Blame the dream job

This one hurt.\nJust when the IU faithful thought the women's basketball program had received a wave-up from the bouncer guarding the door at the club of emerging basketball programs, we were promptly given the boot once we reached the front of the line. \nCoach Sharon Versyp is gone.\nNow, I'm not saying the team can't continue with its current success. I just believe it would have been an easier feat to accomplish with Versyp sitting at the top of the bench.\nIn her first year, she led the team deep into the WNIT Tournament, finished the season with a 19-14 record and recruited the Gatorade high school players of the year in both Connecticut and Wisconsin.\nThings were happening.\nBut as soon as the Purdue job opened, she followed her heart. And so the search for a new coach begins.\nPerhaps the nation's busiest and most secretive director of athletics, Rick Greenspan (seriously this guy should be a consultant for Batman, Superman and ninjas everywhere) will be out conducting one of his infamous 'nationwide' searches to find the next suitor of the women's basketball throne. (I heard Randy Wittman's a done deal. How about you?)\nBut Versyp's departure seems to be attached to a larger issue within the athletics department at this University -- the revolving door of coaches.\nVersyp took the escalator up to West Lafayette, while Mike Davis took the elevator down to Birmingham, Ala. Former IU baseball coach Bob Morgan retired and current baseball coach Tracy Smith came over from the University of Miami-Ohio to take over this year.\nThis could all be about timing, though. Morgan was at the helm of the baseball team for a whopping 22 years and decided to retire. We all know it was time for Davis to move on. And Versyp -- a four-year Boilermaker player -- is black and gold through and through, capitalizing on perhaps the only chance in her life to snatch the Purdue women's basketball coaching job.\nSo maybe, it's not a problem only at this University, but in collegiate athletics as a whole. It seems that just as a coach has made his or her mark on a program, he or she gets scooped away by more money, a better program or a better and more competitive conference. (Or in Davis' case, somewhere he wouldn't get pelted with criticism at every misstep. Besides, the money is pretty nice for him at UAB. He has an incentive-laden contract that could garner him close to a million dollars. Add that to the $400,000 IU will be paying him next year and he's sitting pretty.)\nLoyalty and contractual commitment seems to sometimes take a backseat to the driving forces of the "big time." In the case of Mark Few, he's making a program like Gonzaga into the "big time" and doesn't seem to want to relinquish that position anytime soon.\nAnd again, you really can't blame Versyp. Her loyalty was and will always be toward Purdue. So as much as it might hurt the IU program, we must realize where Versyp's mindset was when she made the decision -- this was her dream job.\nSometimes we think of the sports world as a separate entity from life as a whole, an escape if you will. But is a coach moving onto bigger and better things really different from you taking a job for more money and more benefits at a new company -- a dream job?\nCertainly not.\nAnd unfortunately for IU basketball fans, Sharon Versyp agrees.