Tony Elliott Continues Supporting First Love of Baseball
When Clemson baseball coach Monte Lee rides through his neighborhood and past Tony Elliott's home, he typically sees the Tigers offensive coordinator out in the yard tossing a baseball, not a pigskin.
Go to a game at Doug Kingsmore Stadium, and it's likely you'll run into Elliott with his wife and kids enjoying a nine-inning contest.
Go back and look at dozens of photos and videos of the assistant coach working his players during practices over the last 10 years, and you'll routinely catch him in a baseball "C" cap while running his players through drills.
"I've always loved baseball," Elliott said this week.
Even though life took Elliott down a path from the West Coast to South Carolina to playing receiver at Clemson to starting an engineering career before getting into college coaching, he's never lost that passion for a different sport. And it's something he's instilling in his children.
"The first ball I picked up was a baseball, and for those who are from California, familiar with California, baseball is king out there," Elliott said."I didn't touch a basketball really until I moved to the South, so it was, it was baseball first, and then about 12 years old I started getting it getting into football."
Elliott lost his mother in a tragic car accident during his youth and moved to S.C. to be with family. He has a very analytical mind and background, which is what much of the game of baseball is built on these days.
"I really liked this to the internal battle, just the internal competition of the game," Elliott said. "Obviously it's a physical game but it's an extremely mental game. So that's where it started just growing up I fell in love with the game played it all the way through high school...was a three-sport athlete. I honestly believe that if I would have concentrated on baseball, you know, I might have been able to play for a while but moving to the South, baseball wasn't quite as popular down in Charleston, in my community, so I kind of transitioned more to football played a little bit of basketball."
Despite massive success as Clemson's play-caller, which includes helping Dabo Swinney's Tigers reach the College Football Playoff six consecutive times and win two national titles, Elliott still finds time to enjoy his other passion.
During Clemson's season opener at Doug Kingsmore Stadium two weeks ago, Elliott and his family were among the limited season-ticket holders cheering on Lee's squad.
"The kind of support that, that we get from coaches of other teams is tremendous and it's why we support our coaches as well that that coach other sports too as a baseball staff," Lee said. "It truly is a family environment at Clemson so it's awesome, to get that support from other coaching staffs."
Several times during the game, Elliott would explain what the Tigers were doing and how there were aligned in the field to his 7-year-old son, who's "ate up" with the game his father first fell in love with during his youth.
It helps, too, that Elliott and his oldest son have their own experienced hitting coach in the neighborhood. Clemson assistant coach Bradley LeCroy, who lives nearby, also has young kids, and he'll take Elliott's outside to work on fundamentals with them.
"He loves baseball," Elliott said about his oldest. "He's playing with the 8-and-under. He probably could play with 10-and-under. So he just has a passion for it so it was just so cool to be able to sit down and share with him my first passion, as it relates to sports was, you know, to just let him know that, 'Hey, you don't have to follow in dad's footsteps but this is where daddy started. This is what I like to do and if you love it, and I'm going to share everything I know with you.'"