During his time as the head coach at Kennesaw State, Pete D’Amour was up front with his players: Only two schools could pull him away from the budding mid-major power that the Owls were quickly becoming. One of those schools was West Virginia, a Big 12 school that does not sponsor softball.
The other was Virginia Tech. The Hokies had only had one head coach since the program’s inception and are one of just two teams in the Atlantic Coast Conference to ever reach the Women’s College Series. It didn’t look like that job would be open anytime soon, either.
When D’Amour accepted his first-ever head coaching position at Kennesaw State in the fall of 2016, it was a hiring that was lauded by many. After spending a decade as an assistant and associate head coach at Missouri, it was finally the longtime assistant’s chance to shine as a head coach. And shine he did
In Kennesaw State’s first season under D’Amour’s leadership, the Owls earned the conference’s #2 seed but were eliminated in the conference tournament. After receiving a berth into the inaugural National Invitational Softball Championship, the Owls advanced to the tournament’s semifinals before ending their season there.
The 2018 season saw an even better result from D’Amour’s club – after being picked as the preseason conference champions, the Owls followed through on that prediction and advanced to the NCAA tournament for the first time in program history.
In just two years, D’Amour led the Owls to unprecedented heights and, even in such a short time, already had the program well on its way to becoming a mid-major powerhouse.
Then came a call from Blacksburg, Virginia.
“It was just a few days after we got back from Regionals,” D’Amour said. “[Virginia Tech] sought me out to see if I was interested in the job.”
Virginia Tech athletic director Whit Babcock was the Executive Associate Athletic Director at Missouri during the time that D’Amour served on the Tigers staff, but career movements took each of them in separate directions.
“I had somewhat, for lack of a better term, lost track of Pete,” Babcock said during a press conference in early June. “We worked together from 2007 to 2011 at Missouri… I remembered him fondly, but had not kept in touch.”
As the search process commenced, D’Amour’s name quickly became a favorite for the position. (And once he was approached about it, the position quickly became a favorite of D’Amour’s.)
“I tried to look for negatives in considering it and I really couldn’t find any,” he said. “The biggest negative was telling my kids at Kennesaw. I wrote down positives and negatives and really couldn’t come up with any negatives for Virginia Tech.”
Making the decision easier was that the position would serve as a homecoming of-sorts for D’Amour. A Monrovia, Maryland native, Blacksburg sits just over four hours from his hometown and roughly three and a half hours from his parents’ home in West Virginia.
D’Amour enters the ACC at a time when the conference is at an all-time high in the sport of softball. Florida State just took home the first-ever Women’s College World Series championship for the ACC, while the conference will soon add its second team in three years when Clemson joins the fray in 2020, following Duke that saw its first-ever campaign in 2018.
“We’ve got three pitchers who can give you good innings,” D’Amour said of his new club’s roster. “My philosophy on coaching has really changed the last couple of years. It’s not all-offense anymore; it’s gone back to being about pitching and defense. If you can pitch and pick up the ball, then you’ve got a chance to win.”
Despite a disappointing 23-30 record in the 2018 season and a 7-16 conference mark just a decade removed from the program’s sole Women’s College World Series appearance, D’Amour sees a bright light at the end of the tunnel for his team: “We’ve got to improve the offense a little, but you build that up a bit, keep the pitching and defense up, and it’s not so much a rebuild as a retooling.”
Still months away from the Hokies even taking the field for the first time with their new coach, keep an eye on the Hokies in the years to come. Asked where he sees his team in five years, D’Amour was clear. “Honestly, contending for a conference championship and an NCAA tournament berth.”
