Inside HOKIE SPORTS | Vol. 11 No. 4 | March 2019

inside.hokiesports.com 37 baseball spotlight luke horanski Continued on page 38 No one appreciates a good laugh more than Virginia Tech’s starting catcher—even when it comes at his own expense. He possesses arguably the biggest personality of all of Virginia Tech’s student-athletes, and rest assured, he takes full pride in that. “From an early age, that’s how I’ve always been,” Horanski admitted. “And honestly, that’s what has fueled me and pushed me forward.” There have been other shenanigans involving Horanski, as one might expect. Last spring, he convinced fellow classmates and teammates Nick Owens and Nick Menken to join him in dying their hair blond to turn around the team’s fortunes during a losing skid. Horanski fittingly took his to a different level, shaving his hair into a sweet-looking, blond mohawk. It didn’t really work—the Hokies finished 21-33 overall, 8-22 in the ACC, and did not make the ACC tournament. Yet Horanski refuses to be deterred, as Tech prepared for the 2019 campaign that opened Feb. 15. “We’re going to have to try something else this year,” he said. That Tech baseball coach John Szefc puts up with this tomfoolery comes as a bit of a surprise. After all, Szefc is the antithesis of a big personality. With his closely cropped hair, serious disposition and take-charge mentality, he comes across as more of a general than a baseball coach, but looks can be deceiving. Szefc encourages his players to be themselves. Horanski found this out rather quickly. In one of his first team meetings during the fall of his arrival in 2017, Szefc—hired in the summer of 2017—singled out Horanski, one of his first recruits. He told his team that passive people don’t generally win in life, and cited Horanski, saying, “We’ve got Luke here. He’s a good player, and he’s just being himself.” Not that Horanski ever planned to change, but Szefc’s comments gave him the green light to be himself. “I didn’t want to come into a place and kind of have to mold who I was to the program,” Horanski said. “I wanted to be able to be myself and build off of that and take stuff that the coaching staff recommended—how to be a better person, how to be a better ball player, stuff like that. I think your foundation is your foundation. Who you are is who you are. I’ve just tried to be myself through and through the whole way … I’m really happy Szefc is on board with me being the goofball that I am.” Tech fans, though, should not let Horanski’s carefree disposition fool them. When it comes to baseball, he is all business. The field serves as his pulpit, and like a minister on Sunday morning, he approaches his craft with the utmost of seriousness. Batting mostly in the third spot in the lineup, Horanski led the team with a .314 batting average in 2018. He hit four homers and drove in 27 runs, and he led the Hokies with a .436 on-base percentage—thanks in part to 22 walks and being hit by pitches nine times. A concussion ended his season after 39 games and pretty much ended the Hokies’ chances of securing a spot in the ACC tournament. That Horanski got to Blacksburg and to this point in his career is a story almost as big as his personality. He is the college baseball version of Marco Polo, having traveled and played practically all over North America. He grew up in Dugald, a rural, farming community east of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Childhood consisted of working on his grandparents’ farm, which fine-tuned his work ethic, and playing baseball with his two brothers on his parents’ 20-acre spread. Yet he never played an inning of high school baseball. He played on all-star teams, and after his sophomore year of high school, he moved to Vancouver to play for one of the best travel teams in the country. He lived with a host family. “I played there and played on the D-Backs scout team full time and then did some trips with the Rangers scout team as well,” he said. “Then I was on the national team as well in high school. Even if we had a high school team, I wouldn’t have been there very much anyways. I probably played over 130 to 150 games my senior year of high school just between all that kind of stuff.” A coach from Creighton University saw Horanski when he played for the Canadian national team at a tournament in Florida.