Vanderbilt

[50's PONY]

Scores up on, off court after Vanderbilt reforms
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Enlarge By Todd Bennett, AP

Vanderbilt's Jennifer Risper, left, and teammate Christina Wirth cut down a portion of the net after defeating LSU in the SEC championship.



VANDY'S RANKED TEAMS

Vanderbilt is having its best sports year and has contenders to win the school's first NCAA team title.

Senior forward Derrick Byars (16.9 points) and coach Kevin Stallings of the men's basketball team, which just fell from the top-25 rankings, were named the Southeastern Conference's player and coach of the year in a coaches' vote Wednesday. The women's basketball team last weekend won its third SEC tournament in six years.

Vanderbilt is ranked in:

-Baseball --- No. 1

-Women's basketball --- No. 9

-Women's bowling --- No. 2

-Women's golf --- No. 5

-Women's lacrosse --- No. 19

-Women's tennis --- No. 17

By Tom Weir





By Tom Weir, USA TODAY
NASHVILLE — Academic pride has made sports different at Vanderbilt University. Consider the graffiti on the wall of a men's bathroom stall at McGugin Center, the main athletics building.
There's an inspirational quote from Gandhi. Right next to that, someone has chosen to pass his private time by listing all 50 states, in meticulous alphabetical order.

Despite a 93% graduation rate for Vanderbilt athletes, the sports world generally agreed the school's chief egghead had cracked four years ago.

Chancellor Gordon Gee disbanded the athletic department, did away with the position of athletics director — and decreed Commodore sports would meld into the cumbersomely named Division of Student Life and University Affairs. The goal, Gee said, was to fully integrate athletes into the student body.

"The strength of Vanderbilt has been they've always had their heads on straight about where athletics fits in," says C.M. Newton, Vanderbilt's basketball coach from 1981 to 1989 and Kentucky's athletics director from 1989 to 2000.

FIND MORE STORIES IN: Nashville | SEC | Auburn | Vanderbilt | Academic | Vanderbilt University | David Williams | Baseball coach
Conventional wisdom, though, dictated the Commodores were doomed to be perpetual doormats by the reorganization.

"You got a lot of reaction from fans and newspeople who said, 'They've gone crazy, all the coaches will leave, they won't be able to recruit, they won't win another game and they've basically gone down to intramural teams,' " says vice chancellor David Williams, who oversaw the reorganization.

None of those dire predictions has come to pass at the Southeastern Conference's only private institution. Despite an undergraduate enrollment of just 6,400, Vanderbilt's baseball team is ranked No. 1 in the nation, the women's basketball team just won the SEC tournament and the university has had an unprecedented seven teams ranked in the top 25 in the last month.

The men's basketball team, dropping out of the rankings this week, on Feb. 17 beat then-No. 1 ranked Florida, which has an enrollment of about 50,000. Vanderbilt also has won four in a row against perennial SEC powerhouse Kentucky.

Baseball coach Tim Corbin, hired the year before the 2003 reorganization, readily concedes his reaction to the change was a mix of panic and confusion.

"With recruiting, I just put it in the chancellor and vice chancellor's lap and had them explain to the kids what we were doing," Corbin says. "They'd go to breakfast, sit down with recruits and say, 'Nothing is going to happen to this program.' "

The major revenue-producing sports — football, baseball, men's and women's basketball — each has a director of sports operations who reports directly to Williams, who effectively takes on the duties of an athletics director.

"All I can say is it's the best we've ever had at Vanderbilt, athletically," Williams says. "I can't say the reorganization did it, but it certainly didn't hurt. It didn't go down."

Athletes' GPAs have risen

Williams says the structural change has had subtle effects.

He says athletes on the student honor council have gone from zero to five. For the first time in school history, no athletes this year were found guilty of academic infractions, such as plagiarism. Athletes also are housed randomly now, which means more are rooming with the general student body.

The grade-point average of athletes since the reorganization has risen from 2.82 to 2.92, edging toward the student body's overall mark of 3.1.

"We've still got a ways to go, but it's up," Williams says.

Vanderbilt's sports economy played a role in the change. Unlike at most big-conference schools, Vanderbilt teams don't generate the entire athletic budget, just a third. Another third comes from SEC revenues and the final third is a subsidy from the school, which makes athletics more accountable to the rest of the university.

"When you're at a place where everybody can tell you 100 ways you can spend that money better, you can't afford to be selfish," Williams says. "You want them to give you that money not only willingly, but happily."

The curious part of the break with tradition was that — in terms of honoring academic obligations for athletes — nothing was broken at Vanderbilt. Gee says out of every 100 SEC athletes, only five would be academically eligible at Vanderbilt.

"They have athletes who might be marginal," Newton says, "but they're not going to have anybody there who can't do the work."

The school perpetually leads the SEC in classroom ratings and, in a league long known for probation-tainted programs, never has incurred notable wrath from NCAA watchdogs.

But for Gee, whose trademark bow tie can be spotted in the crowd at most Commodore sports events, that wasn't enough.

"I believe that the future of intercollegiate athletes is on the line right now," he says. "We're either going to make a decision that we're going to become a college system, or we're going to become a farm system for the pros."

Students now get a 'whole package'

Pro scouts have been flocking to Hawkins Field, home of Vanderbilt's 15-0 baseball team. Left-handed pitcher David Price is 3-0 and the College Baseball Foundation's player of the week after a 13-strikeout performance March 2 against Xavier.

Third baseman Pedro Alvarez, named freshman of the year last season by Baseball America, is hitting .469, with seven home runs. He turned down a $1 million offer from the Boston Red Sox and says, "Here, I view it as the whole package, a good education and a good program."

With Corbin turning around a program that had losing seasons from 1998 to 2003, he has been courted by Auburn and LSU. But he has stayed at Vanderbilt, where he believes he has a recruiting edge. "I just felt we were selling an Ivy League-type education with an SEC baseball education, and I felt those were two things that were hard to come by," Corbin says.

Corbin and most of Vanderbilt's other winning coaches were hired by the last person to hold the title of athletics director, Todd Turner, now the AD at the University of Washington.

"I give Todd all due credit for that," Williams says "but also give us credit for keeping those coaches."

Williams delights in telling of the borderline criminal behavior he and Gee engaged in to keep Corbin from taking the Auburn job in 2004. When Corbin returned to Nashville from his interview aboard an Auburn plane, Williams and Gee were waiting on the runway.

They had the flight tracked and learned it would land at a private airport.

"Probably a law was violated in this, in that we were able to find the tail number of the plane, which I guess is an FAA violation," Williams says.

"The first guy I see coming off the runway is the chancellor, standing right there," Corbin says. "He said, 'I don't want to go back to Vanderbilt and talk; I want to do it right here.' "

Corbin agreed to a revised contract and says, "There aren't too many chancellors who would really give a rat's butt about their baseball coach, but he did."

[Water Pony]

Daughter went to Vanderbilt and son to SMU. Love both schools. Gee's move to eliminate the athletic department was gutsy. At the heart is not having the inmates in charge of the asylum.

We paid a big penalty twenty years. With winning FB and BB programs and a near perfect graduation rate, SMU could be similar.

We can't out spend the BCS schools, but we can out class them.

Go Dores, Go Mustangs!

P.S. Nortwestern, Duke, Stanford, Notre Dame and the academies are not bad models either. In our backyard, Rice looks pretty good.

Yes, I am naive. But, college sports don't have to be run by the media and boosters.

[leopold]

Vandy took care of the money, stuck with the SEC, and never sold out their academic standards. As a result, they were in the position to do this. Best of luck to them.