'He's Genuine': Christian Ostrander Shares Respect for Friend Rob Vaughn

HATTIESBURG, Miss.— Alabama baseball coach Rob Vaughn has called Southern Miss skipper Christian Ostrander one of his great friends. The two crossed paths for the second time in 2025 on Saturday, with Ostrander's Golden Eagles ending the season of Vaughn's Crimson Tide.

"Iron sharpens iron," Ostrander said after the game, a 6-5 Southern Miss win in game three of the Hattiesburg Regional between the 0-1 teams. "He's genuine, and I appreciate that greatly. I think sometimes that gets lost at the higher levels, highest levels of some things. That guy's as real as it gets."

Vaughn and Ostrander are in their second seasons as head coaches at their current schools. The former lamented on Thursday the possibility of having to eliminate the latter from the NCAA Tournament during regionals, as opposed to further along the journey in supers or Omaha.

"I wish I wasn't playing one of my dear friends in Christian Ostrander. I wish we saw each other a little bit later in the tournament," Vaughn said Thursday. "But one of us gets to come out of this thing."

"It was kinda bittersweet competing against one another," Ostrander said. "Anytime you do that against somebody that you have a relationship with, care about, yeah, you want to try to suffocate them and beat them, but at the end of the day, you're gonna give them a hug and tell them great job."

Ostrander said he and Vaughn have grown a connection through a coaches' cohort over the past nine months, where professional insights are shared and ideas bounced off each other. The two coaches spoke near the first-base dugout 90 minutes before Saturday's game.