HALL OF FAME FEATURE: Chris Stanley '98

Life sometimes throws curveballs.

Chris Stanley hadn’t planned on extending his baseball career past high school despite his success. However, thanks to a crucial call by an umpire — not the kind you’d imagine —Stanley ended up coming to Averett University, where he was a key piece of the Cougars’ inaugural baseball program. Nearly three decades later, Stanley is set to etch his name into history once again as a member of the 2024 Averett Athletics Hall of Fame, which will be inducted on Oct. 19 during Homecoming.

“I didn't know where Averett was, which is kind of silly when you think about it but it was before the days of Google and smartphones,” Stanley said. “I'm a kid from Meadows of Dan, Virginia, which is about as rural of a town that you can find in Virginia. It was cool to be in college and get that experience at Averett. I went there to play baseball, was able to get my degree in history, I made lifelong friends and had my first-born there. It was a treasured moment with those experiences, and with the guys I still talk to, there's always a story.”

Stanley’s story as it pertains to Averett began in the summer after his senior year at Patrick County High School. A four-year starter who made varsity as a freshman, Stanley was putting together quite the career. And it started getting him noticed.

“My junior year, I had a pretty good campaign and my coach that we had at the time said there were colleges looking at me,” Stanley recalled. “But my senior year was just terrible. I think I pressed too much and got that nasty senioritis where I didn't put the work in that I needed to. And nothing came of it, so I decided to take a year off between high school and college, but really, I had no ambition to go to college.”

Not knowing what he wanted to do, Stanley planned to take a gap year, but in the meantime was working several jobs while playing baseball with the local American Legion team and was playing some of his best ball. As fate would have it, Averett entered the picture.

Averett was just beginning its baseball program, preparing for a club team to play in 1995 before going varsity in 1996. Longtime Averett professor Dr. Tommy Foster was tabbed as the program’s first head coach, and he was on the hunt to find any players who would consider joining a new program.

With his ear low to the ground, Foster got a tip from a local umpire — go check out this guy named Chris Stanley from up near Patrick County.

“He said he had called his American Legion game and Chris had just been terrific,” Foster recalled. “I think he had gotten four or five hits.”

So Foster decided to follow up on the lead and went to Stanley’s American Legion game when his team came to Danville. As it turned out, Foster never got to see Stanley put a ball in play as the game eventually got rained out. But that didn’t stop him from wanting him on his roster.

“I went down to the dugout and talked to him,” Foster said. “I was just impressed with him as a person.”

With blind faith on both sides, they shook on it.

“Somehow and someway, he decided to offer me and that I could compete for a spot,” Stanley said. “I thought, 'What the heck? What do I have to lose?' I'm 18 or 19 at the time. The rest is history.”

After playing the 1995 season for Averett’s club team, Stanley starred on the Cougars’ roster for the program’s first three varsity seasons from 1996-98. Not including his unofficial stats where he hit over .400 during that club season, Stanley raked over his last three years by finishing with a .372 batting average with 131 hits, including 35 doubles, seven triples and 13 home runs. He also drove in 90 runs and stole 19 bases over 94 games in those three seasons. Stanley was named to the USA South All-Conference First Team in 1996 after batting a conference-best .431 for the year, which was among the top 50 batting averages in the nation that season. Stanley also finished second in the country in 1996 in doubles per game. He followed that up by earning USA South Second Team honors in 1997 after hitting .392. His career batting average is the third highest in program history and ranks in the top five in home runs. His .716 slugging percentage in 1996 is the program's single-season record. Stanley was later named to the USA South's 50th Anniversary Baseball Team in 2014. Now, he adds Hall of Famer to his résumé. 

“Coach Foster landed him at a time where we were kind of looking for anybody,” said Ed Fulton, who assisted Foster with coaching at the start of the program before serving as Averett’s head coach from 1997-2017. “For us to get a player like Chris was really a good find, and for him to come and stay at a time when we were trying to build a program was really huge.”

During the 1995 season as part of Averett’s club team, Stanley didn’t feel overwhelmed with the transition between playing high school ball and playing college despite playing strong competition against a lot of high-caliber junior colleges that first year.

“These kids who were their aces were throwing in the mid- to-high 80s, and that was something that I didn't see a lot or really at all in high school,” Stanley said. “Transitioning and changing my philosophy as to what kind of hitter I was going to be or what kind of outfielder I was going to be or how I was going to run the bases, it was eye-opening. But obviously having some early success against some high-quality teams definitely instilled in me the drive to think I could hit against anybody, catch any ball that was in the air, make any throw I need to make or do what I needed to on the base paths. That was my mentality.”

Described by Foster as being “strong-willed,” it’s no surprise Stanley thrived. But Foster said he takes no credit in that.

“It’s extremely hard to teach hitting,” Foster said. “You can improve some aspects of hitting with coaching but that seems like a gift where you have to have good reflexes and hand-eye coordination. Usually good hitters have played baseball from the time they are 5 years old on up, so they have had a lot of practice. Chris was just a natural hitter. That first year, we played junior college teams and he hit over .400 that year. I didn’t do anything and I’m not giving myself any credit for his hitting ability. He was just a natural hitter and I just turned him loose and put him in the lineup and let him hit.”

As Averett went into its first season of varsity play in 1996, Stanley continued to thrive individually. It’s one of his favorite memories from his time at Averett.

“My sophomore year, leading the conference in hitting was a pretty big thing,” Stanley reminisced. “I don't know that anyone, myself included, would have thought that would have been a possibility especially given the caliber of opponents we faced and the number of great hitters that were in the league at that time. That's obviously a treasured moment for me.”

An outfielder who could hit for average with some power, play good defense and had speed on the base paths, Stanley was just what the Cougars needed in those early years to help establish the program.

“In baseball, you try to compare players you are looking at to other players, whether it be in your program or other programs or wherever,” Fulton said. “Chris set a pretty good bar of what we wanted an outfielder to look like at Averett — what kind of speed we wanted there, what kind of offensive production we wanted, what kind of practice habits. When we would go look at players, we’d ask, ‘Well how does he compare to Stanley.’”

Just as he took a lot of pride in his hitting, Stanley is also proud to have been a part of that foundation for the program in its infancy — a program that won a conference championship and made an NCAA appearance not too long after in 2003.

“Looking back, it is obviously something I treasure,” Stanley said. “We all thought we could have done better, but we were a new program and what you don't always get is the pedigree of players coming in because the program hasn't established itself yet. Obviously, history speaks for itself and Coach Fulton did a heck of a job cultivating that integrity and that culture early in the program to go out and get players from all over to compete at a very high level, especially went they reached the NCAA playoffs the one year.”

These days, baseball has re-entered the picture for Stanley, who lives in Twinsburg, Ohio, with his wife, Karen (who played women’s soccer at Averett). They have two kids, Moira and Gehrig, and a grandson, Beau. After working in retail management most of his adult life, he decided to get into coaching baseball and has been doing that since 2016. He’s now a substitute teacher and full-time baseball coach at Crestwood High School.

“I’m having the time of my life and I’m looking forward to giving back and teaching all the things I learned from Coach Foster, Coach Fulton, all the assistant coaches and my teammates,” Stanley said. 

Stanley still keeps in contact occasionally with Foster, who retired from Averett nearly two decades ago and currently lives near his family in Clinton, Mississippi. In fact, funny enough, it wasn’t until the two talked several years ago that Stanley learned the true story behind the umpire’s influence on his recruitment to Averett. For years, Stanley thought it all stemmed from another player that was being recruited by Averett.

“I knew there was a kid from South Boston that he was recruiting who ended up going to N.C. Wesleyan University named Drew Bohnanon, and I think I faced Drew four times that summer and I hit four homers off of him,” Stanley said. “I remember after the last time we played South Boston, Drew came up to me and told me, 'Hey I'm getting recruited by a school in Danville, but I'm going to another school but I will put in a good word for you.' So this whole time I thought Drew had spoken kindly about me to Coach Foster — even though Coach Foster never saw me swing a bat — and that's what got me there to Averett.”

No matter how it happened, Stanley’s journey to Averett certainly turned out to be a home run for everyone involved.