We had to borrow a key to get into the room Lucas Jones once called his office. He’d been kicked off head coaches’ row at University of Lynchburg, Jones joked after finding a way to gain entry.
Once inside, he explained why it remained empty. A new Hornets head baseball coach had been appointed long ago, but the staff at one point recently had opted to set up shop near the diamond, rather than a couple hundred yards away in this room. It was just easier, not to mention more spacious.
Before that move, Jones shared this small office space with Travis Beazley, an assistant coach at the time who’s since been elevated to the lead job in the UL baseball program. Jones and Beazley — and whoever else chose to visit on any given day — crammed into that tight space to talk recruiting, discuss practice plans or determine lineups for gamedays.
Here, in this now mostly bare room, Jones sat in an office chair on a Thursday afternoon in late January, ready to explain his plans for the future. The spring season for the Hornets baseball squad is Jones’ first at Lynchburg as anything other than a player or head coach.
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So for a portion of the nearly two hours we chatted, Jones told me about how his role might change. Jones, the man who led UL to a national title in 2023 as head coach, now is an assistant.
Many of the men on this team’s staff assisted Jones a year ago, so familiarity and chemistry among coaches — and how Jones may fit into this new dynamic — isn’t a concern for Jones, he said. That’s not hard to believe, since Jones hasn’t ever been the loudest guy in the dugout, or one to willingly jump into postgame photos. In his last several years at UL, he’d always eschewed being the center of attention.
Although games are still several days away, he anticipates turning into more of a bench coach, teaching the game and preparing players to step on the field in an even quieter manner. He won’t be coaching third, choosing whether to gamble for the chance at a run by sending players home as they round the bases or whether to play it safe based on the situation, won’t be signaling to his hitters as he watches opposing hurlers on the mound.
He won’t be responsible for practice plans or selling recruits on the UL baseball program.
For another seasoned former head coach, such changes might not be easy to navigate. Jones, though, is content with the direction his career is taking at the moment.
“I just know, right now, I’m very satisfied with not being a head coach,” he said.
There’s no way he’s fibbing, either. Because in this talk we’re having, Jones isn’t serving up any clichés, not saying things he’s learned over the years are the “right” things to say in an interview. On this day, an at times uncomfortable Jones peels back the protective layers he’d had tightly and neatly packed for years.
The ones that, in the eyes of the public, started to be stripped away on Aug. 7, 2023, two months after the Hornets had been crowned national champs.
***
Lucas Jones had the subject on his mind for months by the time the 2023 campaign for his Lynchburg baseball team wrapped up. That he had an affinity for writing, especially “when it comes to personal things,” he said, only served to help the process along.
It took the 41-year-old Jones somewhere around 15 minutes to draft the letter he signed and posted on social media last August.
Breaking the news any other way, Jones explained, wouldn’t have worked for him at the time.
“I couldn’t. I just couldn’t,” said Jones, the 2023 national coach of the year.
Couldn’t think of a better way to explain his decision to step down — to his players, or their families, or Lynchburg fans, or those who’d discovered the Hornets during their historic run. Couldn’t find another way to help people understand why the man who’d just led UL to the top of the Division III baseball world wouldn’t be eager and willing to use such a lofty achievement as momentum for himself in the context of the program.
Couldn’t think about having conversations that pointed a spotlight at the serious, raw, emotional challenges in which he found himself entangled.
“I have spent the past five years getting up most days with an intent to persuade the audience that everything is alright but surely is not,” Jones wrote in the letter that announced his decision to step down from the position he held.
Last summer, Jones laid bare his struggles in that letter. Panic attacks, anxiety, depression. All of them described with some level of detail as he told his program and its supporters he’d be taking an extended leave of absence, with the hope to return at some point to a reduced role on the coaching staff (one he now owns).
By August, he’d felt ready to publicize the move and some of the lead-up to it.
He’d known well before then, however, he’d give up his post as skipper, he told me.
Before the 2023 season commenced, Jones said he’d struggled in his decision to come back. Then, during a campaign that got off to a quick start, and found sustained momentum, his thoughts stopped wrestling.
“I knew about halfway through the year, if not before that, that this was gonna be it,” Jones said. “I know in my heart that I don’t want to be a head coach right now.”
***
By the time the second weekend of the Old Dominion Athletic Conference tournament rolled around, the Hornets already were making history.
They’d eclipsed the previous program wins record (36). Later hit a whopping 40 wins, on their way to 48 on the 2023 season.
They’d captured a 10th ODAC crown. Reached the NCAA tournament for the third straight season.
Won an NCAA regional for the first time in program history.
Then came the super regional crown, the trip to the Division III national championship tourney, and, finally, the appearance in the DIII baseball season’s final series against Johns Hopkins.
A 7-6, come-from-behind victory in a winner-take-all Game 3 handed the Hornets the title trophy and all the glory.
At the pinnacle and during the climb, Lucas Jones was there facilitating, a head coach championing his players and celebrating their accomplishments.
Internally, another emotion took hold of Jones.
“At the end of it,” he said, “it was relief. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, man!’ overjoyed. Because you obsess about something so much, you almost can’t believe you did it.
“But if people knew what I put myself through to get to this point, they would understand that it’s not very joyful.”
If they knew about the panic attacks, the anxiety, the depression, they might understand why Jones, coming off the bus at the University of Lynchburg as hundreds of supporters flocked to celebrate the national championship with the returning team at the campus victory bell, wasn’t so animated or so excited for the photo-ops with the trophy and players, family or friends.
But they didn’t. They wouldn’t. Jones made sure of it.
***
“It’s gotten to a point where I had gotten pretty natural with, ‘Hey, I’m gonna let people that I think that I’m doing well because I have to be in control of this situation, because I’m in a leadership role,’” Lucas Jones said.
“Never a glimpse of, ‘Man, this guy has something going on.’”
This was Jones for years, before he’d chosen to step down as a head coach. For years, he’d struggled, — even though on some level, “it doesn’t make sense.”
Jones can’t pinpoint any outside force that significantly contributed to his mental decline.
Growing up, for example, his family was only ever supportive. At UL, the same applied to colleagues and bosses. No overly traumatic event is part of his past, either, Jones said.
Recently, though, he’s come to better understand his struggle.
“I think that’s what's strange about mental health. Yes, there are external factors that can contribute,” he said, “but it’s the story you tell yourself.”
Words in Jones’ mental story focused on his value.
“Pretty much for the longest time, it was like in order to be valued, in order to be considered at all in terms of being credible or being good at your profession, … you have to win,” Jones explained.
Success, he added, was only defined by that victory-loss tally, and by exactly how far those victories took his program.
So 2021 — when the Hornets went 36-15, won an ODAC crown one year after the pandemic cut off the previous promising campaign and two years removed from the second of back-to-back losing seasons — was commendable, in Jones’ mind. But not good enough.
And 2022, when the Hornets reached an NCAA regional for the second straight year, wasn’t good enough, either — because they didn’t go any further, and came up short of winning an ODAC title during the postseason before making the NCAA tourney.
“It’s very hard for me to turn off 2021, 2022 and feel like that was a success even though, man, we had gone leaps and bounds expectation-wise,” Jones said.
Perfection was the only good-enough outcome. Coming off the 2023 national title, Jones believes returning as head coach would’ve only produced more self-induced pressure.
“It’s only a success if we go back. We gotta win,” Jones said, offering up some of the thoughts he’d at one point had — despite knowing how “impossible” it is to achieve such feats consistently in baseball or sports generally — before stepping down.
These thoughts reigned inside Jones. Thoughts to which every other bowed. “It doesn’t matter what anybody says,” Jones explained, “you can’t change my mind.”
And steadily, the load got heavier.
“It built,” Jones said. “At first you don’t know what the hell you’re dealing with, and then you’ve got all these different things, panic attacks, and you’re feeling anxious … much more than I felt prior to those times. And then depression kind of follows that.
“And then it’s this ideation of like, ‘Man, am I better off somewhere else?’”
***
Most of the time the moments were fleeting. Moments when he’d considered that perhaps others saw him as he saw himself — unsuccessful, not valuable — before dismissing that idea enough to continue checking off the boxes on his head coach’s to-do list.
One Sunday in mid-February looked different, however.
It was Super Bowl Sunday, Lucas Jones said, almost one year ago. The festivities of the day — and the joke about the Philadelphia Eagles he now can associate — no doubt help him remember.
What transpired in Jones’ house on that morning, though, wouldn’t be hard to recall even if the day hadn’t carried any extra national acclaim.
On this day, family routine and upcoming coaching duties took a back seat.
“I woke up one Sunday morning with the intent to commit suicide,” Jones said.
“I’d had that thought before, but not to the extent where like, ‘Oh, s---, this is not good.’”
Jones knew how he’d do it. He’d picked out a bridge from which to leap.
Even scarier, perhaps, was the reality that hit Jones as he contemplated ending his life.
“It wasn’t anything that happened,” he said. “Like a life [event] where like somebody died or something changed drastically.
“It was just, this is how I felt.”
Only by seeking help, from his wife and from professionals, did Jones find another direction.
***
For years, the only signposts he could see pointed one way. Success is still ahead, they said, way down the road.
Any other markers carried a warning: struggles along your journey should be kept to yourself, lest onlookers get the wrong idea of you.
During his head coaching tenure, Lucas Jones plod that path faithfully.
“I know over five years how I lived. It was not communicating that with maybe even a handful of people. Even my wife for a certain extent didn’t know the true essence of what was going on,” he said.
“I was like, ‘I don’t want to hurt anybody. I don’t want anybody to feel concerned for me.’ It was just more of like, ‘Well I know how to do this part — I know how to fake it really good — so I’m gonna keep on doing that.’”
From an outsider’s perspective, there was no reason to deviate.
If the athletes Jones helped churn out from a Division III program weren’t enough proof, certainly the high-profile wins and eventually the national championship trophy were.
From Jones’ point of view, this track was one he became adept, even comfortable, at traversing. Stepping off, in his mind, could mar the well-manicured image he’d built of himself, the calm, in-control coach on the rise.
“You’re telling yourself, ‘If I come out and say these things, it’s just, “This guy is a hack. Does he have control over the situation, because he doesn’t have control over his emotions?”’” Jones said.
And stepping off that well-trodden trail might also require personally confronting difficult, uncomfortable thoughts and feelings.
That Sunday morning, though, was a watershed, forcing Jones to look for and then step onto another path — “the path of more resistance.”
***
Feb. 17, 2023, five days after the bridge consumed Lucas Jones’ morning, he and the Hornets took on their first opponent. Wilmington of Ohio became the first victim in the ultimately historic campaign.
Four months later, relief settled over Jones, who then plunged into the challenge of walking unfamiliar terrain upon stepping down.
Relieved of the daily grind that accompanies life as a head coach, Jones sought — and still seeks — guidance from a counselor as he works to find ways to redefine “success.”
“I’m trying to change that narrative in my own space,” he said.
It’s an ongoing battle, Jones admitted. There are no perfect remedies, there’s no easy way to healing. But now, hope has found its way into the mix.
“It’s not in the place I want to ultimately be in, but I feel better than I did when making the decision [to step down],” Jones said as we talked in late January. “I feel better than a year ago. I feel better than three years ago.”
In his time away from the diamond, he added, he’s learned baseball and a mental well-being can coexist.
“That reflection has led me to I don’t need this, but I desire this,” Jones said of his decision to end his leave to return as an assistant coach.
His job now is to maintain a healthy approach as he works to help players become the best version of themselves.
He hopes to accomplish that, from a practical perspective, by continuing to imbue his knowledge of and experience with the game and by increasing the Hornets’ focus on their mental approach in a sport built around failure (batters who average one hit in every three at-bats — those who head back to the dugout two out of three at-bats, in other words — are considered especially talented, after all).
And Jones, of course, aims to facilitate players’ growth personally, too.
“You can engage with me,” he said of his message to the UL athletes, “and that’s what I seek in this position is much more of that interaction.”
Perhaps his openness in that Aug. 7 letter paves the way for players to feel more comfortable doing so. Experience tells Jones that odds are someone on his team might be able to identify with him when it comes to mental health struggles.
Recent experience has showed Jones that idea applies outside the Lynchburg baseball program, too.
On one social media site, his letter attracted more than 150,000 views. Hundreds of the people who saw it weighed in with words of appreciation for his vulnerability or with well wishes. Many of those — especially the ones who fill out the coaching ranks across the country, who understand well the sacrifices required and the pressures of the job — reached out directly.
“I heard from coaches that I’ve never even met before that are like, ‘Hey, I feel you.’ ‘I feel the same things.’ ‘Thanks for sharing,’” Jones said.
For all who’ve seen his letter, all who may hear his story, Jones hopes to be an encouragement.
“It may just help one person — not even like, ‘Oh, I need to get help,’ but just, ‘Oh wow, somebody else is feeling the same way that I feel,’” Jones said.
“Instead of now feeling guilt or shame about it, … maybe that can motivate them to at least challenge themselves to go the path of more resistance and it’ll help them get better.”
The first step, he said, is to talk about it. Find people who can point out that path, like a primary doctor or counselor, and help build a travel plan.
And know, from someone who’s still on that journey, that value isn’t measured by what you produce.
“I don’t want other people to have to go through what I put myself through,” Jones said, before offering one more piece of advice born out of his fight.
“Focus on the ‘yes’ people. The people [who believe] it doesn’t matter if you’re the head coach at Lynchburg or a greeter at Walmart or flipping burgers at McDonald’s — you’re valued because you’re you.”
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“It may just help one person — not even like, ‘Oh, I need to get help,’ but just, ‘Oh wow, somebody else is feeling the same way that I feel.'"
“I think that’s what strange about mental health. Yes, there are external factors that can contribute, but it’s the story you tell yourself.”
“Focus on the ‘yes’ people. The people [who believe] it doesn’t matter if you’re the head coach at Lynchburg or a greeter at Walmart or flipping burgers at McDonald’s — you’re valued because you’re you.”