Frank Anderson will serve as Tennessee baseball’s interim head coach following Tony Vitello’s departure to the San Fransisco Giants on Wednesday afternoon, Danny White announced Wednesday afternoon.
White says that Tennessee will hold a nationwide search and that associate head coach Josh Elander will be a candidate.
Veteran pitching coach Frank Anderson will serve as Tennessee’s interim head coach as Danny White conducts a coaching search. Anderson has been Tennessee’s pitching coach since Vitello arrived in Knoxville in 2017. The veteran is one of the nation’s top pitching coaches and the Vols have consistently had one of the nation’s best pitching staffs under his leadership.
Anderson does have head coaching experience in his career too. He was previously the head coach at Oklahoma State from 2004-12 where he led the Cowboys to the NCAA Tournament six times with one super regional appearance.
However, Anderson is the interim head coach he is nearing retirement and is not a legit candidate for Tennessee’s head coaching vacancy. He said in a past interview that he had no interest in being a college head coach again.
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Josh Elander is Tennessee’s associate head coach and is the in-house candidate to land the head coaching job. White says that Elander not being an interim coach is not a negative but is so he can focus on his candidacy.
Elander has spent the last eight years as an assistant coach at Tennessee under Vitello including the last three as associate head coach. Effectively Tennessee’s offensive coordinator, Elander has helped build some of the best offenses in the nation year-in, year-out.
In past years, the Vols have obliterated program offensive records including home run and total runs records. They have also contended for a number of SEC and college baseball offensive records too. Elander has been a major part of that success.
Tennessee is currently in the midst of fall practice and is scheduled to play an intrasquad scrimmage at First Horizon Park in Nashville on Sunday afternoon. As of now, Tennessee plans for that scrimmage to proceed as originally scheduled.
Vitello built one of the best programs in college baseball during his eight-year tenure as Tennessee baseball’s head coach. In his eight seasons as head coach, Tennessee won two SEC Regular-Season and SEC Tournament championships, made the super regionals five times, made the College World Series three times and won the 2024 National Championship— the first in program history. Vitello ended his stint at Tennessee with a 341-131 record.
