The Volunteer State Athletic Conference (VSAC) was a college athletic conference which was predominantly for smaller colleges in the U.S. state of Tennessee.
The VSAC was organized in the 1940s and dissolved in the early 1980s. Member schools were in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA). Long-term members of the conference included the institutions now known as Belmont University, Bethel College, Bryan College, Carson-Newman College, Christian Brothers University, King College, Lambuth College, Lee University, Lincoln Memorial University, Lipscomb University, Milligan College, Tusculum College, Tennessee Wesleyan College and Union University. The conference dissolved when the institutions in the eastern portion of the state seceded to form the Tennessee Valley Athletic Conference (TVAC). Those in the western part of the state formed in turn the Tennessee Collegiate Athletic Conference (TCAC). The Appalachian Athletic Conference is the direct successor of the Tennessee Valley Athletic Conference and was known as such until the mid-1990s when the addition of schools in Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina necessitated the name change. The current TranSouth Athletic Conference is sometimes regarded as something of a successor to the TCAC.
Other founding members of the VSAC include East Tennessee State University, Middle Tennessee State University, Austin Peay State University and Tennessee Technological University.
Famous quotes containing the words volunteer, state, athletic and/or conference:
“We should have an army so organized and so officered as to be capable in time of emergency, in cooperation with the National Militia, and under the provision of a proper national volunteer law, rapidly to expand into a force sufficient to resist all probable invasion from abroad and to furnish a respectable expeditionary force if necessary in the maintenance of our traditional American policy which bears the name of President Monroe.”
—William Howard Taft (18571930)
“That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to the dukes house, washed and dressed and laid in the dukes bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“The only athletic sport I ever mastered was backgammon.”
—Douglas Jerrold (18031857)
“Politics is still the mans game. The women are allowed to do the chores, the dirty work, and now and thenbut only occasionallyone is present at some secret conference or other. But its not the rule. They can go out and get the vote, if they can and will; they can collect money, they can be grateful for being permitted to work. But that is all.”
—Mary Roberts Rinehart (18761958)