Spring Signing Day: Four Cavaliers Celebrate NCAA Commitments
By Dylan Howlett
Before the emails to coaches and visits to campuses, before the long drives to camps and longer days in the afternoon sun, they were boys who dreamed. Emmet Christian ’24 and Thomas Pollard ’24 loved baseball. They could see themselves playing it anywhere: with travel teams, at Durham Academy, for a college program. Or, on this night as middle schoolers enjoying a sleepover, in the heart of the Pollards’ West Durham living room. They would invent, and they would play, indoor baseball. “It’s not advisable,” Pollard says.
But the allure of baseball in any form, destructive or otherwise, was too strong. Thomas’s younger brother, Brady Pollard ’26, joined in to give the trio a dedicated pitcher, hitter and fielder. They found a mini replica wood bat commonly handed out as a promotion at Major League Baseball games. They pitched with a small foam ball. “So we’re like, ‘Nothing can go wrong,’ ” Christian says. The banister on the second-floor landing served as the line of demarcation for a home run. They played without incident, and with great fanfare, for 20 minutes. Brady started making fun of Thomas’s swing. Thomas chirped back. Brady became determined. “I’m going to really hit this one,” he said.
Christian tossed the ball from the middle of the living room, and Brady swung hard. He forgot to hold onto the bat. It flew out of his left hand and impaled the screen of the family TV. The boys froze. Christian gingerly walked over and pulled the bat out of the TV. “It was just crushed,” he says. Thomas started screaming at Brady. The din summoned their parents: Chris, a longtime Division I baseball head coach at Appalachian State and Duke University, and Stephanie, who in 2014 came to DA as a third-grade teacher and now teaches math at the Middle School. “Honestly,” Stephanie says now, “Thomas was giving Brady such a hard time that we didn’t feel like we needed to.” For a moment, everyone stood and stared, mouths agape. Christian, who had thrown the pitch that started this calamitous sequence, felt his stomach twist into knots. Chris Pollard walked over to examine the mutilated TV. His shoulders rose and fell with a deep sigh. “OK,” he said. He knew the occupational hazards of raising aspiring ballplayers.
They are aspiring no more. The three indoor baseball enthusiasts are all teammates on the DA varsity baseball team. And Thursday afternoon, as part of DA’s Spring Signing Day, Thomas Pollard (Kenyon College) and Christian (Tufts University) celebrated their commitment to collegiate athletics programs, along with cross-country and track athlete Allison Hall ’24 (Tulane University) and volleyball player Kate Norry ’24 (Bates College). The quartet lifted the number of NCAA commitments in DA’s Class of 2024 to 10, following six in the fall. Christian and Pollard sat at adjoining tables. The families of the four commits gathered behind their sons and daughters and grandchildren, watching as they signed ceremonial pieces of paper that meant so little, yet so much. Years of toiling in obscurity, of hoping to be noticed, of imagining their living room as the largest cathedrals in their given sport.
Brady, Chris and Stephanie all stood behind Thomas. They always have. Even when a bat shattered a television screen.
Emmet Christian ’24, Baseball — Tufts University
STARTING PITCHER, DA BASEBALL
Baseball is governed by two solitary lines that travel beyond first and third base. But the sport is rarely, if ever, linear. Christian and Thomas Pollard form two-thirds of a three-player DA baseball senior class. During his ninth-grade year, Christian was the only member of the class to play JV baseball; Pollard and CW Hollenbeck ’24 began their high school careers with the varsity. Christian wanted to find the line, and fast. “I was like, ‘I gotta go to work,’ ” he said.
It wasn’t a trifling declaration. “If you want to talk about work ethic,” Pollard says, “Emmet is up there with the best of them.” There was plenty of work to do. His velocity topped out at 75 mph, which wouldn’t be fast enough to merit consideration from collegiate programs. He threw every day he could, even though his mechanics were — in his words — “horrible.” DA Athletics shared a photo of Christian in a game-day post on social media that showed Christian’s leg and foot bowing out, while his pitching arm arched wildly over his head. “It looked just alien, the way my foot is planted,” he says now, shaking his head.
And so he worked. His velocity rose to 84 mph by the end of his sophomore year. Playing in college was no longer an outlandish prospect. That summer, he enrolled in a velocity program at a Raleigh baseball club, attending hour-long training sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays, repeatedly throwing a medicine ball against a wall to build strength. He lifted weights every day and put on 35 pounds by the time his junior season began at DA. When hip tightness caused back pain during his junior season, Christian drove more than an hour to a physical therapy facility and learned more about stretches that would loosen his body. When he felt his pitching stagnate at the end of his junior season, he returned to the baseball club and used a sand-filled bowling pin to improve his release point. He reached 90 mph by the end of that summer, and colleges started to notice — thanks in no small part to his mom, Dr. Jennifer Christian.
“I definitely would not have gotten where I am without her,” Emmet Christian says. “I was like, ‘I want this, but I have zero clue how to get there.’”
Jennifer bought a book about the recruiting landscape in collegiate baseball, dotting the copy with bent sticky notes that peeled over the edges. Christian blanched. “I thought it was so extra, what it was telling us to do,” Christian says. It’s not extra, Jennifer told him. If this is what you want, if this is your dream, then this is the way. He created a spreadsheet of every college program in which he had interest, including email address, average GPA and every conceivable statistic from each school’s admissions profile. Christian wrote upward of 200 emails to coaches across dozens of programs. He received a response on about half of them. When discouragement set in, his mom was there. You’ve gotta get it done, she’d say. You’ve gotta do it. “We just kept going,” Christian says.
He kept going, mostly, for Tufts University. “It matched everything I wanted,” Christian says. It had a top-flight engineering program, stellar academics, sparkling baseball facilities. He had already emailed the coaching staff 15 times, and 15 times he had received an automated response that directed Christian to complete a standardized recruiting survey. But he sent a 16th email, and he received a response. Unbeknownst to Christian, the Tufts coaching staff had seen him pitch at a Northeastern University camp. They were impressed, and they invited Christian to tour the athletic facilities at Tufts. “One of the things I want to be able to do,” he told one of the coaches,” is to get an engineering degree and play baseball.” The coach smiled. “Well, this is the spot,” he said. “We have 10 engineers on the team.” That was that. Christian later received an offer and committed in August 2023.
It was circuitous, and bumpy, and worth it. Christian’s left wrist is wrapped in a variety of bands that carry a variety of meanings: a red band from an N.C. State engineering camp during the summer between his sophomore and junior year, a band with a prominent sunflower pendant from his younger sister, Livvy Christian ’28. Then there’s the aquamarine band from his Upper School Capstone trip to Costa Rica. He dreaded the trip at the time. Christian had his social circle and his baseball teammates, and he didn’t stray too far from his closest friends. He didn’t know anybody on the trip. But then he met them, and had a memorable time, and remains friends with all of the trip-goers to this day. He keeps the band as a reminder that everybody is a friend, that every path — even those with alien-like mechanics and injuries and unanswered emails — is worth pursuing.
He smiles. “Why close yourself off?”
Allison Hall ’24, Cross-Country, Indoor Track and Outdoor Track — Tulane University
DISTANCE RUNNER, DA CROSS-COUNTRY & TRACK AND FIELD
ECOND-FASTEST MILE TIME (5:06) IN DA HISTORY
2023 TISAC RUNNER OF THE YEAR
2019 TISAC CHAMPION IN GIRLS 3200-METER
2018 INDIVIDUAL STATE CROSS-COUNTRY CHAMPION
FOUR-TIME ALL-STATE HONOREE
SIX-TIME ALL-CONFERENCE HONOREE
Allison Hall ’24 was always going to run. It was never a question. Her father, Conrad Hall ’89, led DA to four state championships in boys track and field and four state championships in boys cross-country. He was a 2017 inductee in the Durham Academy Athletic Hall of Fame and serves as a Cary Academy Upper School history teacher, cross-country coach and track and field coach. Allison’s mother, Virginia Hall ’91, won two state cross-country championships and three consecutive state championships in the 4x400-meter relay at DA. Of course Allison would run. How fast, and how far, and how joyously was entirely up to her.
It started early. When Hall was a first-grader at DA, she listed running as one of the “best things about the year.” She began coaching her classmates during recess to improve their mile times. One of her most treasured information books as a beginning reader in second grade was titled “The Art of Running a Mile,” with chapters dedicated to pace, trail running, track running and finishing. She offered pointed critiques on her student evaluation for Lower School PE: “Not enough running,” she wrote. Hall was an eager participant in Girls on the Run until she lamented that there was “too much talking and not enough running.” As a third-grader, she had to choose a famous American to research and feature in her state project; naturally, she profiled William Penn, the namesake of the famed Penn Relays, the oldest and largest track and field competition in the U.S. She proposed the idea of hosting a running-themed birthday party. Her parents talked her out of it. There aren’t many kids, they told her, who would appreciate running during a birthday party. There aren’t many kids, it turns out, like Hall.
“She is one of the best distance runners to ever come through DA,” says Costen Irons, the head coach for DA track and field.
When she was around 12 years old, Allison and Conrad completed two three-mile loops around the Al Buehler Trail in Durham. They topped it off by running the eight miles back to their home. Allison ran faster, and faster, and faster, until her dad was far behind. She trotted into their house, poured Conrad a glass of water, jogged back down the street and presented it to Conrad before he could finish his run. She won the Disney Half-Marathon in the 14U division, all the while stopping for photos with Disney characters as she outpaced the field. The Halls have scores of photos featuring Allison returning from a run in the snow, in the heat, in the rain, on vacation — and, while high-fiving Conrad, in the midst of a hurricane on her birthday. Not much, if anything, can disrupt her stride. She ran her best time in cross-country — as an eighth-grader in a 5K — after her shoe fell off. During her state meet in seventh grade, her braid fell out and sent her hair spilling across her face and her eyes. She set a personal record in the two-mile.
“What I love most about Allison and her running,” says Virginia Hall, a DA Middle School history teacher, “is the joy that it brings her and the people around her, and the growth she’s shown in learning how to navigate the ups and downs of a demanding discipline.”
It won’t get any less demanding at Tulane University. Hall will compete in all three seasons — with the university’s cross-country, indoor track and outdoor track teams — while trying to enjoy the inimitable cuisine and history of New Orleans. Her schedule, and the demands of collegiate athletics, are not likely to dampen Hall’s spirit. She still derives as much joy from running as she did when she was a kid. “There’s something so special about just going out and doing easy training runs,” she says. She laughs when a reporter points out that, for most, there is no such thing as an easy run. She loves talking with her teammates during those long, loping jogs, or thinking about her plans and letting her mind wander. Her younger sister, Catherine Hall ’26, runs on the same 4x400-meter relay team. They’ve occasionally passed the baton to each other during races. “It’s so fun,” Allison says.
So, too, is being the fastest in her family. The Halls annually run competitive races on July 4 and around New Year’s Day. By now, Allison has set the fastest times in the family. Their speed, however, is hers. “They’ve been the most supportive parents ever,” Allison says of Conrad and Virginia. “I definitely couldn’t have done it without their support and encouragement.”
But joy comes first, always. It arrives away from the trails and the track when she’s engrossed in a riveting book, or swimming, or cheering on Duke in basketball and football. And it’s present, always, in her stride. Allison and Conrad will occasionally run together on flooded trails. They do not tiptoe or prance around puddles. Instead, they pretend to be basilisk lizards, splashing their feet down in a quick circular motion to part the water and prevent their feet from getting wet, slowing down none at all and laughing along the way.
Of course Allison Hall would run. Of course nothing would get in her way.
Kate Norry ’24, Volleyball — Bates College
MIDDLE BLOCKER & OUTSIDE HITTER, DA VOLLEYBALL TEAM
2023 ALL-STATE HONOREE
TWO-TIME ALL-CONFERENCE HONOREE
In sixth grade, Kate Norry ’24 wasn’t thinking of collegiate athletics, or recruiting, or even volleyball. She had just started playing the sport as a student at Triangle Day School. But she was more keen on becoming a soccer goalkeeper, and playing basketball, and cherishing the variety in her after-school activities. “From a little age, I was never like, ‘I’m playing volleyball in college,’” Norry says.
That changed the summer before she arrived at DA as a ninth-grader. Norry attended an open gym session with the DA volleyball team. The head coach at the time, Latacha De Oliveira, was intrigued. She asked Norry to meet with her and attend private lessons. A few weeks later, Norry made the team.
The prospect of playing collegiately, however, didn’t emerge until the end of her sophomore year. All it took was some cajoling from her teammates. She looked at Gabriella Marchese ’22, now an outside hitter and defensive specialist on the Swarthmore College volleyball team, and could see herself following the same path. Two other teammates, Olivia Kohn ’23 and Hannah Kohn ’23, felt similarly. “You can totally do it if you wanted to,” they said. Norry told her mom, Carrie, that she had made up her mind: She would start playing club volleyball during her junior year, and she would start reaching out to college coaches.
She knew what she wanted: a small liberal arts school in New England. Norry zeroed in on the NESCAC and sent emails to every head coach in the conference. Her original top choice, Bowdoin College, is the fiercest rival of her eventual choice, Bates College. “Of course I’m going to go [to Bates] and hate on Bowdoin,” Norry says, laughing.
It was the right call. On Monday, April 8, Norry and Carrie attended admitted students day at Bates. It was 61 degrees and cloudless. She attended speeches in the morning and academic sessions in the afternoon, and in between she ran into multiple volleyball players and introduced her mom to the head coach. And then they fulfilled a dream of her mother’s: viewing a solar eclipse within the path of totality. They drove two hours northwest to Rangeley, Maine, a town of 1,200 residents that swelled with eclipse viewers and totality seekers. It took Kate and Carrie four hours to drive back to Bates in Lewiston, Maine. Yet much like her belated volleyball career, Norry found she was right on time.
“It was worth it,” Norry says, smiling.
Thomas Pollard ’24, Baseball — Kenyon College
STARTING CATCHER, VARSITY BASEBALL TEAM
TWO-TIME VARSITY BASEBALL CAPTAIN
FOUR-YEAR LETTER WINNER
Before his younger brother sent a bat through the family television, Pollard sent a baseball through his brother’s face. Thomas was 5, and Brady was 3, when they trundled out onto the turf field in the indoor practice facility at Appalachian State, where their father, Chris, was the head baseball coach. The brothers were playing catch under the watchful eye of Chris when Thomas popped Brady in the nose with a throw. Brady started crying as the blood dripped from his nose and splashed onto the turf below. It remains, much like the bat-throwing incident, a subject of intense familial debate. Chris insists that Thomas threw the ball way too hard. “There’s no way that was my fault,” Thomas says. “He should have caught it.”
It was the beginning of an education in baseball. Chris coached at App State for eight years. On those chilly spring days, when the wind would whip through Beaver Field and pierce every inch of exposed skin, Thomas and Brady would bundle up to cheer on their dad. When the games ended, Thomas would pad down onto the field to congratulate Chris after a win or offer sympathy after a loss. He’d look around and see the Mountaineers towering above him. They’d smile and toss the ball around with Thomas until the cold forced everyone inside. Those are the coolest guys in the world, Thomas thought to himself. “I wanted to be like them,” he says. “That was definitely what got me into baseball.”
Chris didn’t push baseball on Thomas. He tried soccer, and football, and basketball. But the pull of being like his dad’s college players won out. He dabbled with second base and third base, and he spent time in the outfield. The area behind home plate beckoned. “There’s something about catcher that is my calling,” Pollard says. He grew to appreciate the physical agony that comes with remaining in a crouch for two, three, four hours at a time. He sports bruises up and down his forearms from pitches that bounce in the dirt. But Pollard is the only player on his team who can see the whole field, who can let the ball come to him in every single play, who can exercise some semblance of control over a game that prizes maddening elusiveness. “It teaches you a lot about life,” he says.
Soon his career, and Brady’s, took off. And so did the Pollards, loading up their 2007 Nissan Armada with bats and gloves and sunflower seeds. Stephanie drove the boys to separate practices and games and camps and showcases across North Carolina, always stopping at Sonic on the way home so Thomas could order his beloved SuperSonic Bacon Double Cheeseburger — no tomato, no mayo, with french fries and a milkshake. The Pollards would eventually trade in their Armada with nearly every icon alight on the dashboard and 400,000 miles on the odometer. “It mystifies me,” Thomas says of his mom’s support. “She has done all that and more.”
So, too, has Chris. Fatherhood, not coaching, has come first. Whenever Thomas would return to the car after one of his games, he wouldn’t face a Division I baseball coach eager to belabor every last foible. “Good game,” he’d say after exchanging a fist bump. “Do you want to hear about it? Or no?” And Thomas would invariably say yes, asking about his swing or his blocking technique behind the plate. On those rare nights when Thomas would slump back to the car after striking out three times, he’d find a smiling Chris waiting to take him out for ice cream.
Around 9 p.m. on a summer’s night after his ninth-grade year, Thomas was sitting on the couch in his living room — this time facing a fully replaced and functional TV screen — when Chris sat down and turned to him. “Hey, Thomas,” he said. “Do you want to play college baseball? If that’s something you’re interested in, now’s the time to start thinking about that.” Thomas nodded. “What are the steps I need to take?” They talked for two hours — about recruiting, about programs, about specializing as a catcher to appear all the more valuable to coaches who always need reinforcements at the position. Thomas had a similar conversation with Stephanie not too long afterward, when Stephanie asked why he wanted to try and extend his playing career into college. “I just couldn’t imagine hanging up my cleats at the end of high school,” he told her.
“He loves the game,” Stephanie says now. “We are just proud of him for the hard work he has put in to make this opportunity possible.”
Pollard knew he wanted to major in environmental studies — an outgrowth of his ardent participation with the Upper School’s student Sustainability Committee — and eventually pursue a master’s degree in forestry. He wanted a campus in the woods where he could fish, a hobby of his since his childhood in Boone. Pollard settled on Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where Jackson Niedel ’22 is a sophomore pitcher and where the longtime head coach has fostered togetherness. “It’s so tight-knit and seems like an amazing culture,” Pollard says. “It’s really what drew me to it.” He’ll also live 30 minutes from a trout stream.
It is this appreciation of the little things, the simple joys, that Chris Pollard has preached with the Duke baseball team, which he has led since 2013. He loves practicing gratitude, and he loves sharing a quote that he tells his team “more than they probably like to hear,” Thomas says, laughing. “Gratitude is the enemy of entitlement,” the quote reads, and Chris Pollard has his players regularly journal about gratitude. Thomas doesn’t need paper to spell it out. “My gratitude for him,” Thomas says of his dad, “is enormous.”
It is, too, even for the most unexpected of sources. On that night years ago when the replica bat pierced the TV screen, Thomas, Brady and Emmet Christian went straight to bed shortly thereafter. The ecstasy of indoor baseball was over. But the busted TV meant they could sleep sooner. They could slip faster into their dreams. Dreams with cleats that never left their feet, dreams with bats that never left their hands
Dreams that would never shatter.
Bria Irizarry contributed additional reporting.