I admit it is unusual for a date to be something other than a datetime field type.

However, there are several departments in the company that run programs/queries against the data in these tables, and those programs are expecting a varchar field. If I actually converted the field type to datetime I would be messing up a whole bunch of people.

(I know because when I first took maintenance of this database over I did change the field type, and you do not want to know about the 47 kinds of doo-doo I got into for that )

I'm pretty familiar with CONVERT...I have used it times beyond count in stored procedures and ad hoc queries. I don't see how it is going to address what I'm trying to do in this case, however.