Inside HOKIE SPORTS | Vol. 12 No. 4 | March 2020

process. Mason actually had recruited one of Seymour’s teammates, Jake Rosen, the year before, and Rosen pushed Mason to recruit Seymour. Mason invited Seymour down for what was going to be the weekend of the year—the football team’s 2015 season opener against No. 1 Ohio State on Labor Day night. The combination of a concert—Brad Paisley played the night before the game—the atmosphere, the excitement, and the future (now concluded) renovation of English Field at Atlantic Union Bank Park won over Seymour. “I had a couple of other visits, but I just fell in love with this place,” Seymour said. “It was that weekend they had the Brad Paisley concert, and they were playing Ohio State on opening night for football. They were building the new [baseball] stadium, and it [Virginia Tech] had so many options from a science and technical standpoint that I was just like, ‘This is the place I want to be.’ It felt like home. It’s the motto, but it felt like home from that visit.” Seymour had visited Wake Forest on that same trip. He took a trip to Tulane as well, and of course, all the New England schools expressed desire for him—BC, Northeastern, Harvard, etc. But in the fall of his junior year, he committed to Virginia Tech. WITH A PURPOSE Since arriving at Virginia Tech, Ian Seymour has been the Hokies’ ace, and the Massachusetts native has big hopes and dreams on and off the field by Jimmy Robertson inside.hokiesports.com 33 ‘We want you to do something that you love.’ Because they love what they do. They work hard at it, and they both dedicate their lives to that and to their family. So from those values, from that perspective, they are my role models.” Blessed with a solid family foundation, Seymour became a great baseball player and a great student at St. John’s High School. His exploits on the diamond earned him notice from college coaches in desperate need of left-handed pitching. Pat Mason, the Hokies’ baseball coach at the time, played at Northeastern University in Boston and also coached at both Northeastern and Boston College before coming to Blacksburg as an assistant under then-head coach Pete Hughes. Mason took over for Hughes as the Hokies’ head coach in 2013 when Hughes bolted for the Oklahoma job. Mason’s New England contacts informed him of Seymour, giving him a jump on the recruiting Continued on page 34 baseball spotlight ian seymour