On December 9, 1949, the annual winter meeting of the Southern Conference took place at the Roanoke Hotel in Roanoke, Virginia. The fifty-two delegates in attendance from the sixteen members heard a report of a special committee charged with “studying the advisability of establishing the office of a Commissioner.”
According to the meeting minutes:
Beginning July 1, 1950, or earlier if possible, the Southern Conference shall engage the services of a person who shall be called Commissioner. He shall be charged with the responsibility of endorcing [sic] the rules and regulations of the Conference.
He shall be paid an annual salary not to exceed twelve thousand ($12,000) dollars. There shall be provided, for the necessary expenses in the operation of his office, an annual sum not to exceed ten thousand ($10,000) dollars, and an additional amount of eight thousand ($8,000) dollars for the maintenance of booking officials.
The committee’s recommendation was seconded and adopted. Another special committee was assigned the task of identifying the right person for the job. After sifting through applications and resumes for much of 1950, the committee felt it became obvious that the right person was Wallace Wade.
Perhaps no individual associated with the Southern Conference had achieved such fame and success over such a long period of time as Wade. He had just completed his sixteenth season as head football coach at Duke. Before that, Wade had built a powerhouse program at Alabama beginning in 1923, winning two Rose Bowls and three mythical national championships.
For three decades the SoCon had been a viable, well-respected organization. But the increasing pressures to succeed in college athletics, particularly with the emergence of television, made presidents, chancellors, and athletic directors realize the need for an executive director who could view issues through a neutral, nonpartisan lens. Wade’s assignment was to monitor national trends, establish and enforce regulations, and promote a sprawling league that stretched from Washington, DC, to Charleston, South Carolina.
It wasn’t long before he was staring at his first crisis. Seven large, high-profile members formally announced their departure to form a new league called the Atlantic Coast Conference. The ACC defections left the remaining Southern Conference members reeling.
“Wallace Wade was our inspiration,” the Citadel faculty representative D. S. McAlister would later tell a Columbia, South Carolina, reporter. “He had come to Duke from Alabama to coach football and told everybody in the Southern that our football could match that of the SEC with hard work. He did the same thing after the conference split in 1953. He told us we had to get to work.
“We did, and we earned respectability.”
Wade was so highly thought of that the departing ACC programs contacted him to serve as commissioner of the fledgling league while keeping his SoCon duties. He accepted, telling members of both conferences that although it might not be the advisable thing to do, and could lead to problems and confusion, he would “serve as ably as he could.” The joint commissionership lasted for almost a year before Wake Forest AD Jim Weaver was named ACC commissioner on May 7, 1954.
“I was told unofficially that the ACC would like me to join them, but I felt loyal to the Southern,” Wade recalled years later.
The formation of the ACC marked the end of the Southern Conference being recognized as one of the top two or three conferences in the United States. But it wasn’t a death knell, either.
“Of course, we had some other difficulties, mostly minor,” remembered Wade. “But the new Southern had better relations among the members. There wasn’t quite the tendency to go all out and there was more conforming to the rules.”
The conference did not add any new members during Wade’s nine years in office. Toward the latter part of his term, Wade convinced the members to create and use the first Southern Conference logo. Rifle was added as a league sport in 1956, mostly at the urging of Virginia Tech and the latest addition to the league, West Virginia.
Success in at least one sport proved more elusive under Wade. The 1951 conference baseball tournament showed net gate receipts of $12.84 in Greensboro. It was moved to Raleigh for two years and fared better, but once the ACC teams left, it was decided to eliminate the baseball tournament. It would not be revived until 1984.
One of Wade’s proudest moments as commissioner was attending the championship game of the 1959 NCAA Basketball Tournament in Louisville’s Freedom Hall where his West Virginia Mountaineers competed in the national championship game, falling to California in the final seconds by a single point.
Nine months later, the 67-year-old Wade stepped down as commissioner and settled on his 120-acre farm in an unincorporated community near Durham, where he and his wife, Virginia, raised prize Hereford cattle. He enjoyed a long retirement, living to see Duke rename its football stadium in his honor in 1967. He died on October 7, 1986, at the age of 94.
Bio taken from "A Proud Athletic History: 100 Years of the Southern Conference" by John Iamarino