By Nathan Rode
National Supervisor

Teaching and coaching high school students and athletes since 1968, Greg Vitello has decided it’s time. The head baseball coach at De Smet Jesuit HS, MO, will retire at the end of the school year. It’s easy to not be surprised by such an announcement when a career spans six decades, but it certainly caught some people off guard—some that were close enough to see it coming.

“I was shocked,” said Tony Vitello, the elder Vitello’s son and assistant coach at Arkansas. “People have been asking me for five or six years and the word retirement never came out of his mouth, but the last two or three years, it was more in passing. So you knew he was at least thinking about it. It's nice to hear he's at peace with it and feels good. When he told me, he shocked the heck out of me.”