Tennessee is tantalizingly close to making it back to college baseball’s eminent event.

After dispatching Northern Kentucky, Indiana and Southern Miss in last week’s Knoxville Regional — a trio of games they won by a combined score of 33-12, with no contest closer than six runs — the Vols are on to the super regional round of the 2024 NCAA Tournament.

Should the tournament’s No. 1 overall seed take care of business, it will advance to the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska for the third time in the past four years. There, Tennessee would aim to secure the program’s first-ever national championship.

To make it back to the CWS, there’s one last obstacle in the Vols’ way.

REQUIRED READING: What to know about Evansville, Tennessee baseball's super regional opponent

In the super regional, Tennessee will welcome Evansville to Lindsey Nelson Stadium in Knoxville, with the winner moving on to Omaha. Evansville, which enters the series with a 38-24 record, came out of the NCAA tournament’s Greenville Regional, where it 3-1, including two victories against host No. 16 East Carolina, to keep its season alive.

Heading into this week’s super regional, here’s what you need to know about Evansville, including its location, mascot, conference and more:

Evansville is located in Evansville, Indiana, a city of nearly 120,00 residents located on the Ohio River in the state’s southwest corner, about 30 miles west of the Illinois border.

Founded in 1854 as Moores Hill College, Evansville is a private university with an enrollment of about 2,000 students. Notable alumni of the school include actor Rami Malek, actor Jack McBrayer, and former NBA player and coach Jerry Sloan.

REQUIRED READING: University of Tennessee can't host a baseball watch party. The upside: upgrades for sports

Evansville’s athletic teams are known as the Purple Aces, a unique moniker with interesting backstory.

Originally called the Pioneers, Evansville beat Louisville 59-39 in the fourth game of the 1924-25 season, a lopsided victory that prompted Louisville coach Fred Enke to tell Evansville coach John Harmon after the game that “You didn’t have four Aces up your sleeve, you had five!”

Harmon and Evansville Courier sports editor Dan Scism, who was relayed the quote, decided they preferred Aces to Pioneers. Given the school’s color scheme, its teams became the Purple Aces.

Evansville’s mascot is Ace Purple, who has the look of a turn-of-the-20^th-century riverboat gambler, as an allusion to Evansville’s location on the Ohio River. Ace Purple was first imagined by local sports cartoonist Larry Hill, who had the sneering mascot wielding a gun and a spiked club. Though its teams kept the Purple Aces nickname, the university’s leadership was not pleased with Hill’s original vision of the character and it was soon abandoned.

In 1977, as Evansville made the move to Division I, the school’s new sports information director sought to bring some kind of mascot back to the university. He reached out to Keith Butz, who had recently reimagined Purdue’s Purdue Pete mascot and ended up turning Ace Purple into a more approachable character.

Evansville is a member of the Missouri Valley Conference, which it joined in 1994.

This season, the Purple Aces went 17-10 in conference play and finished third in the league standings, but won the Missouri Valley tournament to earn an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament.

REQUIRED READING: Here are 10 Tennessee baseball stories you’ve never heard because records weren’t kept

The Purple Aces are led by coach Wes Carroll, who is in his 16^th season as Evansville’s coach.

A native of nearby Newburgh, Indiana, Carroll played baseball at Evansville, where he became its first freshman all-American selection in 1998. To this day, he’s first in program history in doubles and second in career hits.

Following his retirement from professional baseball in 2006, he returned to Evansville to become an assistant coach. Two years later, in July 2008, he was promoted to head coach.

Carroll, a two-time Missouri Valley coach of the year, has gone 427-432 at his alma mater.

The Evansville baseball program has frequently used “GUAC” as part of its larger branding, particularly on social media.

It’s not a reference to guacamole, but rather an acronym for “Get Up, Ace Country.” The phrase was born in 2022, when fans sought to rally a team that started 9-14, but won 23 of its final 33 games to finish in second place in the Missouri Valley standings.

The acronym draws a little extra attention, and elicits some confusion, when preceded with a hashtag on social media, causing it to appear with an avocado emoji.

Though it’s appearing in the super regionals for the first time ever, Evansville is in the NCAA tournament for the sixth time in program history.

Additionally, the Purple Aces have won three Missouri Valley championships, had 24 all-Americans and produced three MLB first-round draft picks, including 1988 No. 1 overall pick Andy Benes.

News Source : https://www.columbiadailyherald.com/story/sports/college/university-of-tennessee/2024/06/07/where-is-evansville-mascot-conference-coach-purple-aces-tennessee-baseball-super-regional-guac-cws/73990467007/