University of Tennessee Athletics
Inside The T – Welcome Home
November 13, 2015 | Football
By Brian Rice
UTSports.com
At some schools, Homecoming is the biggest weekend and the biggest football crowd of the season. At Tennessee, where 100,000 fans pour through the gates every time we open the doors, the impact of Homecoming may be a little less, but it is no less meaningful.
A college campus is something that binds generations of graduates and everyone else that has spent time there. Each weekend is like a Homecoming, because there is no need to wait for a special occasion to get back to the place you love. It doesn’t matter if it’s one game a year that you spend months planning or if you wake up the morning of the game and look at your spouse and say “if we leave now, we could make it.”
When alumni from all over the country come back to Knoxville this weekend for the Homecoming game against North Texas, the campus they find may not be exactly the one they remember, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.
It is a fact I was reminded of this past weekend when a good friend and two-time UT grad came in for the South Carolina game. She has spent the last four years in Wisconsin, this being her first trip back to see a game and campus since. We talked about all that has changed in the short time she has been gone, from the area surrounding the stadium to the new buildings that have gone up and are going up around campus.
No matter what had changed, the feeling of being in the stadium and being a part of game day was still just as powerful for her as it was as a student. I asked after the game how she enjoyed it. The text message came back quickly. “I had goosebumps being back in Neyland.”
That’s a reaction that is repeated anytime I talk to someone who comes back for the first time in a long time. No matter what has changed around campus or even in the stadium, the feeling is the same.
Sometimes when I walk around campus, I barely recognize it. I came to school in the fall of 2001 to a place I already knew well. As a student, I ate a lot of meals and spent a lot of time in the University Center. It was unexpectedly emotional to see it reduced to rubble over the summer with its gleaming replacement standing tall right next door.
My business classes were in the Glocker building right behind the UC. The Haslam College of Business now stands on the site, with one of the exterior walls of Glocker still in place. It’s the same story all over campus, Music Building? Replaced with something bigger and better. Ayers Hall? Went from a building that no one wanted to enter to a campus showplace.
Perhaps the biggest change for me is the site where Stokely Athletics Center stood. I never saw a basketball game there like many of you did. My memories of it came in volleyball matches, track meets and days (and a lot of nights) spent in the offices there. I had the honor of being the PA announcer for the final event held there, a volleyball match against Notre Dame.
In the place of Stokely and its next-door neighbor Gibbs Hall, a new dorm and parking garage are rising. An extension of the football practice fields will follow.
My point in all of those memories is that no matter what was once there or what has come next or will come next, it will still be special because it’s still Tennessee. The new Student Union will never mean as much to me as the UC did, but it will mean a lot more to the students that walk through it now.
The names and faces on the sidelines have changed as well. I’m on the fifth head football coach of my lifetime, the third that I’ve worked directly with. I consider myself fortunate to have developed a relationship with the other two. John Majors (and I always refer to him as John in print because that’s the way he told me to) doesn’t need for it to be Homecoming to return to campus. It doesn’t have to be a special occasion for Phillip Fulmer to stop by practice, either.
Jerry Seinfeld once said that cheering for sports teams no matter who the players or coaches were amounts to cheering for laundry. He has an argument for professional teams, but occasions like Homecoming remind us all that cheering for Tennessee is about much more than that. It’s about having a relationship with a place and its people. A place that, even as it changes, continues to be the place you’ll always remember.
I think my friend said it best. It’s a place that will always give you goosebumps.
