Rob Vaughn still remembers getting the call from Alabama athletics director Greg Byrne. He and wife Kayleigh were on the way back to College Park, Maryland, from a game at Penn State on May 20, 2023. In the hours before, the Terrapins had won the conference regular season championship.
“I’m getting 200 messages saying congratulations and then I had a 205 number I didn’t know … ” Vaughn told the Tuscaloosa News on Tuesday.
Vaughn knew the state Alabama baseball was in. If Vaughn answered Byrne, it meant he was open to inheriting the turmoil and pressure left by fired Crimson Tide coach Brad Bohannon’s involvement in a gambling scandal. If he didn’t, life could go on peacefully in Maryland, where he was celebrated for seeing the program to its best season ever in 2022 and a historic league tournament championship the next year.
Two years later, a two-time Big 10 Coach of the Year with two 40-win seasons at Maryland already under his belt, Vaughn now has his first 40-win regular season at the helm of Alabama — a feat UA hasn’t accomplished since 2002, but pulled off in a ninth-inning thriller at Florida. He almost didn’t take the job, though.
After Alabama baseball’s first 40-win regular season since 2002, why Rob Vaughn chose the Tide
“I was like, ‘I’m gonna call back. I mean, you never know, but I don’t think this is probably it,’ ” Vaughn, 37, said.
He was singing a different tune when he walked back in the house 30 minutes later.
“I could have stayed in a Big 10 at University of Maryland and been as happy as could be in, coached a good team and had a great life,” Vaughn said, having turned down multiple jobs in the years prior. “We weren’t even looking to leave.”
More than being a coach, Vaughn loves being a husband to wife, Kayleigh, and a father to Wyatt, 8, Beau, 2, and five-month-old Annie. Coming up on 15 years of marriage, Vaughn and Kayleigh’s relationship began on October 14, 2007 and the two were married on October 23, 2010. The typical husband might get the two confused. Not Vaughn, and he’s proud of it.
“I didn’t know if you could coach in the SEC and be a good husband and still be a good dad,” Vaughn said. Byrne promised Vaughn that he could be all three. A pretty sweet deal. “When I left my interview with Greg, it was the first time I was ever like, ‘Man, I think I can do it with him, and I think I can do it here,’ ” Vaughn recalled.
“What I saw here is a place that is a great family place in a league that is absolutely the most cutthroat in all of sports,” Vaughn said. “I saw somebody that wanted me to do it the right way.” Before talking with Byrne, Vaughn wasn’t sure that “existed” in the SEC.
“I thought, you come to this league, you got to sell your soul, and I wasn’t willing to do that,” Vaughn said.
Meet the village behind Rob Vaughn
Vaughn knows why he’s in Tuscaloosa when he makes spaghetti dinners for his parents on Sundays, or when he looks in the sleepy eyes of “best baby ever” Annie James, or watching milestones at “sweet, kind, thoughtful, awesome” Wyatt’s baseball games. Even mornings before school are picture-perfect. Vaughn’s “freaking bull in a china shop” Beau tends to barrel downstairs, eat his yogurt and hit balls — until it’s time to yell at dad for making him put down the bat to get in the car. “That dude is a savage. I love him. He is so much fun,” Vaughn said of Beau. “All he wants to do all day, every day, is play baseball.”
“Since we’ve been here, I just feel like once a week, something happens where my wife and I look at each other, and we know we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be,” Vaughn said. “This is exactly what we signed up for.”
