Tennessee baseball’s path to the College World Series has been challenging and adversity filled. Let’s take a look at the Vols journey from the time they returned home from the SEC Tournament.
The vast majority of pundits projected Tennessee to land as a two-seed in Indiana State’s regional. The Sycamores ended up as the No. 14 overall seed but the Vols didn’t go to Terre Haute. Instead, the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee sent Tennessee to Clemson where they had to face the No. 4 overall seed Tigers.
It was an extremely tough draw for Tennessee as Clemson entered the event winners of 16 straight games and were playing as well as any team in the country.
After handling Charlotte in its regional opener, Tennessee was down to its last strike twice against Clemson and ace pitcher Caden Grice. But a pair of two out singles ran Grice from the game and brought the go-ahead run to the plate.
Zane Denton made it count, destroying a three-run homer all the way out of Doug Kingsmore Stadium. But it wasn’t easy from there either, Clemson tied the game in the bottom of the ninth inning before Tennessee won in 14 innings. Hunter Ensley drove ahead the go-ahead run with a double into the right center field gap. Chase Burns and Seth Halvorsen were excellent in relief.
The Vols finished off the Clemson Regional a day later by defeating Charlotte again.
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From there the waiting game began again. Tennessee awaited the winner of the Auburn Regional with Penn and Southern Miss facing off in the championship game. A Penn win would send the Quakers to Knoxville for the super regionals. A Southern Miss win meant the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee would choose whether Southern Miss or Tennessee would host.
When the Golden Eagles outlasted Penn, the committee had a decision to make. Despite Tennessee boasting a better resume, the selection committee chose Hattiesburg as the super regional host.
Tennessee arrived in Southern Mississippi for a wild weekend. After just three innings, the first weather delay of the weekend began. The teams briefly returned and five more outs were recorded before game one went back into a delay.
Despite torrential downpour well into the night, it took the NCAA until just before 9 p.m. CT to finally postpone the rest of game one until the next day. Play resumed with Tennessee trailing 4-0 in the fifth inning and despite making a fifth inning run, the Vols dropped game one and were on the brink of elimination.
Tennessee looked like it was in major trouble early in game two as Southern Miss took a 4-0 lead in the third inning and Vol players and coaches argued with the home plate umpire. But Tennessee found another gear, scoring six runs in the fourth inning before coasting to a series evening victory.
Tennessee and Southern Miss each waited until after 11 p.m. CT to figure out the game three game time as the NCAA and ESPN waited for the Stanford-Texas game to end before announcing the game time.
Both organizations ignored weather forecasts and set the first pitch time for 5 p.m. CT. Tennessee never made its way to Pete Taylor Park before the original first pitch time as a thunderstorm rolled into Hattiesburg. The game didn’t begin until 9 p.m. CT and 10 p.m. ET back in Knoxville.
There were no hiccups once play began and Tennessee defeated Southern Miss 5-0 behind elite pitching performances from Drew Beam and Chase Burns.
Tennessee heads to Omaha Wednesday before facing LSU in its College World Series opener Saturday night at 7 p.m. ET. The Tigers took two out of three over Tennessee in Baton Rouge back in March.
