You'll never see a sign on Randy Sanders' office door that says: "Gone fishing."

Imagine the fan uproar if Tennessee's offensive coordinator was spotted on the lake, even during an open-date week.

However, after recruiting and spring practice wind down each year, Sanders enjoys nothing more than firing up a bass boat and spending the day on the water. If he weren't a football coach, he says he would be a fisherman.

R.L. Sanders, Randy's dad, is retired and fishes nearly every day. He passed on his love for the outdoors to his son. In fact, Randy sometimes fishes competitively. He once caught 17 fish in a three-hour span in a spring bass tournament on Fort Loudoun Lake.

"When I was a kid, I would take an old broom handle and pretend it was a fishing pole,'' Sanders said.

"I'd go through the house and get tubes of toothpaste or bottles of shampoo and then put them in the yard and pretend they were fish. I would even go in the woods and pick up all the leaves that I thought were shaped like fish and then put them on the grass and try to catch them.

"Most of my play time growing up revolved around either fishing or football."

Some of Sanders' earliest recollections of football are of going to watch his older brother, Wayne, play fullback for Morristown East High School. Randy was only 4 when the high school team won the 1969 Class 3A state championship.

"Wayne played fullback so that's the position I wanted to play," Randy said.

"The first day I went to Pee Wee practice, the coach put me at quarterback and I wasn't excited about that at all. My hero growing up wasn't a quarterback. It was Larry Csonka, the fullback for the Miami Dolphins.

"I can still remember sitting at the kitchen table in our house when I was 5 or 6, and watching the clock and waiting for it to turn to 9:00 when Monday Night Football came on."

Despite his initial reluctance, Sanders was a quarterback throughout his youth, high school and college football career. He was only 14 when he started as a freshman at Morristown East and he kept the job all four years. He was named all-state and passed for 4,225 career yards. After being recruited by dozens of schools, he narrowed the list to Georgia, Alabama and UT and signed with the Vols.

In college, he lost a battle with Jeff Francis for the starting job in 1986. When Francis was injured in October 1987, Sanders helped lead the Vols to victory over Georgia Tech. He completed his degree in December 1987 and left the team because of shoulder problems and a lack of playing time. However, he remained loyal to the program in August 1988 by agreeing to rejoin the team as a backup in preseason after reserve Sterling Henton broke a bone in his foot.

Sixteen years later, he's preparing for his 21st football season at UT.

"I love the job I have and I love the University of Tennessee," he says. "I would like to be a head coach some day but I don't have a set timetable for it. If that doesn't happen my identity as a person isn't tied up in having the title 'head coach.' ''

He turns 39 in September. Whether he coaches another decade or three more decades, he hasn't lost sight of his long-range goal.

"One of these days I want to be able to get in a boat and go fishing when the leaves are changing," he says. "I bet I haven't been out on a boat in the fall in 20 or 30 years."