The barbarians are “at the pearly gates of college baseball,” to borrow from the lofty prose of Texas A&M coach Jim Schlossnagle. The swag surfers in Tennessee orange or Smokey gray or whatever is Friday’s garish jersey of the day are so close to shore in the only triple-landlocked state in the country.
The Vols have been to the College World Series before. This is their seventh trip overall, their third in the last four years, but never have they ridden into Omaha on such high horses under those black hats. If rah-rah Kentucky celebrated sharing the SEC regular-season championship “like it was a damn presidential inauguration,” in the unusually acerbic words of Vanderbilt Zen master Tim Corbin, can you imagine how Tony Vitello’s dudes with ‘tudes will let loose if they win it all?
A moment of silence for the Vandy Whistler at the very thought.
If you’ve been paying attention as the SEC’s been displaying its superior brand of postseason hardball as usual, it should happen. Despite the presence of three other conference brothers in A&M, Kentucky and Florida and four ACC wannabes in North Carolina, Florida State, Virginia and NC State, Tennessee should win the College World Series for the first time.
That would make UT the ninth conference member with an NCAA baseball championship in its trophy case, the league’s third newbie with a natty in the past four years after Mississippi State in 2021 and Ole Miss in 2022. Alabama and Auburn remain among a shrinking subset of SEC schools that are 0-for-Omaha.
The Tennessee women’s tennis team is one of 14 schools slated to host 2025 Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) Kickoff Weekend. The Lady Vols will welcome No. 15 Ohio State, No. 16 NC State and No. 27 Texas Tech to Goodfriend Tennis Center on Jan. 24-25, 2025.
The annual ITA Kickoff Weekend features 56 teams competing across 14 different sites. The winners of the single-elimination event advance to the ITA Division I National Team Indoor Championship. Next year will be the first time just 14 schools host instead of 15, due to a change in formatting.
The 2024 ITA National Team Indoor Championship will be co-hosted by Illinois and Northwestern on Feb. 7-10, 2025. For the next two years, Northwestern will be designated as the final site and will host both semifinal matches as well as the finals at its facility.
Opening-round contests at each location pit the No. 1 (host) seed versus the No. 4 seed and the No. 2 seed against the No. 3 seed. The two winners advance to the following day’s championship match, while the two losing teams will square off in a consolation match.
Next year will be the second in a row that Tennessee host the ITA Kickoff Weekend in both men’s and women’ s tennis
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