Shopper news • FEBRUARY 24, 2014 • A-5
Excitement is upon us: spring sports! No doubt you are delighted, perhaps even bubbling over, with the coming of spring sports at the University of Tennessee. What, you hadn’t even thought of Volunteer track, baseball, tennis or golf? These are the fun and games funded by football and donations. Please mark your calendar. Enjoy. I didn’t throw softball into that group. It is a big winner and often draws a crowd. Ellen Renfroe is really good. Baseball, we are told, will be better this year, weather permitting. Dave Serrano, baseball coach ($450,000 salary), is not promising championships just yet, but he does foresee significant improvement. That was the plan all along for year three. It appears he has recruited well. He expects the rewards of growth and development. He thinks he has much better pitching. He believes the Vols will become relevant in the SEC.
Marvin West
That is very good news, a giant jump if it happens. The team was 8-20 last season, last in the Eastern Division, totally irrelevant. From mid-April until the bitter end, Serrano’s Vols won three league games. Other highlights were two rainouts. Pitching, you ask? Andrew Lee is thought to be recovered from Tommy John surgery. Kyle Serrano, the coach’s son, chose college over the Colorado Rockies. Bless him. First baseman Scott Price can hit. “Probably the best hitter in the SEC,” says the coach. Third baseman Will Maddox takes the game very seriously. Tough guy.
Dirt on uniform. The oldfashioned description was “hard-nosed.” Pro scouts will probably make notes about sophomore shortstop A.J. Simcox. Team characteristics? Better defense, lots more scoring punch. Coach says he can now compare talent with rivals without feeling handicapped. If there are positive developments in track, they remain hidden. Old Vols send emails, trying to convince me that a coaching change is necessary. I have reserved comment. Athletic director Dave Hart is on his own in this case. He gets paid most of a million to make such weighty decisions. Tennis is not really a spring sport. It goes on 10 months a year. For me, it is more fun on a balmy April afternoon. The Vols are nationally ranked. They have strong leadership with teaching skills. Sam Winterbotham was 2013 national coach of
County auditor hits the ground running You’d expect an internal auditor to run a lean, mean operation, and new county auditor Andrea Williams is no exception. Her office has a staff of three – herself, another auditor and an administrative assistant who does everything from some audit work to checking grammar. Williams, who came to Knox County from TVA, started work Dec. 16. She said the timing was perfect, with the laid-back holiday season allowing her to work her way through a massive amount of reading material. She’s now working on a risk assessment for fiscal
Jake Mabe
year 2015. “We’re looking at which areas add the most value,” Williams said, “so we can evaluate not just the financial risk, but the reputational risk and public safety. We should be finished around June.” Her office also performs
some request work, if the county Audit Committee or County Commission requests an audit, or performs reviews on the back end of an external audit. All of her work has to be approved by the Audit Committee. In January, County Commission requested a procedural review of the criminal-justice system. “That includes everything, from the time a person enters the system to the time they complete it. It involves multiple players and processes,” she said, not just the office of embattled Criminal Court Clerk Joy
the year. Chris Woodruff is another head coach in associate disguise. Ben Testerman is volunteer assistant. Wow! Winterbotham, a native of Stoke on Trent, England, has the proper recruiting phone numbers – Australia, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Webb School. Tennessee golf, much like cross-country, is for the participants who take pride in their sport and can press on without the cheering multitudes. It is OK if you skip some matches. You do need to know about the Mack and Jonnie Day practice facility along the Tennessee River. It is big league. It should be. The grassy patch cost $4.5 million. Phase 2 of this project, the Furrow-Blackburn clubhouse, will be special, too. If you are into spring football, there is one date to circle. The Orange and White game is scheduled for April 12 at Neyland Stadium. McCroskey. One of Williams’ suggestions has been to digitize the method by which the county performs monthly pcard audits. C u r r e nt l y, that process is manual. “ W i t h Williams technology, you can do queries and push a button. (Manually), it is time intensive and less consistent than a database process.” Last month, commission discussed at length whether Williams should be present for the entirety of its meetings like the county law di-
Showing the love Sisters Ellen Turner (left) and Helen Ashe are fascinated with Mayor Tim Burchett’s selfie, a photo taken on his smartphone and transmitted instantly to friends of The Love Kitchen. Burchett and Doug Bataille, senior director of parks and recreation, presented the sisters with $3,400 and several barrels of canned food on Feb. 19. The donations were collected in December at the county-sponsored Holiday Festival of Lights at Concord Park. Photo by S. Clark
rector. Williams says the consensus was that she use her discretion on when to be present. Other goals for her first year include getting the dayto-day operations of running her office in order and making sure every county department knows she has an open-door policy. “We want to maintain our independence, but that doesn’t mean we’re isolated. We’re all on the same team, working for the people of Knox County.” Williams was born in Michigan and lived all over the Southeast as a child. She earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting and a master’s in accounting with a concentration in taxa-
tion from UT. Her first job was working in the Inspector General’s office and the compliance office at TVA. She says the best part of her job is getting to solve problems. “You get the bigger picture, not just the transactional details. And you can provide information that can improve something. I like learning. Every audit is a new experience.” And that also means pointing out both the good and the bad. “When you’re an auditor, people don’t always want to see you. But I haven’t gotten that feeling here. We want to point out both ways the county can improve and the things they are doing well.”
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