It’s not every day that an entire athletics department hits a home run, but that’s what happened October 26 at Coker College.

Inspired by the vision of Division II’s community-engagement initiative, Coker Athletics Director Tim Griggs conceived and then pulled off "A Taste of Coker," an evening of food, entertainment and social interaction staged on a crisp autum evening directly on top of Coker’s soccer field.

"I’ve got people calling me and I’ve got e-mails saying how much they enjoyed it," Griggs said. "People were so happy. The vice president for development called me this morning at 8:30 and said that in 32 years at the college, this is the most fun event he’s ever been to. I’m telling you, we hit a home run."

The plan involved recruiting 20 friends of the university to serve as guest chefs. Tickets, priced at $20 each, were sold throughout the community of Hartsville, South Carolina. The chefs’ stations were set up around the perimeter of the field, with a coach assigned to each station. The bleachers were moved to the middle of the field, where members of the Coker student-athlete advisory committee and other student-athletes played with children, most of them less than 10 years old. Throughout the evening, a student-athlete entertained with singing and a guitar, the cheerleaders cheered and the Coker Dancers danced, even coaxing the school’s president and vice presidents into a line dance.

In all, 200 tickets were sold. Counting the participating athletes, staff, chefs and a few comps, about 300 people got a Taste of Coker.

"I was shooting for 20 cooks, but we ended up with 23," Griggs said. "We were paying the chefs $100 apiece but over half of them said, ‘Don’t pay me anything. Use this as a donation to the booster club.’"

The Taste of Coker ultimately netted more than $7,000, thanks mostly to $5,000 in sponsorships sold in advance of the event. But the bigger gain was that school and community got to know one another better.

"You could pick what you wanted to do," Griggs said. "Adults could mingle with the other adults, but you could see your kid playing with the athletes 40 yards away. Everybody was talking about how open it was and how much space they had to move around. People migrated around the field to sample all the cooks. They met with the coaches and they met with the student-athletes, so it was big-time interaction."

But maybe the best interaction was between the SAAC and the children. "They had soccer out there in the middle of the field and little kids 5, 6 and 7 years old kicking the ball around with them," Griggs said. "Volleyball players had young kids bumping the ball back and forth with them."

Caution had to be taken to segregate high school prospects from the interaction. The boosters couldn’t make contact, and the student-athletes could not involve them in a tryout situation.

"We’ve got to change the rules in the NCAA about community engagement so that people can feel free to come in for something like this," Griggs said. "If we don’t have all these rules, we’ll be able to invite more people and we’ll be able to engage with more groups."

Division II Vice President Mike Racy said the Taste of Coker is exactly the type of project that will help interested athletics programs and institutions build stronger bonds with their communities.

"One of the things people are going to ask is how can you tell when one of these events is successful," Racy said. "I say that the definition is when you announce that you’re not going to do the event next year and the community won’t let you cancel."

Nobody is talking about cancellation after the first edition of a Taste of Coker. In fact, Griggs regards the inaugural taste as only an appetizer since that it was conceived, planned, sold and executed in about a month.

"It was," he said, "all we dreamed it would be."