Minium: ODU Baseball Coach Chris Finwood uses the Classics of Western Civilization to Mold and Motivate His Players

"Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good." Marcus Aurelius
 
By Harry Minium
 
Chris Finwood keeps a dog-eared copy of a book titled "Meditations" on his desk. Considered a classic of Western Civilization, the book is a series of personal thoughts and reflections written by Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius before he died in 180 AD. 
 
Finwood has dozens of sticky notes attached to pages so that he can quickly find quotes that inspire him.
 
"That helps set my mood for the day," Finwood said of the book.
 
Finwood is a voracious reader, often consuming several books a week. Every morning, he begins his day by reading a great work of philosophy, from the famous Greek and German orators, Ralph Waldo Emerson or Ryan Holiday. At night, he dives into fiction, from Clive Cussler to Ernest Hemingway.
 
He's a student of the stoic philosophy, established more than 2,500 years ago by the ancient Greeks, that asserts you should not worry about what you can't control, so control only what you can, including how you treat your fellow human beings.  
 
Finwood majored in English at Virginia Military Institute, where he learned that the most precious commodity on earth, the one thing that is truly finite, is time. So, he reads rather than watch TV.
 
"I like to read historical fiction before I go to sleep," he said.
 
And did I mention that this bookworm, this student of Western Civilization, this buttoned-down former Keydet, is also one hell of a baseball coach?
 
This is Finwood's 10th season as Old Dominion University's head coach, and he recently passed a milestone that few attain. He won his 500th career game last Saturday when the Monarchs pounded Florida International, 14-0.
 
His Monarchs are 21-5 and are ranked 27th in the NCAA RPI, a ranking that if it holds up, would likely land ODU in the NCAA tournament.
 
He took the Monarchs to the 2014 NCAA tournament and likely should have gone in 2017, when ODU was one of the last teams eliminated by the selection committee. ODU was ranked 25th for a time in the 2017 NCAA poll.
 
Nearly all of his teams have been winners, especially in the last three seasons. The Monarchs are a combined 68-30 in the 2019, 2020 and 2021 seasons heading into Friday's game at Florida Atlantic, and that makes Finwood a bit of an overachiever. 
 
ODU competes in Conference USA, which may be a one-bid league in most sports but competes well against the Power 5 in baseball. And while the Bud Metheny Baseball Complex is a fine facility, it does not compare to the palatial facilities you'll find at Southern Mississippi, Rice or Louisiana Tech.
 
That's something Finwood says his players wear as a badge of honor, especially when they beat Virginia or Virginia Tech or East Carolina, as they did earlier this season in Greenville when the Pirates were ranked No. 17 in the country. They are now No. 11.
 
"They may have more bells and whistles, but bells and whistles don't make you a ballplayer," Finwood said.
 
Yes, it's early this season, but even ODU is ranked ahead of 12 of the 15 ACC teams and every Big Ten team in the RPI.


 
And Finwood's work with is players is even more impressive off the field. "Finny," as he likes to be called, holds his players to a high standard off the field and in the classroom.
 
No exceptions. If a player makes a mistake, Finny likely won't have to say anything. "Our players do that," Finny said. "They hold each other accountable."
 
It is because of his insistence on a strict academic regimen that the ODU baseball team consistently has the best grade point average of any of the University's men's teams and that his players are model student-athletes off the field.
 
"You're not going to get late night phone calls with problems about a baseball player," Athletic Director Wood Selig said. 
 
"His kids are going to graduate and a lot of them get drafted. I admire so much how he runs his program."
 
Being an ODU baseball player also means you will be read to every day.
 
"Every day he will read us a quote, something to make us think and inspire us to do better," senior outfielder Kyle Battle said. "And I do mean, every day."
 
Vinnie Pasquantino, a former ODU star now in the Kansas City Royals minor league system, said not only was there a quote every day, Finny reads a book to the team every fall during offseason workouts.
 
Pasquantino fondly remembers Finny reading the book "Legacy," a history of the All Blacks rugby team from New Zealand, page by page, day by day, from cover to cover.
 
"Some of the best books I've ever read were suggested to me by coach Finwood," Selig said.
 
Baseball coaches are notoriously superstitious and Finny, although a learned man, is as superstitious as any coach.
Many of the quotes that Finwood reads to his players go up on the blackboard in the locker room. If the team wins a game, the quote stays. If the Monarchs lose, it is quickly replaced with another gem of information.
 
 He declined requests for interviews about his 500th victory until after the Monarchs beat FIU.
 
Pasquantino said Finwood doesn't read to his players to make himself look good. 
 
"He does it because he cares," Pasquantino said. "It's not like he looks up these quotes on Google. He's studied them. He tells us what they mean, how we can use them to become better people.
 
"He's really big into guys figuring out their mental head space, at trying to get people in a good spot. I never heard him give us a quote that didn't help the team."
 
And as for the way he deals with players, Pasquantino said "he's a hard-nosed coach.
 
"You know what he expects from you when you walk into the facility or when you walk around campus. It's engraved in your mind that you are ODU baseball.
 
"It's not just what happens on the field that's important to him."
 
"Today I escaped from the crush of circumstances, or better put, I threw them out, for the crush wasn't from outside me but in my own assumptions."

 Marcus Aurelius
 
Finny grew up all over the world in a blue-collar, Air Force family. His father, Kenneth, was a single Dad and an enlisted man who retired as a master sergeant.


 
Finny lived in Germany, Hawaii, New York, Nebraska "and probably a few other places I've forgotten," he said, before his Dad was permanently stationed at Langley Air Force Base on the Peninsula in 1976. Finny went to junior high and then to Hampton High School, where he learned to love books from a tenth-grade English teacher. 
 
But Finny was also a young guy, growing up in the 1980s, and said he was "a bit of a hellion."
 
Finny was a baseball star who had a number of scholarship offers. VMI was far from his first choice until his Dad offered some sage advice.
 
"He told me, 'I know there's a lot of discipline at VMI and no matter what you're going to do in this world, you're going to need that. You need a lot of that right now, so you might want to consider VMI,' " Finny said.
 
It would not be the last time his father set him on the right path.
 
Finny enrolled at VMI where freshmen, known as "Rats," go through something called the "Rat Line."
 
The Rat Line continues from the day students arrive at school until about mid-February. Cadets walk at attention along prescribed routes inside the barracks and at any moment, can be stopped by an upper classman and asked about anything, from repeating what is on the lunch menu to singing school songs and chants.
 
Fail to recite the words precisely or have a scuff on your shoe or a smudge on your shirt and you do pushups while be loudly chastised by upper classmen. Yes, it's humiliating and demanding, but designed to make you stronger and more self-confident.
 
With every hour of every day planned, "you learn time management from day one," Finny said, "because you don't have a choice.
 
"That stays with you the rest of your life. We had a saying there, 'if you're late, you're forgotten.' 
 
"I tell our guys every day we can't do this with people who don't value other peoples' time."
 
Finny was a four-year starter for the Keydets and had a career .300 batting average and hit .399 as a senior.
 
He graduated in 1988 with the first class in VMI history that wasn't required to join the military. He had some tryouts with Major League Baseball teams, but his Dad persuaded him to eschew playing for coaching.
 
"My Dad told me that if I'm determined to do this, to play baseball, that 'I know you'll make one of those minor league teams,' " Finny said.
 
"But with all due respect, you're not good enough to play in the big leagues.  One day you're going to be 28 years old and wondering what to do with the rest of your life."
 
Finny put his glove aside and accepted jobs working in VMI's Office of Admissions and as an assistant baseball coach.
 
"I made a grand total of $6,000 that first year and was as happy as I could be with every penny," Finny said.
 
After three years as an assistant, he was named the head coach, at age 24, and although he inherited a team that won just two games, he won 21 games in 1993 and 20 in 1994. VMI lost in the 1993 Southern Conference tournament championship game.
 
From VMI he went to VCU for six years, including four as the associate head coach, and then was an assistant coach at Auburn for five years.
 
Then the athletic director at Western Kentucky, Selig hired Finny to come coach the Hilltoppers.
 
After enduring two rebuilding seasons, the Hilltoppers won two Sun Belt Conference titles in a row. A year after coming to ODU, Selig asked Finny to come with him to Norfolk, back to his home area of Tidewater, where Finny says he hopes to live the rest of his life.
 
"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."
 
Marcus Aurelius
 
Finwood's 500th victory came in the first game of a doubleheader, so there was not a lot of pomp and circumstance. Public address announcer Jack Ankerson announced the milestone and there was a pretty cool tribute to Finny on the outfield scoreboard.
 
Players and coaches exchanged high fives, but then they retreated to the dugout.
 
"We had to play again in 40 minutes, so it was pretty quick, and that's the way I preferred it," Finny said.
 
That does not surprise Pasquantino, who said, "unless someone told him, I doubt he had any idea he was close to 500.
 
"He doesn't look at his personal achievements as a success. He wants to see everybody succeed. That's how he built the culture we've got at ODU," he said.
 
Finny said he knew he'd won his 500th because players and assistant coaches reminded him. He said he felt more gratified with victory No. 501, when ODU won the nightcap, 3-2, because it allowed the Monarchs to sweep the doubleheader from FIU.
 
Finny was touched by the number of people who reached out to him. Once word got out about his 500th victory, his phone and email blew up. He's heard from more than 100 people and counting.
 
"I'm still returning messages," he said.  "And I will return every message because they all mean a lot to me.
 
"Awards and milestones like this, the credit should go to everyone in the program. I've had some fantastic assistant coaches along the way, guys who are head coaches now. 
 
"There are guys who are coaches in the SEC, who are good men, good husbands, good fathers, and you know, hopefully, I had a little bit to do with that. My current staff is just a fantastic bunch of guys and you know I really appreciate sharing this with them."
 
"I know," he added, "that we get judged as coaches by wins and losses. But if we can be a positive influence on players' lives, that's really what coaching is about.
 
"If that's not why you're in it, they you're in the wrong profession."
 
Finny, 55, said he expects to finish out his career at ODU "as long as Wood Selig is here," he said.
 
"I'm so appreciative to Wood for allowing me to become a head coach again," he said. "He's been so supportive. I couldn't work for a better boss."
 
How long before he retires? When I asked, he joked that he'll likely "croak" one day making a pitching change.
 
"I don't have a lot of hobbies," he said. "I like to play golf now and then, but what I really enjoy is coaching baseball.
 
"I enjoy everything about coaching. It doesn't feel like work to me. I love to watch these guys grow and get better as ballplayers."
 
Pasquantino said "you're going to have to rip that jersey off of him" to get him to retire.
 
"It's really cool that he got his 500th win," he said. "And it's really cool that he stayed at Old Dominion. A few years ago, when we were in the NCAA tournament, there was talk that he was going to leave.
 
"I'm so glad he stayed. He's someone you want to play for. He's not someone who's going to ask an assistant coach to talk to you. He's not afraid to tell you whatever message you need to hear himself.
 
"He tries to get the best out of you. He's going to love you but if things don't go well, he's going to come down on you like a father."
 
And in that respect, Finny had a great role model.
 
Finny lost his Dad far too early. Ken Finwood was jogging one day and had a heart attack. He was 49. Finny was just 25.
 
"There's a lot of regret there because he never got to meet either of my kids," Finny said referring to son Grey and daughter Riley.


 
The family has a pretty cool tradition in which one of the children receives the father's middle name. 
 
Kenny's middle name was Edward, named for his father. Finny's middle name is Kenneth. His son is Greyson Christopher Finwood.
 
"It's just a way of keeping that spirit alive a little bit," Finny said.
 
"My dad was really a wise man. Every time I listened to him, I made the right decision.
 
"I think about him every day. He's always with me.
 
"When the sun is shining, I look up there and say something to him."
 
Surely, there is one proud father looking back. 
 
Contact Minium: hminium@odu.edu