Latest news with #CandiceStoreyLee
Al Arabiya
an hour ago
- Business
- Al Arabiya
Vanderbilt Ready to Keep Investing in Football After Historic Season and House Settlement
Vanderbilt has numerous options for distributing revenue sharing with a two-time national baseball champion and both men's and women's basketball coming off NCAA Tournament berths. Combined with a history of more losing seasons than bowl berths, it seemingly would be an easy decision to invest anywhere but football. Not for the Commodores. 'This is the SEC,' Vanderbilt athletic director Candice Storey Lee said Tuesday. 'You have to invest and invest at a high level.' The decision is more complex with the SEC's lone private university coming off one of its best all-around athletic seasons in years. Lee wouldn't specify if Vanderbilt will follow the 75–15–5–5 formula that has become a popular revenue-sharing plan with the House settlement that would send 75 percent of revenue-share money to football, followed by men's basketball, then women's basketball. Investing more in football isn't just the cost of doing business in the Southeastern Conference. Lee and Chancellor Daniel Diermeier lured Clark Lea away from Notre Dame because they wanted to turn Vanderbilt into a consistent winner, which the Commodores haven't been in decades. In 2021, Vanderbilt announced its biggest football stadium renovation in 40 years with a complete redesign and rebuild of each end zone. The south end zone will be ready for the season opener Aug. 30. All the spending is easier to justify after 2024. With quarterback Diego Pavia, the Commodores went 7–6 and won their first bowl since 2013. The season's highlight was the program's first win over an AP No. 1–ranked team, with the Commodores never trailing against Alabama last October. Lea said last season's success is starting to break through the cynicism around Vanderbilt football. 'We all see the opportunity that we have right now,' Lea said. 'And I think for those of us that have been in this really…certainly for me, this being year five, I'm so excited to feel like I have something at stake, to feel like chips are on the table.' Football wasn't the only beneficiary of that initial $300 million investment. The north end zone now features the Huber Center, which opened last fall, giving men's basketball and women's basketball each a floor complete with separate practice courts, locker rooms, film rooms, and hangout areas for players. The timing was perfect on a campus where women's soccer reached its first Sweet 16 and women's tennis hosted an NCAA regional: – Vanderbilt men's basketball went 20–13 in coach Mark Byington's debut season, earning the Commodores' first NCAA Tournament berth since 2017. – The women beat in-state rival Tennessee twice in a season for the first time, went 22–11, and earned a second straight NCAA Tournament berth. With Mikayla Blakes setting records as a freshman and Khamil Pierre back, coach Shea Ralph is targeting titles and the program's first Final Four since 1993. Ralph said she's glad to be working at Vanderbilt for an athletic director who played women's basketball at the school. Lee graduated in 2000 after four seasons playing for coach Jim Foster. Ralph's concern now is how female athletes' fair-market value is assessed. 'Are we being compared to other women? Which is going to set us back,' Ralph said. The practice court, once shared, now will be used by volleyball, Vanderbilt's 17th sport, debuting this fall. The south end zone will have a space that can be used by coach Tim Corbin and his baseball program, which just earned the No. 1 national seed for the NCAA Tournament after winning the SEC Tournament. A training table in that end zone also will be open to all athletes. 'It's clear that we're trying to, yes, invest where you get the largest return on investment, but also invest where all of our student athletes can be positively impacted,' Lee said.
Associated Press
9 hours ago
- Business
- Associated Press
Vanderbilt ready to keep investing in football after historic season and House settlement
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Vanderbilt has plenty of options for divvying up revenue sharing under the House settlement with a two-time national baseball champ and both men's and women's basketball coming off NCAA Tournament berths. Combined with a record of more losing seasons than bowl berths seemingly would make for an easy decision to invest anywhere but football. Not the Commodores. 'This is the SEC,' Vanderbilt athletic director Candice Storey Lee said Tuesday. 'You have to invest and invest at a high level.' The decision is tougher with the SEC's lone private university coming off one of its best all-around athletic seasons in years. Lee wouldn't specify if Vanderbilt will follow the 75-15-5-5 formula that has emerged as a popular revenue-sharing plan with the House settlement that would send 75% of revenue-share money to football, followed by men's basketball, then women's basketball. Investing more in football isn't just the cost of doing business in the Southeastern Conference. Lee and Chancellor Daniel Diermeier lured Clark Lea away from Notre Dame because they wanted to turn Vanderbilt into a consistent winner, which the Commodores haven't been in decades. In 2021, Vanderbilt announced its biggest football stadium renovation in 40 years with a complete redesign and rebuild of each end zone. The south end zone will be ready for the season opener Aug. 30. All the spending is easier to justify after 2024. With quarterback Diego Pavia, the Commodores went 7-5 and won their first bowl since 2013. The season's highlight was the program's first win over an AP No. 1-ranked team with the Commodores never trailing against Alabama last October. Lea said last season's success is starting to break through the 'cynicism' around Vanderbilt football. 'We all see the opportunity that we have right now,' Lea said. 'And I think for those of us that have been in this really ... certainly for me this being year five, I'm so excited to feel like I have something at stake, to feel like chips are on the table.' Football wasn't the only beneficiary of that initial $300 million investment. The north end zone now features the Huber Center, which opened last fall giving men's basketball and women's basketball each a floor complete with separate practice courts, locker rooms, film rooms and hangout areas for players. The timing was perfect on a campus where women's soccer reached its first Sweet 16 and women's tennis hosted an NCAA regional: — Vanderbilt men's basketball went 20-13 in coach Mark Byington's debut season earning the Commodores' first NCAA Tournament berth since 2017. — The women beat in-state rival Tennessee twice in a season for the first time, went 22-11 and earned a second straight NCAA Tournament berth. With Mikayla Blakes setting records as a freshman and Khamil Pierre back, coach Shea Ralph is targeting titles and the program's first Final Four since 1993. Ralph said she's glad to be working at Vanderbilt for an athletic director who played women's basketball at the school. Lee graduated in 2000 after four seasons playing for coach Jim Foster. Ralph's concern now is how female athletes' fair-market value is assessed. 'Are we being compared to other women? Which is going to set us back,' Ralph said. The practice court once shared now will be used by volleyball, Vanderbilt's 17th sport debuting this fall. The south end zone will have a space that can be used by coach Tim Corbin and his baseball program, which just earned the No. 1 national seed for the NCAA Tournament after winning the SEC Tournament. A training table in that end zone also will be open to all athletes. 'It's clear that we're trying to, yes, invest where you get the largest return on investment, but also invest where all of our student athletes can be positively impacted,' Lee said. ___ Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here. AP college football: and
Yahoo
25-03-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Despite March Madness losses, Vanderbilt's future looks bright under AD Lee
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. Opinion: To fully celebrate 100 Years of Opry, we must remember DeFord Bailey's injustice '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 adwilliams@ or follow her on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @AndreaWillWrite and BlueSky at @ This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: March Madness: AD Candice Lee on Vanderbilt's winning future | Opinion
