then those things are against his comfort level, because he's always thrown hard and you're telling him we need to teach you how to throw softer with a curve ball or varying speeds on his slider and you want to teach him to do it with less effort." Jones, however, made the choice to adapt the changes and he delivered a steady rookie season out of the bullpen, throwing 55 in- nings over 25 outings (one start and 24 relief appearances) with a 3.13 ERA and a 40-to-23 strikeouts-to-walks ratio. He gave up just 42 hits and no home runs. "I wanted to play coming in freshman year," Jones stated. "I wanted to make what- ever contribution or help the team however I could, whether it was throwing to a left- handed batter or starting every game." Despite a solid first-year regular season, Jones struggled late in the campaign, hitting the proverbial "freshman wall." In late April, he was sporting a 4-1 record and a team-lead- ing 1.07 ERA in 42 innings. But over his final nine outings of the season Jones' ERA bal- looned to 3.13 over just 12 innings of work. "You finally get the kid to [make some changes] freshman year, and he has a really good freshman year and he runs out of gas a little bit," Kuhn said. Jones made his final appearance of the season May 30 in an NCAA Regional con- test against Bucknell. That meant watching the Super Regional and Virginia's national runner-up run in the College World Series from the dugout. The disappointment of missing out on the

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