He is a patient hitter who can hit for average and has explosive power. Defensively, Kurtz is one of the best to ever do it at first base, making difficult plays seem routine while also consistently throwing deflected throws to avoid potential errors in the field.
Kurtz won back-to-back ACC Player of the Week awards in early April, breaking the boards like never before. As the Demon Deacons claimed the ACC series over Virginia Tech and Boston College, Kurtz went 18-for-34 at the plate (.529 average) with 13 home runs and 26 RBIs. His hitting percentage during that nine-game span was an astronomical 1.794.
“No, but I’ve been saying that about him my whole time here,” the Wake Forest coach said. Tom Walter said when asked if he had ever seen such impressive running at the plate. “He does something every year that I’ve never seen before. So, not long ago, we put him in the lead.”
For Kurtz, it was more about securing wins than individual accolades.
“It’s going well – 5-0 in the last five games, so I can’t complain,” he said midway through the round. “This is a first for sure. It’s easy to do that with the guys around me, just always picking us up so when things aren’t going well for me and then being able to turn it around and kind of call in makes it so much more easy to celebrate too.”
After starting the season with a bit of an offensive slump, things got worse when Kurtz suffered an injury that forced him to miss six games.
“Jack (Winnay) said the injury might be the best thing that happened to me this year,” Kurtz said. “It was really nice to take a step back and look at everything from a different perspective and really realize how grateful I should be. Even when I was struggling, how grateful I should be for the situation I’m in.
“Where I am, Wake Forest, is where every kid should dream of coming here. So take advantage of every day I have here, enjoy them and keep working. funny like that. Walt (Wake Forest coach Tom Walter) says it best, there’s 2 by 20 and then there’s 12 by 20. So you just have to persist.”
Kurtz suffered a rotator cuff strain, perhaps with some biceps tendinitis, according to Walter.
“It was several things,” Kurtz explained. “I got angry, I dived, I made a mark and I got hit and things like that happen over and over again and it continues to irritate. It got to the point where I dove in and it hurt more than normal.”
There were initial concerns that the injury would have a long-term impact, but Kurtz began working on his rehabilitation and missed very little time.
“I prayed about it every day,” he said. “I expected good things to come and they did. So I’m really grateful for that too.”
Although he leads the ACC in drawn walks (43), it was getting more aggressive in the batter’s box that helped unlock the herculean impact Kurtz had in winning back-to-back conference player of the week awards.
“It was just him getting comfortable in the box – getting back to being aggressive,” Walter said. “I think those walks at the beginning of the year made him a little too passive, so he went back to being aggressive. Nick Kurtz He’s aggressive in the middle of the field, he’s fun to watch. It was great watching him. He’s hot on fastballs now and has always handled velocity well, so he’s in a really good position.
“He became passive and then he started pressing and you saw him foul those balls, which you never saw Nick Kurtz to do. And that’s when he was up there, maybe guessing a little too much, and not at the right time for the fastball, but at the start of the breaking ball. Every hitter goes through this. And he went through that and then he had the injury and he had a chance to hit the reset button.”
After suffering a loss at the hands of North Carolina, the Demon Deacons put things together, winning several ACC series while climbing the national rankings and RPI.
“We all knew our time was coming where you would have so many new guys and try to build an Omaha-caliber team and it would have its ups and downs just like baseball,” Kurtz said. “And we really didn’t have that. If you want to talk about last year, we really didn’t have that. And the first time we had it was when we were in Omaha.
“So being able to go through the season, going through the lows, being able to celebrate the highs and everything like that, you really get to experience it all.”
