Two days before she was to graduate from Vanderbilt in the spring of 1980, Teresa Lawrence was working out in the school’s weight room when Emily Harsh, VU’s women’s athletic director at the time, asked her what she was going to do for a career.
Replied a smiling Lawrence, the Girls Preparatory School product who became the first Black female athlete in Commodores history: “One day I’m coming back and taking your position.”
More than 40 years later, and two years after retiring as Tennessee State’s overall athletic director following 18 years in that role, the now Teresa Lawrence Phillips says of that moment, “I don’t even know why I said it. I was laughing when I did. But while I never became athletic director at Vanderbilt, I did wind up spending most of my adult life in college athletics.”
A three-sport star at GPS in basketball, swimming and volleyball who’s a member of the school’s Hall of Fame, Phillips first went to VU on an academic scholarship. Asked what she intended to become following college back then, the eventual economics major said, “I probably thought I was headed to law school. Athletics was not even a thought.”
It also didn’t help that despite Title IX’s passage four years earlier, Vanderbilt didn’t even have a women’s varsity basketball team in the fall of 1976.