FAYETTEVILLE — When pitching coach Wes Johnson left Mississippi State for Arkansas earlier this year, he left behind some new-age recruiting tactics for something a little more old school.
At Mississippi State, all coaches have a Twitter account. It gives them a presence on the social media platform used by many recruits and fans. The NCAA allows coaches to interact with recruits through the platform’s direct messaging feature, and earlier this year expanded that interaction to include retweets of recruits’ posts.
But at Arkansas, Johnson isn’t active on social media, nor is he asked to be. In fact, none of the Razorbacks’ baseball coaches actively recruit or post on Twitter, a rarity in today’s college baseball landscape.
Instead, Arkansas coaches take a more traditional approach to communicating with recruits: mostly over the phone and in-person, as well as through text messages.
“I think it’s a reflection of our personalities,” said Tony Vitello, the Razorbacks’ hitting coach and recruiting coordinator. “The one thing I’ve learned about Coach Dave Van Horn is that he is so good about keeping things simple.
“It’s not a very sales-pitch approach we take to recruiting. Where we do our hustling is not with the Twitter fingers, but with getting our eyes to as many games as possible and then on the phone. I think we put as much time as anyone into building relationships, not only with the prospects, but with their families as well.
“What they get from us is honesty. We don’t promise anyone anything. We can’t guarantee anything. We’re always working, but I think all of us, instead of send out a tweet, would rather get our hands dirty and hit fungo bats or help a guy with something baseball related.”
That isn’t to say the coaches don’t use social media in some capacity. It is almost a necessity for news gathering or for monitoring recruits’ and players’ actions online.
Van Horn, the 15th-year head coach, is the Razorbacks’ only baseball coach with a promoted Twitter account. Members of Arkansas’ media relations staff have access to Van Horn’s account for posting purposes, but it has only 14 posts, including one in the past year.
By comparison, Auburn head coach Butch Thompson - Johnson's predecessor as Mississippi State's pitching coach - had 19 tweets the first 10 days of October.
“Some kids think it’s cool, some kids think it’s overkill,” Van Horn said of recruits’ thoughts about social media. “We’ve done a good job of getting kids to come visit us and if we do that, we don’t have to try to tell everybody everything we’re doing every day (on social media). To me, that just doesn’t make a lot of sense. That’s our philosophy.”
The lack of a social media presence has not hurt the Razorbacks’ coaches. After years of recruiting against one another, Vitello and Johnson have teamed up to give Arkansas one of the best recruiting tandems in college baseball.
Both are respected throughout baseball circles for their abilities to interact with high school players and commit them to any program.
“Coach Vitello is everywhere. I see him at every event,” said Cole Turney, an all-American outfielder who is expected to sign with the Razorbacks in November. “My dad made a comment, ‘I see Coach Vitello more than I see my wife.’ He works hard and knows what he’s looking for.”
Vitello and Johnson are happy to be working together. They previously competed for the same recruits, especially in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex when Vitello was the recruiting coordinator at TCU and Johnson had the same role at Dallas Baptist.
“I’m not saying this because we work together — I said it last year when I was at Dallas Baptist — but Tony may be the best guy in the country at what he does,” Johnson said. “I lost players to him all the time.”
Vitello helped assemble a 2016 class at Arkansas that is ranked the 12th-best nationally by Baseball America. Johnson has also proven valuable early in his tenure.
Among the players to cite him as the reason for committing to the Razorbacks is left-handed pitcher Hunter Milligan of Greenbrier. Milligan, who at one point was rated the seventh-best prospect nationally in his class, had previously committed to play for Johnson at Mississippi State.
There are many more top names committed to the Razorbacks, including an abnormally large number already in the class of 2019.
“Recruiting is at an all-time high around here,” Van Horn said. “We’ve got some guys just flat getting after it on the recruiting trail.”
And they are doing it old school.
“I think it’s unique because so many are going the social media route,” Johnson said. “Dave is all about relationships and sitting down with a family, and telling them what Arkansas baseball is about face-to-face.
“I am 100 percent for what we do and the way we recruit. At the end of the day, you better have built relationships with these young men. I still like the handshake and the relationship-building, and quite frankly I don’t think it has cost us a kid not having social media.”
This originally appeared in Hawgs Illustrated magazine