Tennessee State athletics director Teresa Phillips to step down next year | Estes – Tennessean
Hers has always been a trailblazing path, made more unique because it wasn’t intentional.
Even now, Teresa Phillips says she became Tennessee State’s athletics director by accident. She earned a degree from Vanderbilt in economics. Her first job was with an insurance company, and she gave that path up to pursue her true passion, which she did while pacing the sidelines for 11 seasons as TSU’s women’s basketball coach.
“If I had to say what I am,” Phillips said, “I really am a coach.”
Nonetheless, Phillips was promoted in 2002 from an interim role to become the Tigers’ full-time athletics director, and they’ve not had another since then.
That, however, is about to change.
After more than three decades at TSU, Phillips has informed the university’s leadership that she is stepping down as athletics director at the end of this school year, she announced Thursday. Her tenure probably will end in June 2020.
She finalized the decision in August but is only now announcing it publicly as TSU is in the midst of homecoming-week festivities leading up to Saturday’s 4:30 p.m. football game at Nissan Stadium against Austin Peay.
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It’s a move that the 61-year-old Phillips said she had been considering as far back as 2011.
Asked the reason, Phillips took a deep breath, thoughtful pause and replied, “Tired.”
“It’s been a long run,” she said. “A low-level, mid-major program is hard. You have to really bring some level of energy. But I think it’s just my time for my health and my peace and my family. It’s been a long run. This is my 31st year at TSU, and I think there’s some other things out there for me to do. You can get stagnated being at the same place, and at some point, your voice can’t be heard like you would like for it to be heard. I just believe that.
“I’ve stayed longer than I really wanted to.”
A Nashville sports institution
Phillips grew up loving sports, but she didn’t aspire to be an athletics administrator in large part because there weren’t examples of women working in such a capacity.
“I didn’t really see a me,” Phillips said. “… There were no women doing what I do.”
There will be another athletics director at TSU, but Phillips never truly could be replaced. She is an institution, not just at TSU but also for sports in Nashville and the state of Tennessee, owner of countless awards and honors.
And for so many reasons.
A native of the Chattanooga area (more accurately Lookout Mountain), Phillips became the first black female student-athlete at Vanderbilt when she walked on the basketball team in the late 1970s after it was recognized as a varsity sport. She’d originally played on the school’s club team.
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One day as a college student working out in Vanderbilt’s Memorial Gym, Phillips was asked by Emily Harsh, then-women’s athletics director for the Commodores, what she planned to do after graduation.
“I said, ‘Well one day, I hope to take your job,’” Phillips said. “I never thought about being an athletics director. It just came out my mouth, and I don’t even know why I said it.”
Little more than two decades later, in 2003, Sports Illustrated ranked the “101 Most Influential Minorities” in sports. Phillips came in at No. 91.
“One of only 24 female ADs in Division I, she’s cleaning up a troubled department,” SI wrote. “She raised her profile this year by stepping in as men’s hoops coach.”
Ah, about that.
‘This isn’t going to be a big deal’
National attention found TSU in 2003, when Phillips coached the men’s basketball team for a game. That season’s coach, Nolan Richardson III, had been fired, and interim coach Hosea Lewis – and multiple players – were facing a one-game suspension, mandated by the Ohio Valley Conference, after a fight during a game.
So Phillips, a successful women’s coach for years, opted to coach TSU’s men during a 71-56 defeat to Austin Peay. As a female coach directing a men’s Division I team, she made history, though she doesn’t reflect on the situation fondly.
“Probably one of the five hardest times that I’ve had in my 30 years here at TSU was that period of time,” Phillips said. “It was a negative, and then attention was put on me, and it was totally unintended. … I had just stopped coaching the women’s team. I knew all the guys. I thought, ‘This isn’t going to be a big deal. I’ll coach them for a game. The coach will come back the next game,’ and then it blew up because my dumb self didn’t know no woman had ever coached a Division I (men’s) team. I mean, who knew? Who cares?”
Years later, Phillips recalls that game and wonders whether it might have been different if it wasn’t for the suspensions and TSU had its full assortment of players available.
Yes, there’s a competitor here. It’s still there after all these years, and in many ways it has kept Phillips in this role, chasing championships. She absolutely wishes that TSU had landed more during her tenure, especially in football, where the Tigers will carry a 1-6 record into Saturday’s game.
“Actually, we have a pretty good team this year,” Phillips said. “We have a very talented team, a very talented offensive team. We’re a team that we can mess up somebody else’s season. … We can win out. That’s what you have to still look at and hope, but you can’t sugarcoat it. This has so far been a very difficult year. We haven’t done great in the last few years.”
This final homecoming as TSU’s AD could be emotional. So will each of the final milestones during the coming school year, from seasons ending in various sports to graduation and other steps.
“Going into this transition for myself, I feel this: I’ve been honest, and I’ve had integrity, and I’ve respected my responsibility,” Phillips said. “… The thing that I wish I could have done was to bring more championships and winning, but I don’t regret the style of management that I had. Because I think with what we’ve had to deal with, we have graduated students and run clean programs.
“Those two things, I’ll still take that.”
Reach Gentry Estes at gestes@tennessean.com and on Twitter @Gentry_Estes.
Published 5:59 PM EDT Oct 17, 2019
