July 26, 2013
Quick Slant is an array of brief insights and occasionally opinionated overviews of collegiate athletics in general and the Vanderbilt Commodores in particular.
In this day of international team travel and vast array of service trips, it is easy to overlook the absolutely incredible adventure 20 Commodore student-athletes and some accompanying staff members just completed in Tanzania. Partnering with Soles4Souls, we collected shoes at games last year and our contingent flew to Tanzania (Africa, if you aren’t sure) and personally delivered those shoes along with joy and love to orphans and the needy in various villages. Check out the photographs that they sent back; you will not regret the small investment of your time to better appreciate the enormous good that was done. Those on the trip report it was a “life-changing experience.”
Congratulations are in order to the gang in our National Commodore Club and Development offices. They were just named the “Team of the Year” by Vanderbilt’s office of Development and Alumni Relations, quite an honor when you consider how many fine development teams are on this campus. Our annual fund enjoyed its best year ever and raised gifts for other capital projects such as the beautiful facilities at the Vanderbilt Legends Club and the high profile multipurpose facility among other projects.
We are eager to get feedback from individuals regarding their potential interests should a decision be made to renovate our football stadium. We have teamed up with a professional company that will conduct this survey and a few months ago we indicated the survey would come out in July. Upon further advice, we decided to conduct the survey in early September for a couple of good reasons: We want the most feedback possible and the experts tell us the first 24-48 hours provides the most response to an email. Therefore we don’t want to be surveying when many are on vacation. Also, after attending a game the experience may sharpen one’s memory and the survey data could be a bit more accurate. We concluded that these reasons merited the slight schedule adjustment.
Readers of this website already know that our basketball program has put together a fun alumni game on August 3. It will be a free event in Memorial Gym, starting at 11 a.m. and likely will last no more than one hour with a moving clock. Keep watching for more information about the former ‘Dores planning to play.
Earlier this week we announced our seven member Hall of Fame class of 2013. The Hall of Fame Weekend is Sept. 6-7 with its special Induction Dinner Sept. 6 as a keynote event. We congratulate our new class and remind fans who want to nominate others that we do this every other year so the next class will be 2015.