Vitello wants credit for Razorbacks' worldwide recruiting net

While getting that youth league team to Arkansas keeps the door open on the Hawaiian pipeline even longer going forward, Tennessee coach Tony Vitello, who will lead his team against the Razorbacks' eclectic group of world travelers in the super regionals this weekend, would like his share of the credit for making it all possible.

"Yeah, I'm frustrated," Vitello said. "I kind of led the charge. A lot of times you just recruit a guy as a staff, but I led the charge on a guy named Rick Nomura, and Rick was a talented player from Hawaii at a junior college, and I think he self served as the bridge, because it's not just the brothers. They got another one over there, he's been injured, but a real talent as a young kid from Hawaii. So it's pretty cool how they started a little trend there. I kind of hate that I was a part of it since I'm wearing wearing orange."

Same, Yet Different

Despite Arkansas having a 13-2 advantage over Tennessee head-to-head the last several years, the two programs are about as evenly aligned as any two national powerhouses could be.

Since play resumed in a somewhat normal way after COVID, Arkansas and Tennessee have dominated college baseball as two of the winningest programs in the country. The Razorbacks have won 74% of their games while the Volunteers have won 76%.

Vitello's Vols have lost 79 games, while Van Horn's Hogs have lost 81 in that same span. That's an average of 16 loss per season while the two combined to average 65 games per year.

Vitello attributes a lot of the programs' mirrored success to his time as an assistant under Van Horn. However, he says another major factor was what Tennessee was able to do with its fan base over the past half decade.

"There's some things that I learned there that I would have never known or never would have experienced without [Van Horn] first believing in me, and then [his] help," Vitello said. "So there's some similarities, or a bridge there a little bit, and then we didn't know what would become of this year, and I, with our fan base, is what I'm getting at. And I was a little concerned on whether we could sustain success here, because in our league you have to have a true home field advantage, and they've had it for decades. Really, I guess, after COVID, even kind of during, in 21 especially, we had the comforting feeling that this is one of the rowdiest places to play as well."

However, to build that crowd, Vitello had to build a different culture that would appeal to a group of fans famously known for showering Ole Miss football players, former Vols head coach Lane Kiffin, and even their own cheerleaders with water bottles, golf balls and even a bottle of mustard. He needed to create an atmosphere filled with more brashness and bravado that was willing to be far more confrontational when the moment called for it.

"It's a totally different place," Vitello said. "Same [in that it's a] state university, flagship school and all that, but Knoxville is different, and baseball in our state's different, and the way we want to do some things here is a little bit different. So again, the bottom line is, all that stuff's extra. They say 'SEC, it just means more,' and a lot of the things that fall under that true cliche, I think are at both places, and that's why the last series was fun, and like I said, they bested us, so we've got work to do."