As others have mentioned, coaching was a big issue but also a total lack of promotion. Both have gotten tons better (I had a friend on the team years ago yet never knew when the games were). To compound the matter, UT didn't establish their fanbase or even try until AFTER the Tennessee Smokies were already embedded in the community. People love watching Smokies' games and they've got a great stadium experience + beer so if you're gonna watch a baseball game that your kid isn't in they're the first choice for baseball fans.

Oh and I disagree about E. TN not caring about baseball (although it's true we don't care about collegebaseball). It certainly does - we had more baseball fields than you could shake a stick at in my hometown (so many, in fact, that my cousin wanted to move there when he was a kid because of the bball fields). And that same town has won the little league world series. Softball is big too.

Between the lack of marketing (for many years even if you were a student, you barely knew we even had a baseball team if you thought about it at all), coaching for many years, and not working to cultivate a fanbase until now that there's competition from the Smokies, it's an upward climb for UT baseball.

It's odd but softball has a better following in a lot of ways because we used to have two ADs (one for the women and one for the men) and the women's AD did a much better job promoting them and taking care of them.

This post was edited on 2/11/15 at 3:30 pm