"I'm ready," Bates told InsideTennessee. "I'm ready to go. I'm excited. It's going to be awesome."
"I'm pretty ready to go," Bates said. "I know just the past few months, I've definitely thought about it a lot more, and I'm 100-percent on what I want to do."
"When you sit down to try and make out a list," Bates said, "you get a top 5 and you think of another school and you're like, 'Oh, wait, let's go with six. Oh, wait, let's go with seven.' All these schools that definitely like separately makes it, 'I don't want to go there.' There's always those schools that are all great, and I just liked having the opportunity to play there. But, I just had to get it down to a top 3 so I could make a decision and be 100-percent with it."
"They've all been out trying to recruit me as much as they could," Bates said.
"It's a few," Bates said of his visits to Tennessee's campus. "I can't really count. You know we have family up there, so whenever we go visit the family we always try to stop by, just talk to the coaches, take another tour of the facilities, see what's different, see what's new. So, I don't know, I think it's like four or five (unofficial visits)."
On opening performance:
"Nobody caught a ball on me," he said. "So, I thought I performed pretty well."
-scout