July 22, 2015
By Jerome Boettcher | Subscribe to Commodore Nation
The phrase never a dull moment rang true for Vanderbilt athletics this spring.
In fact, the moments were plentiful, making this one of the most memorable – if not the best – springs in school history.
Women’s tennis delivered the biggest moment to date by winning the national championship for the third in VU athletics history, joining baseball last year and bowling in 2007. Led by NCAA Tournament and SEC Tournament MVP Astra Sharma and ITA National Coach of the Year Geoff Macdonald, the Commodores also snatched the program’s first SEC Tournament crown.
Baseball finished as national champion runner-ups, falling one win short of a second straight title. The Commodores, with No. 1 overall draft pick Dansby Swanson leading the charge, reached the College World Series for the second straight year and third time in five seasons.
With three players finishing in the top 11, men’s golf stormed their way to a second-place finish in stroke play at the NCAA Championships. They advanced to the eight-team match play for the first time only to fall to eventual national champ LSU.
And two-sport phenom Simone Charley added to an already impressive resume by placing third in the triple jump at the NCAA Outdoor Championship. It was the highest podium finish for a Commodore since Ryan Tolbert won the national title in 1997. Charley earned for First-Team All-American honors for the second time after taking fourth at the NCAA Indoor Track & Field Championship in March.
Not to be overlooked, women’s golf and men’s tennis also made the NCAA Tournament.
In addition to all the athletic accomplishments, all 16 Vanderbilt teams exceeded the NCAA’s multi-year standard for Academic Progress Rate, including an SEC-high seven teams with perfect scores. The athletic department also had a record 3.16 GPA for the spring semester and the federal graduation rate was 92 percent – the highest it has ever been. To athletic director David Williams, the 2014-15 school year, especially the spring months, once again served as proof that the excuse that Vanderbilt can’t win because its an academic school holds no water.
“I think there was a time where we so believed that that we used that as a ‘Yeah, we know we didn’t win but you’ll be working for us one day,'” Williams said. “My answer is let’s win and you work for us. We now understand our lane. We understand how to navigate in that lane. We understand who we are. We don’t let anybody else define what Vanderbilt athletics is about. We define it, and you just have to compete with us.”
In addition to the team accomplishments there were several noteworthy individual honors and achievements.
Seniors Gonzales “A.J.” Austin (men’s tennis) and Hunter Stewart (men’s golf) were named SEC Players of the Year and First-Team All-Americans. They are the first duo to win in the same year since Derrick Byars (men’s basketball) and David Price (baseball) in 2007. Plus, Carson Fulmer was named SEC Pitcher of the Year, joining Price and Grayson Garvin (2011) as the only other Commodores to do so.
On the same day Vanderbilt punched its ticket to Omaha, Fulmer was one of three ‘Dores to be taken in the first round of the MLB Draft for just the fourth time a school has had three top-25 selections in the same year. Shortstop Dansby Swanson went No. 1 overall to the Arizona Diamondbacks. Within an hour, Fulmer was selected eighth overall by the Chicago White Sox and Walker Buehler capped the night off by being picked 24th by the Los Angeles Dodgers. In all, eight Commodores were taken in the draft, for a total of 85 under coach Tim Corbin’s 13-year watch.
A day later, Vanderbilt was represented on a global stage. Redshirt junior Lina Granados, a dual citizen, became the first active Vanderbilt soccer player to represent a country at the Women’s World Cup. She was one of 23 players for the Colombian National Team in Canada.
Later in the week, teammates Hunter Stewart and Matthias Schwab represented Vanderbilt in the world’s biggest collegiate golfing showcase at the Palmer Cup. Stewart was one of the top 10 American collegiate golfers chosen while Schwab, from Austria, played for the Europeans.
The ending to the 2014-15 academic year will be tough to follow, but Williams says as the success trends up so do the expectations.
“It’s been a sort of year that you can put up and say, it is a great year but we can still do better,” he said. “That is sort of a risky piece because you don’t say that to diminish what we have done. But I think it has instilled in people a sort of thing that as good as the year before was, man, we can even do better.”
