During his tenure at the helm of the Volunteers athletic program, Mike Hamilton's visionary leadership has exemplified the “ideal of service” captured by the university's revered Torchbearer Statue.
Appointed to the position of director of athletics in 2003, Hamilton's stewardship of the Tennessee brand continues to ascend to unprecedented new heights. While Tennessee athletics continues to shine brightly as a national standard of intercollegiate achievement, Hamilton has assured that the athletic department's impact reaches far beyond the fields of competition.
In 2010-11, the benefits of Hamilton's fiscal oversight took the form of $10.3 million in direct cash support to the general UT Knoxville campus—the largest such contribution by athletics in university history. The UT athletics department remains one only a handful of nationwide that receives no funds from state subsidies or taxes.
Success on a national level has long been a staple of Tennessee athletics, and under Hamilton's watch, this trend has continued. The Vols have placed in the top 16 in the NACDA Director's Cup six times in the last seven years, including two top-10 finishes.
The men's basketball program has reached new heights in recent years and reached the NCAA Elite Eight in 2010—the program's most successful season in 101 years. The basketball program also won the 2008 SEC Championship and achieved the program's first-ever No. 1 national ranking that same year. Additionally, men's tennis played for the national championship and finished second in the nation in 2010. The leaders of those two programs, tennis coach Sam Winterbotham and basketball coach Bruce Pearl, were both hired by Hamilton and have each earned National Coach of the Year distinction at Tennessee.
