Jeff Forehand inducted into Tennessee Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame

Head baseball coach Jeff Forehand has been inducted into the Tennessee Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame.

The induction took place Jan. 25 at TBCA’s annual clinic in Franklin

The veteran head coach is entering his 19th year at Lipscomb, which includes two Atlantic Sun Coach of the Year honors. Forehand is being celebrated for his contributions to the team. The decorated skipper has tallied more than 600 career wins at the collegiate level, three Atlantic Sun championships and the only three NCAA tournament appearances in the program’s history, making him undoubtedly the most successful coach in Lipscomb baseball history. We spoke with Lipscomb University’s head athletic director, Philip “Hutch” Hutcheson, to find out what makes Coach Forehand so extraordinary.

 “He’s a great competitor,” Athletic Director Philip Hutcheson said. “He wants to be the very best he can be, and he wants his teams to be that way, so all of those things are very important.”

Hutcheson summed up Forehand’s tenure at Lipscomb as “teacher.”

“He’s a godly man,” Hutcheson said. “He’s a person who cares about the athletes off the field just as much as he does on the field. I think the players can watch the way he’s a husband, the way he’s a dad, the way he’s been a son. In all those ways, he’s teaching lessons all along the way. He happened to have good baseball teams by teaching those lessons, but more importantly, the young men who come through our program go on to take those lessons into their own lives.”

Before Forehand’s arrival, the Bisons had not posted a winning season since joining Division I in 2004. In just his second season, the Bisons were over .500, won a program-record 19 ASUN conference games and claimed their first ASUN championship title.

This conference title led to the Bisons’ first NCAA postseason appearance. While that appearance was short-lived, it included a major upset of the Georgia Bulldogs in the opening round. Since that point, Lipscomb has experienced both highs and lows, but the program reached new heights with its 35-23 overall record and 20-10 conference record, which included an ASUN regular-season title in 2022. That season, while a major stepping stone, was overshadowed by the 2023 season, in which the Bisons won both the Atlantic Sun regular-season title and the tournament championship.

Forehand has coached 63 All-ASUN selections, one All-American, four freshman All-Americans, five All-Region honorees, the team’s first ABCA/Rawlings Gold Glove recipient and produced 17 of the 33 players ever drafted from Lipscomb into Major League Baseball.

“Personally, Coach Forehand has shown me what a real man should be and what a leader should be,” graduate student pitcher Bryce Houghton said. “I think anybody that comes to Lipscomb and plays on the baseball team will tell you that Coach Forehand is not just a great coach but he’s a great human being. A lot of college coaches just care what you can do for them on the field, and he cares about you as a person first and truly means it when he says he loves you.”

Photo by Micah Barkley