Beth Sullivan making headlines at UT

I agree with bullcorn. While maybe some might have posted differently if she were a he, it seems to have no impact at all on the facts of the case, or of how people are commenting on those facts, etc.

you're right, but i still think this blew up higher because she is a female head coach. everyone agrees it is horrible ..that is not n dispute

To "one who know" and 5uyik5yi

I actually am a college coach and clearly you are not. I didn't say I didn't think the young lady wasn't talented and I would have given her a scholarship. What I said was that BAS saw that she is not an immediate SEC scorer (which is what the SEC head coaches want) and got rid of her. I have watched plenty of videotape on the young athlete. She IS NOT an SEC top scorer and her all-time performances will show that. But she can be a successful collegiate athlete given the right circumstances (time to develop) which is not what the SEC gives you and clearly what BAS wants. If you haven't scored as a freshman in the SEC then they want to get rid of you. That is fact.

Puleeze? Examples? Just a dozen out of dozens will suffice.

Reality Check x 2 wrote:

To "one who know" and 5uyik5yi

I actually am a college coach and clearly you are not. I didn't say I didn't think the young lady wasn't talented and I would have given her a scholarship. What I said was that BAS saw that she is not an immediate SEC scorer (which is what the SEC head coaches want) and got rid of her. I have watched plenty of videotape on the young athlete. She IS NOT an SEC top scorer and her all-time performances will show that. But she can be a successful collegiate athlete given the right circumstances (time to develop) which is not what the SEC gives you and clearly what BAS wants. If you haven't scored as a freshman in the SEC then they want to get rid of you. That is fact.

Unfortunately, it appears that coach sullivan doesn't think she is a good enough coach to take 3 top notch HS recruits and turn them into "SEC" scoring material. She'll have to find foreign talent or poach from other programs to find her athletes.

Reality Check x 2 wrote:

To "one who know" and 5uyik5yi

I actually am a college coach and clearly you are not. .

You are the coach at Tennessee.

You don't like Groves because he told how it was and you were probably to much of a b*t*h to take it like a mature adult.

Take off the rose colored glasses Malmo, you are going off the deep end by canonizing the "beloved" Coach Groves.

He was an excellent coach, developed talent across the board, he made studs studlier and some average runners into studs.

But he was also iracible, profane and confrontational. Often to his own detriment with athletes and administrators. Many runners thought that their 4 years was the max one could handle in that kind of environment. After a few years all of that fades and bygones are bygones. But that doesn't change the facts.

Stick to the subject, which is what Sullivan and UT just orchestrated. And, your comments about her looks are petty and mean spirited. As was your attempted shot at Scharsu. Both say a lot about you.

[quote]not my usual handle wrote:

[quote]malmo wrote:

"You're missing the point. A scholarship athlete doesn't need to prove a anything."

Are you serious?!?! They ABSOLUTELY need to prove their worth from day one. If I am a head coach and willing to invest a "full ride" in an individual at an SEC program where scholarships are limited, I want them to come in ready to roll and make me think that I made the right decision by investing in them. The SEC is not a developmental conference where athletes can post a decent marks in high-school and then lock down a scholarship and sit back and relax. If you are given a scholarship then you should take it serious and take the summer prior to showing up to campus to get in shape and at least look like you deserve to be there.

I guarantee you if a few of these girls that were cut showed up on fire and rolling in beast-mode on day one with confidence and swag like most elite SEC sprinters then things might have played out differently. All of you on here acting like Harvey was cut just because BAS wanted to make her life miserable are crazy. Like, I said...if she looked like an SEC stud when she rolled onto campus then this thread wouldn't be here.

Quit talking about how much potential she "might" have once she gets some D1 training under her belt. The SEC is a sprint dominated conference and you need to be able to come and ready to contribute as a freshman if you are on a full ride. It's one thing if you are given a partial scholarship...then it might be ok to allow them some time to develop within the system, but if you come in on a 100% scholly then you better be good and prove yourself from day one.

I don't know what is more brutal...the immature, idiotic comments about BAS being ugly and fat or the wind burn that I am getting from these helicopters swarming around this thread.

Some Hall of Fame male track coaches make what BAS did look like nothing. "Sport of character" LOL. More like characters in the sport. Athletes have to navigate their own way and if they run into a bad coach situation they can move on.

Sorry, pal, I'm seeing this perfectly clear with 20/20 vision. You're the one looking at this through a distorted leans.

Trying to turn this around and make it about me, further illustrates that you, nor anyone else, will stand up and defend her on the merits. Her conduct in this matter is despicable, petty, mean-spirited and completely unacceptable.

Her conduct is completely incompatible with the mission of the university. Everyone who has any personal contact with her has painted her as ruthless and uncaring, except for herself, and that this is something that they expected she was capable of doing, and generally relieved that they no longer have to tolerate her.

She is a horrible, horrible, human being for doing this. No one has stood up for her character. None. The best that they can do is to say that everyone does it (patently false) or that there are two sides of the story, again false. The reason why no one can defend her conduct is because it's indefensible. The story is as clear as daylight.

Beloved is a word that has not been, nor ever will be, applied to that woman.

I am not the one(s) who are calling her ugly.

Speculation of this sort goes nowhere, but I would be astonished if this were not a 200-post thread if the coach were a male and nothing about the circumstances were different. You'd probably see fewer gratuitous comments about his physical appearance, but the level of outrage would be the same.

I really don't understand the people attempting to reconcile the cutting of Morgan Harvey in particular on the basis of how poorly she was bound to do in the NCAA thanks to "regressing" as a senior. You don't cut someone who runs 59-point and sub-14:00 as a high-school girl in October of her freshman year even if she shows up looking like a manatee (which I doubt Harvey did). If she shows up missing a leg or an arm, okay, make changes, but no coach worth having around would run such a person through a mental projection tool and say, "Well, maybe in three years she can get down to 58.5 in the long hurdles, and UT needs more points than that." Isn't taking great young talent that hasn't had a chance to full blossom for one reason or another (in this case, apparently, injury) and trying to make hay of it a challenge that any decent coach would relish? The young lady is no reclamation project, like a football or football star who can't stay out of the police log in his local newspaper but is a blue-chipper by any standard; she is, by all accounts, a typical top-notch prep trackster who was looking forward to the chance to keep running without interruption.

Stanford had every reason to cut Russell Brown as an incoming freshman. He couldn't keep up with the fastest athletes on the women's team in the initial practices. But in the end he turned out okay, both with the Cardinal and as an OTC member. And stories like this are not only not rare, they are legion.

This coach looks like a screaming weasel regardless of the gonads it's toting around.

Chubster wrote:

"You're missing the point. A scholarship athlete doesn't need to prove a anything."

Are you serious?!?! They ABSOLUTELY need to prove their worth from day one.

No they don't. The contract is for one year at a time. The schools mission is to educate and encourage, not to threaten and harass.

Chubster wrote:

All of you on here acting like Harvey was cut just because BAS wanted to make her life miserable are crazy

Wrong. There is no defense for this. The athletes have a scholarship. That cannot be revoked without misconduct. To cut a scholarship athlete from the team, there can only be one motivation behind it, to cause extreme distress and harm to them hoping they will quit school. Student-athletes are not chattel, there only for the capricious whims of an uncaring psychopath.

One of the happiest days of a teenagers life is the day that they receive an acceptance letter to their future college. For an athlete it's even more exciting, for the affirmation that they "belong" and that all of the years of hard worked paid off, reliving their family of financial burden and a mountain of debt. Their hopes and dreams finally being realized.

I remember those letters clearly, they said, "Welcome to the [university here] class of '77." None of them ever said "Welcome to the class of 2018, unless we decide to cut your 18 year old ass after two weeks after you've moved thousands of miles from home."

Seriously, put potential aside for a minute and take this into consideration. What I don't understand is her reasoning behind telling the athletes that she would not have recruited them and that is why she is letting them go. Take Morgan Harvey, for example. She posted the 11th fastest time in the nation last year for HS girls in the 400m hurdles with a 1:00.02 time. Taking a look at 2013 (since no girls from UTK ran the 400m hurdles last year according to TFFRS), she would have been the #1 athlete from UT in the event. Moreover, she ran 13.95 for the 100m hurdles and 56.17 for the 400m in HS. Those times are fast than a good bit of the other women's best times from UT in the 2014 outdoor track season. So if Coach Sullivan's reasoning for dropping this athlete from the UT roster was because she wasn't good enough to run in the SEC, what is making her keep SLOWER athletes in the program? What I'm getting at is how can Sullivan say that these girls aren't good enough to be on the team when they have already run faster than girls she is still allowing to stay on the team? Doesn't make any sense. I'm not calling her a jerk in this post (though I think she is); I'm saying she's ignorant. She's turning away athletes that are already faster than others on the roster. And to the person who stated that she just doesn't want to Coach JJ's athletes, and that's why she's pushing them away, you do understand that the entirety of the remaining roster is JJ's athletes, right?

Please explain how your last sentence isn't a vehement personal attack? Your vision is not close to 20/20, you revise history to suit your current story.

Clearing out the freshmen, now ,means she gets a 100% BAS squad in place one season sooner.

i've always hated ut... wrote:

if Coach Sullivan's reasoning for dropping this athlete from the UT roster was because she wasn't good enough to run in the SEC, what is making her keep SLOWER athletes in the program?

Don't expect a coherent answer from anyone defending BAS in this. They're clearly not motivated or moved by facts and logic, and like creationists and Holocaust deniers are apt to simply double down on their nonsense when challenged.

Detecting A Rank Fishy Smell wrote:

i've always hated ut... wrote:

if Coach Sullivan's reasoning for dropping this athlete from the UT roster was because she wasn't good enough to run in the SEC, what is making her keep SLOWER athletes in the program?

Don't expect a coherent answer from anyone defending BAS in this. They're clearly not motivated or moved by facts and logic, and like creationists and Holocaust deniers are apt to simply double down on their nonsense when challenged.

The athletes that are slower are probably on minimal scholarship or about to graduate.