Feb. 6, 2012
Subscribe to the Commodore Nation | JANUARY
Nashville’s country music lore loves tales of singers that rode into Music City with little more than big dreams and struck gold on 16th Avenue. Randy Travis was working in a restaurant one day and topping the charts the next. Or so the legend claims.
We like to think these artists were overnight successes; in a lonesome bar they jotted lyrics on a napkin, recorded the next day and sold a million records in a month. Instant celebrity!
The truth is that success doesn’t work that way in show business or, for that matter, in life. Best-selling author Malcomb Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at anything, so many of our “overnight sensations” must have already logged 9,992 hours behind the scenes.
This is especially the case in athletics, where developing championship caliber teams is much more a marathon than a sprint. There are very few overnight success stories in college sports and those that might make that claim are often subject to an NCAA investigation. Quality programs are like fines wines: they need time to cure.
This issue of Commodore Nation addresses several Vanderbilt teams that might seem to have gotten very good overnight, but these stories reveal that assumption is far from the truth.
A couple of years ago, what outsider could have predicted our women’s cross country team would win the Southeastern Conference championship this fall in blowout fashion? Just like these diminutive runners who excelled at coming from behind, the program gradually evolved into a winner. Not long ago its goal was to avoid the cellar; then with savvy recruiting, new talent pushed the team into the SEC’s mid-range, then into third and finally, first!
Did our cross country coaches suddenly get smart? Steven Keith deserved his SEC Coach of the Year award this season, but assembling the roster over the last four or five years was where the race was won.
It’s a similar story in every other successful program on our campus. We like to think the nation’s best prep baseball talent automatically flocks to Hawkins Field, but our baseball staff has many stories of recruiting disappointments as it gradually moved the talent bar higher and higher.
Our bowlers traditionally land the country’s best high school talent, but once upon a time when the program was in its infancy, the finest student-athletes considered coming to the fledgling program a big risk.
A few years ago new men’s tennis coach Ian Duvenhage inherited a roster of just four scholarship student-athletes. Needing a minimum of six to compete in a match, the team’s motto was a modest “Six or Nix.” Through hard work and excellent salesmanship, Duvenhage’s current freshmen class was judged the nation’s best by a major tennis publication.
And so it goes in this department. There is a quiet but steady momentum that is often totally undetected on internet blogs, sports talk radio and those few surviving newspaper columns.
On the whole, sports media is forced to practice “pack journalism”–where like a pack of hounds, as one thinks they all tend to think. It’s not necessarily their fault. Who could be informed to every small success in athletics? Often the only people realizing what is coming down the pipeline are the insiders.
With the privilege of such a look, if future program success were stocks on the Dow we could offer you some profitable tips. We could have forecast the rise of these programs, and there are more success stories on the way.
It’s a bull market on West End. Just don’t believe it is happening overnight.
