Tony Vitello details what he sees at midpoint of the regular season

It is the midway point of the 2023 college baseball season and Tennessee manager Tony Vitello sees a lot of similarities between how his team performed in the fall and now in the spring.

“Parallel to the fall, I think a lot of growth from the first weekend,” Vitello said ahead of the weekend series with Florida. “We said that about the fall. I mean August was almost awkward how new everything seemed to feel and how many questions were unanswered. But by the end of the fall, it didn’t seem like that and you had a lot of questions answered. But start a whole new season, the actual season, and we’ve made a lot of progress, answered a lot of questions compared to game one.

“I look for really that same theme to continue and everyone’s talking around the office. I’ve spoken with some of you all. Our best baseball has yet to come and also our best team personality, team image or just best environment has yet to occur as well. That’s not going to happen just over time just because time takes place. It’s got to be progress and guys forging ahead and fortunately, we’ve had that mentality.”

The Volunteers lost two of three over the weekend to the Gators to fall to 22-10 on the season, which is a very good record but not as good as last season’s historic regular season run.

However, the team is 5-7 in conference play. But two of the series they have played so far have come against the top two ranked teams in the country in Florida and LSU.

Vitello likes where his program is at the moment and likes that they are continuing to build something in Knoxville.

“The last couple of years, it’s almost like people are whispering, don’t win too many games too early or were you playing your best baseball at a certain point prior to the postseason,” Vitello said. “You want to keep building, building, building, building and again there’s no magic formula for that. But this team seems to have the consistent theme of getting to know each other more, growing more just in all categories and then playing better. Then as a coaching staff, we seem to be getting answers more and more as days go by.”