Orange Nation, Indivisible

In the old days - like last year - that would have been the obvious option for most University of Tennessee students.

Sarah Hughes and Ashley Bales had other ideas. Their mission was to beat the crowd.

The two UT freshmen snubbed a warm bed to get up around 8 a.m. They bundled up, left their dorm room and went out in a freezing rain to stand in line.

Sleep wasn't even on the radar.

By 10 a.m., they were the first UT students in line at Thompson-Boling Arena for the 3 p.m. men's basketball game on Feb. 4 against Mississippi.

That's right, five hours before tipoff, and it was a game with Ole Miss. Not Florida. Not Kentucky.

Hughes and Bales are just two examples of the renaissance of passion among UT students for Vols basketball.

"There's so much excitement," Hughes said, also admitting that she likes to get an up-close and personal look at junior forward Dane Bradshaw.

"You can see how coach (Bruce) Pearl relates to the players and he relates really well with the students," she said.

Pearl had his own mission after being hired to resurrect a dormant program.

He visited dorms. He stood on chairs in cafeterias and exhorted students to buy into UT basketball.

At first, the response was resounding doubt.

Four years of no NCAA tournament berths created a malaise among the student faction.

All that changed this season.

The Vols started winning and Pearl's vision for student participation took off.

One student regular is Tim Ainger, a senior psychology major.

He's the guy in the big, orange-foam cowboy hat, a crowd favorite this season.

"Coach Pearl knows how to play off people's positives," Ainger said. "He knows at this university, even if we had a UT tiddlywinks team, there would be 100,000 people who could potentially get excited about it because there's so much pride in the University of Tennessee."

Students were hungry for something to get excited about during the winter months.

"He got here and he played to that perfectly," Ainger said. "He aroused enough spirit in people to get them to come out for that first time. Once that started happening, it was just magic.

"He knows what he's doing. The man's a genius on the court and off the court."

Rocky Top rowdies Unlike the freshmen Hughes and Bales, Ainger remembers what it was like last year.

"I remember being able to walk up to a game 20 minutes after it started and sitting in the front row," he said. "For the Florida game (this year), we were out there six or seven hours before the game started and we still weren't first in line."

Pearl has created almost a cult following among the Orange Nation of UT students.

A few go so far as to put on the their best white dress shirt accompanied by an orange tie and orange suspenders - a la Pearl.

Tony Clabough, a senior in microbiology, is one of those guys.

"I might have come to one game last year, maybe Kentucky," Clabough said. "It just wasn't that fun to come watch. There wasn't any energy. Things are a lot different now."

Senior Josh Cooper can testify.

"It's normally a football buzz around here, but lately it's all about basketball," Cooper said.

"People come up to you and they don't ask if you're going to the game, they ask what time are you going to leave to get to the game."

Pearl's princess Jacqui Pearl, the oldest of four Pearl children, is one of the UT students caught up in the excitement.

She's a UT sophomore majoring in secondary education.

She's also the person who actually unpacked Pearl's sweat-stained gray suit after a victorious trip to Florida.

"It was awful," Jacqui said. "It was funny though."

Jacqui has become a celebrity in her own right as a part-time national anthem singer prior to UT games.

The move from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has been eased by her father's success and the renewed interest in the program.

"I had no idea it would be this big," Jacqui said. "They told me it was a fishbowl when we moved down here, and everything was going to be a bit more magnified than it was in Milwaukee, but I don't think any of us expected it to be like this."

As far as Jacqui is concerned, she's just another UT student caught up in the excitement.

"You see these sections fill up and students jumping around and being loud," she said. "They're the energy. They pick it up and get it going.

"As far as I know, the spirit about basketball around campus this year compared to last year has just gone through the roof."

Hamilton's delight That "through the roof" excitement is exactly what UT athletic director Mike Hamilton hoped to see when he hired Pearl last spring.

"I've said from the beginning our goals were twofold as it related to Tennessee and the arena," Hamilton said. "We wanted to bring the students back and have people sample our product.

"We believed if that would happen people would come in waves, and they have."

It was Pearl's idea to create an open section behind one of UT's goals for a standing-room-only student section.

First come, first serve. That's why the students were at the gate five hours before game time.

"The energy in this arena starts with our students, particularly this area down in the end zone," Hamilton said.

"We averaged 575 students a game last year. Obviously that's up significantly with some great student crowds. I just really appreciate them being a part of it."

The home season is now finished, with the Vols, 21-6 after Saturday's win over Vanderbilt, awaiting the Southeastern Conference tournament in Nashville and an impending bid to the NCAA tournament.

For Hamilton, it was just fun seeing the look on the players' faces as they walked down through the crowd prior to games.

"You want to feel like your classmates are supporting you," he said. "Those are the guys you're seeing as you walk to different classes during the week.

"Our guys can hold their heads high, and I'm sure they're getting a lot of high fives and 'attaboys' on the way to class. That probably means as much to them as anything."