'I am not for everyone': Love or loathe him, Tony Vitello has Tennessee rocking

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. -- Baseball is a game that is built around and dominated by lines. Baselines. Foul lines. The batter's box. The on-deck circle. Even the walls are edged with bright yellow borderlines. Constant linear reminders of where one is allowed to be, lest someone literally run afoul of those boundaries and the seemingly endless rules that govern them.

There are many people in baseball -- it would be an easy argument to say most -- who operate safely within those lines. Then, there are those who view their job to push back on those restrictions. To step over, or at least to place all 10 toes atop or up against the edge of all of those lines.

And that brings us to Tony Vitello.

He is the coach of the Tennessee Volunteers, the defending Men's College World Series champion. He has led the Vols to their fifth consecutive super regional this weekend, as No. 14 Tennessee travels to No. 3 Arkansas for an SEC showdown against Hogs coach Dave Van Horn, one of the many legendary college baseball minds under whom Vitello worked from 2014 to 2017. He's 46, single and, in his own words, "married to the game," but also isn't allergic to traveling to Nashville or the islands for a good time.

All of the above should make a man nationally beloved. Instead, Vitello is a Tennessee Orange axe, splitting the college baseball community's feeling about him as a very clean, yes, line between love and loathe. Those who do not care for him point to what they believe is a disregard for those sacred baseball guardrails. Those who applaud him don't see a man bent on baseball disregard. They see a border-bending maverick.

"I think you don't know where the line is until you cross it. And then you make an adjustment," said Vitello, who is nearing the end of his eighth season in Knoxville. "I don't want our guys, if they give them a coloring book, I don't want them just coloring inside the lines. You know, come up with something different."

At this point, we should explain that the 46-year-old is also obsessed with Matt Damon movies, maybe even more than baseball.

"In 'Good Will Hunting,' the one thing he says to a guy is, 'At least I'm not unoriginal.' What a terrible thing, to be forgotten in the locker room. If there's a team reunion, and no one immediately says, 'There's the weird guy,' or 'There's the guy that was a psycho,' or 'There's the guy that made everybody laugh.' If you walk in and no one's got anything, that, that ain't good. So, for me, I'd rather our guys and our coaching staff push the limits for what competing is, under the realm of what we think. Not what someone else thinks."

What college baseball statisticians and historians think is that the Vitello era on Rocky Top has been a run of unexpected success. From 1947 through 2016, the Vols were one of the game's snooziest of sleeping giants, making only four trips to Omaha over the first seven decades of the Men's College World Series. Now, they are seeking their fourth visit in five years. The first three of those berths ended in disappointment, sandwiched around a 2022 season that critics pointed to as proof of Vitello's misguided managerial ways, when the undisputed No. 1 team, packed with 10 MLB draft picks, failed to make it out of the Knoxville Super Regional.

The problem most pointed to, fair or unfair, was the recurring stepping over of those lines. Vitello's Irish-Italian blood overheating itself past a healthy motivational simmer and into a boil that blew his top and gave his players permission to do the same. See: chest-bumped umpires, upside-down dugout chairs, three suspensions and five ejections in eight years.

But big emotion has also become the trademark of the Big Orange, heart-on-the-sleeve hardball that, finally, last June, paid off with Tennessee's first national title of any kind in a decade and a half.

"This job is about evolution," Vitello said. "I think life is about evolution. What works? What doesn't? I'm not the smartest guy you'll ever meet, but I am smart enough to learn from my actions and the results that come from it, or the results that don't. At least, I think I am smart enough. I guess some people would say that's not true. But honestly, the only people I care about when it comes to that are the ones in this building and the people who support what we are doing in this building."

Plus, let's be honest. He's a movie guy, and every actor from Denzel Washington to his beloved Damon says being the bad guy is more fun.

"OK. Yeah, we can play the villain a little bit. But we're trying to win," Vitello said.

Vitello likes to frame his foray into coaching as a happy series of accidents and coincidences. Raised in the St. Louis area, the youngest of four kids and the only boy, he was the high school infielder who wasn't a great hitter, but had a solid glove and a rubber arm. He landed a roster spot at Division II Spring Hill College in Alabama before transferring into his home state program, the perennially lackluster Missouri Tigers. Then, he used that arm to start throwing batting practice to his teammates. That led to a full-time assistant coaching position at his alma mater, which led to a series of assistant stops, learning from Van Horn and Jim Schlossnagle, the coach of the Texas A&M team the Vols beat to win last year's title.

He became known as a road warrior recruiter, racking up all-star rosters at schools that expect to have them, but also at Mizzou.

"You can teach a young coach the finer points of the job," Schlossnagle said of Vitello one year ago, on the eve of their MCWS showdown. They worked together at TCU from 2011 to 2013. "What you can't teach them is drive. Work ethic. That thing in your DNA that has you working from the moment you wake up until it's bedtime. No one ever had to teach Tony that. He'd already been taught that long before he got to us."

Those lessons came from his father, Greg Vitello, a Missouri Sports Hall of Famer, a baseball and soccer coaching legend who worked for 46 years at De Smet High School, where he coached his son. Prior to that, he took the boy to wherever he was on the sidelines. Young Tony tucked his way beneath the scorer's table. He watched his dad paint lines on playing fields. He watched his dad run practices. And by the time teenage Tony became a Spartan, all he knew was arriving early, leaving late and doing whatever it took to win. But more than that, the daily expressed mission of turning young athletes into young adults.

"That was his focus," Tony Vitello said. "Trust me, he's super competitive, but if you win games, that's a byproduct of that. It was never talk of we need to get to the final four, or we need to get to this championship or that. So, when a final four did arrive or a championship did arrive, it was pure emotion. My dad was a maniac worker. And I think I learned that, and watched that, and respected that. The time I got to be around him was invaluable."

"I had to back off on him because, you know, he's your son," Greg Vitello said. "You want him to be the best. And then again, there's always that talk around you. 'Hey, the only reason he's playing is his old man's the coach!' But you know what? He proved himself."

The moment that Tony Vitello still can't talk about without catching a lump in his throat was in 1997, when he was part of the fourth of Greg's five Missouri state championship soccer teams. The moment the match was over, Tony retreated to the locker room and fell apart.

"I couldn't stop crying," Tony said. "It was a relief because I wanted to help him win one of those state championships. I had this strange fear of, 'What if I go to high school for four years, play three sports and never, never have it happen?' It was a thrilling moment, but it was a weird sense of relief."

The world didn't see that moment in '97 or listen when Tony called his father, sobbing, to say that he had been offered his first head coaching job, and it was from Tennessee. ("In the SEC!" Greg now shouts.)

But we all saw it last June. That's when the son, before he dove into the Charles Schwab Field crowd or before he posed for postgame photos with Tennessee great Peyton Manning, stood on the top step of the dugout in Omaha and threw his arms around his father.