COLLEGE BASEBALL ’25: Defending champion Vols have new-look roster but face same high expectations

It was as if the 2024 Tennessee Volunteers were built to win a national championship with their dominant pitching and an offense that produced the second-most home runs in a season in NCAA history. They ended up with an SEC-record 60 wins and beat Texas A&M in a three-game College World Series finals.

Eight players from that team were drafted, including six in the first four rounds. That’s left coach Tony Vitello to approach 2025 as a building year, though much is still expected of the Vols as defending champions. They’re picked second behind Texas A&M in the Southeastern Conference preseason coaches’ poll and are a consensus top-five team in the national polls.

“They’re the 2025 team and they want to put their own stamp on this particular year,” Vitello said. “I think our guys are ready to move on and kind of use this blank canvas they have and start splashing some paint on there.”

The Vols open with a three-game home series against Hofstra starting Friday, Division I baseball’s opening day.

The weekend rotation could take some time to get established. Mississippi transfer Liam Doyle is in line to be the No. 1 starter. Nate Snead, a 10-game winner as a reliever last season, likely will move into a starter’s role. Junior college transfer Brandon Arvidson, the returning Marcus Phillips and heralded freshman Tegan Kuhns are among pitchers competing for a spot.

The everyday lineup also will look a lot different. Sluggers Christian Moore, Dylan Dreiling, Blake Burke, Kavares Tears and Billy Amick left via the draft after combining for 120 of the Vols’ 184 homers.

Preseason All-SEC pick Dean Curley will be in his second year at shortstop and Hunter Ensley will be back in center field. Curley and Ensley, with 12 apiece, are the top returning home run hitters.

Ensley has been in the program since the post-pandemic rise of the Vols. Their 211 wins and .773 winning percentage since 2021 rank No. 1 nationally. They went 0-2 in the 2021 CWS, lost a home super regional as the No. 1 national seed in 2022 and went 1-2 in the 2023 CWS before winning it all last year.

“I definitely think there’s more eyes on the baseball program now,” Ensley said. “You could really just walk over to the baseball field and kind of look around, and to me, that kind of tells you the whole story. More people are buying in, more people are invested, more people are involved, more people kind of want to be around the program.”

So while the names on the lineup card change, the expectations remain the same for the team’s expanded fan base. The Vols ranked seventh nationally in attendance last year with an average of 5,339 per game, more than twice as many as the 1,721 per game that showed up in Vitello’s first season in 2018.

“We built a little bit of a brand here,” he said.

Since South Carolina won back-to-back titles in 2010-11, only one returning national champion has made it back to Omaha, Nebraska, for the CWS. That was Florida, which won the 2017 title and lasted four games in the 2018 CWS.

LSU, the 2023 champion, had a losing record in SEC play and lost in regionals last year. Mississippi and Mississippi State, winners of the previous two championships, finished under .500 and didn’t make the NCAA Tournament the next year.

Snead makes no promises about how the Vols will fare the year after their championship.

“I mean, we lost a lot of our guys that contributed to that team,” he said. “So obviously the expectation for everybody outside of the team is always there, and they always want us to win. Obviously, we want to win, too, but it’s just baseball. I mean, you really can’t control much. So we’re going to go out there and just play. Hopefully we win again.”

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AP college sports: https://apnews.com/hub/college-sports