NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Vanderbilt is searching for a brand new soccer coach, and the brand new chancellor and athletic director wish to clarify that particular person may have a say in how the college improves their amenities.
And Vanderbilt might be able to spend cash to make these enhancements not solely actuality, however worthy of being a constitution member of the Southeastern Convention.
“We will do rather a lot,” chancellor Daniel Diermeier informed The Related Press on Wednesday. “And we have now an unlimited quantity of belongings and we have to convey them, we have to leverage them with a view to advance athletics at college as a complete.”
Vanderbilt fired coach Derek Mason on Nov. 29 after shedding the primary eight video games of his seventh season. Athletic director Candice Lee, who had the interim title eliminated in Could, mentioned this provides Vanderbilt an opportunity to indicate its dedication to competing within the SEC.
The SEC’s lone non-public college has the league’s smallest soccer stadium, which had its final main renovations in 1981.
Lee was a ladies’s basketball participant on groups that reached two Elite Eights within the NCAA match. Diermeier is a local of Germany and fan of Borussia Mönchengladbach within the Champions League. He additionally has labored at Stanford and Northwestern in his profession, seeing how each paired educational and athletic success.
Diermeier mentioned assessing the state of affairs was his first job at Vanderbilt after being provost on the College of Chicago, now Division III however the place Jay Berwanger was the primary Heisman Trophy winner in 1935.
“Vanderbilt is a spot with a really sturdy tradition and with a really sturdy sense of values, and we consider that faculty athletics generally is a crucial half for our college,” Diermeier mentioned. “There are only a few different issues that may convey a college collectively as a lot as athletics, that may create a way of neighborhood.”
Each Diermeier and Lee mentioned Vanderbilt additionally has work to higher join with their followers and alumni. Lee mentioned they’re being very intentional and strategic.
“All the things that we’re doing is deliberate with a transparent imaginative and prescient and an finish aim in thoughts,” Lee mentioned.
Diermeier additionally sees males’s basketball as an space for enchancment. Coach Jerry Stackhouse is in his second season after taking on a program that misplaced 26 straight SEC video games earlier than snapping that skid final February. The Commodores play in Memorial Gymnasium, which is the SEC’s oldest basketball area.
Diermeier mentioned the brand new soccer coach might be a accomplice in constructing this system and deciding what investments are wanted to assist athletes on and off the sector. Vanderbilt constructed an indoor observe facility in 2013 underneath coach James Franklin, who’s now at Penn State.
“I’d like to spend money on a means the place the amenities help our student-athletes and sign to them that we’re severe and that we wish to compete and that we wish to compete on the highest stage,” Diermeier mentioned. “That is the best message.”
Over the previous couple of a long time, Vanderbilt has unveiled plans to improve the soccer stadium with outcomes principally targeted on beauty points. Diermeier famous how the NHL’s Chicago Blackhawks wooed again followers after years of struggles and the ache of the “double doink” discipline aim miss by Chicago within the NFL playoffs.
“Folks must see the place’s the meat and, you recognize, proof of the pudding,” Diermeier mentioned. “And that is fully affordable. And I perceive that. And I perceive that there was disappointment and a very long time of disappointment.”
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