Thanks to John Shearer for his balanced article on the Lady Vols name change. As John mentioned, "several," people showed up at the trustees' meeting to protest the name change. UT has 28,000 students, 250,000 alumni and Knoxville has a SMA population of 700,000 and the protesters could only manage several people to show up.
There is very little support among the alums and contributors to protest the name change. The fact is very few people care about the Lady Vols or show up at the their events outside of basketball, and they are keeping the name.
The state of Tennessee was recently ranked dead last in a survey of quality of life. I think that state legislators like Roger Kane might spend more time on raising our quality of life than worrying about the name of sports teams that very few people have ever attended a game.
Douglas Jones
Ooltewah