Student-athletes like Erica Robertson make it easy to root for the Commodores. The Boston Herald's Steve Buckley has a terrific feature on Robertson, an incoming freshman and women's tennis player.
According to the folks at the club, Erica will be the first African-American to play for the Vanderbilt women’s team. But while she earned an athletic scholarship there, she didn’t necessarily need one; she already had landed an academic scholarship that would have covered 90 percent of her collegiate freight.
Yet when she visited the campus and met coach Geoff Macdonald, one thing led to another, and here we are: Erica has earned what in college circles is known as a full ride.
“It’s nice to be able to tell people, when I want to, that I did earn an academic scholarship,” Robertson said yesterday following a morning workout at the Sportsmen’s Tennis Club. “Tennis is important to me. It always will be. But I do have other interests.”
Those include history, in particular the post-Reconstruction, and that’s cool. At a time when we keep hearing about students who don’t even know about the Civil War, here’s a student who has moved right past that period and into the Reconstruction era.
While this site is devoted primarily to the big-time sports like football, basketball and baseball, I often find stories like this one even more compelling. Erica Robertson epitomizes what the Vanderbilt student-athlete should be.
Photo [Boston Herald]
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Another example, my uncle gets treatment every so often at the Vanderbilt hospital, where Gabe Hall, tackle on the football team, interned for a summer. He and my uncle would talk football, and they developed a good bond. It was really neat to hear him talk about it. We're lucky to have genuinely good kids representing the school as athletes.
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