Tony Vitello grew up in a baseball family in the baseball-crazed city of St. Louis and spent a decade playing and coaching the sport at the University of Missouri. So it's only natural Vitello is using a concept he attributes to former St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa as he begins his first head coaching job at Tennessee.

Vitello remembers the Hall of Famer using "leadership councils" on his Cardinals teams. The idea is to indoctrinate a select group of a team's prominent players — about six of them, Vitello said — and have those players model the coach's message to the rest of the team.