Despite March Madness losses, Vanderbilt's future looks bright under AD Lee

Yahoo

25-03-2025

Candice Storey Lee doesn't care if you're a bandwagon fan. As the athletic director of Vanderbilt University, she doesn't care if you only started rooting for the black and gold after Vandy football upset SEC powerhouse Alabama.
She doesn't even mind if the first time you ever cheered for the Commodores was last Friday, March 21, when the men's and women's basketball teams played their first-round games in this year's March Madness tournament − the first time both teams went dancing, together, since 2012.
Lee, who initially arrived on campus 30 years ago, herself a member of the women's hoops team, is only glad you're on board now.
While playing for five years, including two medical redshirt years, interning in the athletic department under former AD David Williams, and ascending to the office's pinnacle, Lee has always believed − in Vanderbilt, yes, but also herself.
That doesn't mean she didn't hear the whispers or see the sidelong glances. She knew what you were thinking: That because Vanderbilt is an elite academic institution, sports just weren't high on the priority list. That the school would always be the butt of the SEC's jokes.
And: That if anyone were to turn things around − to prove that, in Lee's words, Vandy could be a top-20 institution, in a great city, in the best conference in the country, with the best people, in a tight-knit community and have a winning athletics program − it probably wouldn't be her. That maybe she was a DEI hire, good for optics but bad for performance.
For a while, this external disbelief in her abilities dictated how Lee moved, how she approached this job she earned over the course of 25 years.
'As a Black woman, the expectation is that you are exceptional,' she told me in her office in March. Many Black women, she said, have had to be 'exceptional with a very small margin of error.'
'You hold yourself to a high standard, but you feel like that's the standard that you have to meet.'
It's been hard to give up those expectations, cultivated over a lifetime, but she's trying: 'I'm not asking the staff to be perfect, so I've learned not to hold myself to that level.'
Still, I get the sense she's unwilling to let up on herself completely. After all, some self-imposed pressure is beneficial. Necessary. Often, when the status quo simply isn't good enough, it's the only way to get better. It's how you believe when no one else does.
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'We beat Alabama, and everybody said we shocked the world,' Lee said. 'Internally, that's not how we talked about it. Yes, the world may be shocked. But we weren't shocked because we had been preparing.'
That 'we' she referred to is a mélange of coaches and administrators who believe: that Vandy athletics can be known as an elite academic institution and an athletic powerhouse, that it's possible to win and help great athletes become great people, that what it is ain't what it's gonna be.
'Every person who works in the department is committed to using athletics to change lives,' Lee said. 'We're not doing the great work that's happening at the medical center. We're not curing cancer. I know that. But I also know the empowerment that can come from being on a team. And I know what sports can do for young people … I know what athletics can bring to a community.
'It's my job to be the architect of the vision and articulate it, but I'm not interested in convincing people.'
Lee was talking about her staff, but I can imagine this ethos also applies to the student-athletes responsible for powering the whole machine − students like the 11 transfer players who were willing to take a chance on Vandy and first-year men's basketball coach Mark Byington. The reward for their faith? An improbable tourney berth after being picked to finish dead-last in the SEC at the start of the season.
And there's Mikayla Blakes, the standout freshman on the women's team who set the NCAA freshman single-game scoring record with a 55-point performance against Auburn. Blakes, a New Jersey native, was a McDonald's All-American recruited to play for Stanford and Tennessee. Yet she chose a place where, echoing Lee's vision, she felt she'd be taken care of. Her brother Jaylen said, 'She was just about building something.'
As for the fans: Vandy has been building. And so far, they've been coming.
But will you stay?
Lee knows how fickle sports can be — how long it takes to change a narrative when success has been inconsistent. So she's committed to leading her team to do the work. She'll let the rest take care of itself.
'If the winning is what hooks you, that's fine with me,' Lee says, 'because once you're hooked, and you get to know us and what makes us tick, I think you'll be hooked for life.'
Andrea Williams is an opinion columnist for The Tennessean and curator of the Black Tennessee Voices initiative. She has an extensive background covering country music, sports, race and society. Email her at [e-mail] or follow her on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @AndreaWillWrite and BlueSky at @andreawillwrite.bsky.social
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: March Madness: AD Candice Lee on Vanderbilt's winning future | Opinion