May 4, 2012
Quick Slant is an array of brief insights and occasionally opinionated overviews of collegiate athletics in general and the Vanderbilt Commodores in particular.
One of the real good guys in sports is golf’s Brandt Snedeker, the guy who always looks as though he just won the lottery. The three-time PGA Tour champ often shares valuable time with our golf teams, where he was a first-team All-American in 2003. One afternoon this week he hung out with our NCAA-bound women’s team at Vanderbilt Legends Club, talking golf and working a bit with them on the practice green and short course. He’s spent similar time with the guys. (Full disclosure: Brandt interned one semester in this communications office and we would dearly love to claim he picked up his superior public relations skills from us. However, it would be as truthful to say we taught him how to putt!)
Did you notice that Tim Jankovich, who was an assistant basketball coach here under Kevin Stallings from 1999-2002, left his job as head coach at Illinois State to become associate head coach at Southern Methodist? And why would one leave a head coaching job to become a top assistant, even if Hall of Famer Larry Brown is the new head coach? Jank reportedly has 700,000 reasons, maybe the most of any collegiate assistant in the country.
Before we drift too far from the subject, Vanderbilt is hosting the NCAA Women’s Golf Championship at Vanderbilt Legends Club in Franklin May 22-25. There will be lots of information on this website and, hopefully, in the area news mix. Twenty-four teams and future LPGA stars will be on display. Our own Commodore team has been assigned to the Central Regional at Ohio State and can qualify by placing in the top eight there.
The last scheduled showing of our Black and Gold football game by Comcast Sports is Monday, May 7 at 7:30 p.m. (CDT).
For my money, our Joe Fisher is as good as they come in describing a baseball game. His call of Connor Harrell’s grand slam home run to beat Kentucky last Sunday was so special we posted it on this site earlier this week, where it quickly received several thousand visits.