Vanderbilt has found greater sports success since losing its athletic department

	Photo Illustration by John Ueland

By Mark Bechtel

On the list of desirable sports jobs, "Vanderbilt baseball ticket scalper" has historically ranked pretty low, usually somewhere down around "Rick Majerus's personal trainer" and "Pete Rose's accountant." But last Friday the hawkers were out in front of Hawkins Field, where the Commodores were hosting an NCAA regional, asking $50 for a $10 ticket. Yes, these are heady days at Vandy, and not just because the baseball team -- which not long ago considered 200 people a good draw -- was pulling in SRO crowds of 3,500 over the weekend. Vanderbilt is enjoying unprecedented success in every sport, a run made all the more remarkable by the fact that four years ago it eliminated its athletic department.

In a move that shocked students, alumni, fans and more than a few Vanderbilt coaches, the school's bow-tie-wearing chancellor, Gordon Gee, announced in the fall of 2003 that he was "declaring war on a culture that has isolated athletics from what the college experience is supposed to be about." No particular scandal -- at Vandy or any other school -- motivated him, only a sense that he didn't want his university to become the kind of place where the term student-athlete required quotation marks. And so AD Todd Turner was let go, and the school's intercollegiate programs were folded into the office of student life -- the same department that oversees intramurals.

Down South there's a saying about Vanderbilt: first in law, first in medicine, last in the SEC. When Gee made his announcement, even that seemed like a stretch. "We heard, 'They're getting out of the SEC! They're leaving Division I-A!'" says David Williams, vice chancellor for university affairs. Bruce Van de Velde, then the Iowa State A.D., said, "If this is the kind of vision they have for their athletic program, I question whether they belong in the SEC." Says Willy Daunic, a former VU baseball and basketball player who hosts a radio show in Nashville, "It was a doomsday mentality -- fans called in saying, What are they doing?"