Former Alabama Baseball Head Coach Retires

A former Alabama baseball coach officially called it a career Wednesday.

Former Alabama head coach Mitch Gaspard watches the action at the SEC Tournament. / Vasha Hunt/AL.com

Former Alabama baseball head coach Mitch Gaspard, who manned the dugout for the Crimson Tide from 2010-16, announced his retirement Wednesday. He had spent the past five seasons in various roles at Louisiana Tech, where he was most recently the associate head coach.

Gaspard oversaw one of Alabama's three 21st-century trips to the super regional round of the NCAA Tournament during his first season as head coach in 2010. His teams went to four NCAA Tournaments, and he posted a 234-193 overall mark at the Capstone. His final season was the first year of the renovated Sewell-Thomas Stadium.

In 2021, he served as hitting coach for the Bulldogs, and Louisiana Tech earned the No. 16 national seed and the right to host a regional. Alabama went to that regional in the program's first NCAA Tournament appearance since Gaspard's tenure, and though the hosts did not win the regional, the Bulldogs did end the Crimson Tide's season. Gaspard was subsequently promoted to associate head coach, and was part of the program for other successes such as the 2024 C-USA regular season title.

This past season, under the leadership of Rob Vaughn, the Crimson Tide notched another milestone that had not been reached since Gaspard's time at the helm: making back-to-back NCAA Tournaments. Alabama's 2013 and 2014 teams both went to Tallahassee for their regionals, as did the 2024 team.

Gaspard has 444 wins as a head coach: 210 of them came from his 2002-07 stint at Northwestern State. He was an Alabama assistant from 1995-2001 (which overlaps with the program's last trip to the College World Series) and again from 2008-09, being tabbed to replace Jim Wells following his retirement. Gaspard's coaching career spanned more than 35 years, as he started out as an assistant at Houston in 1988. After he resigned from Alabama in May 2016, he had stints at Kansas State and Georgia before reaching his career's final stop in Ruston, La.