Vanderbilt's Candice Storey Lee Named Athletic Director of the Year

Athletic department leadership is increasingly defined by the ability to navigate capital investment cycles alongside competitive and regulatory change. Candice Storey Lee, Vanderbilt University's Athletic Director, has earned the Sports Business Journal's Athletic Director of the Year recognition for doing exactly that — stewarding major facility projects while guiding the program through the most consequential restructuring in collegiate athletics history.

Lee oversaw the completion of the Huber Center, Vanderbilt's basketball operations center and practice facility, alongside a broader set of renovations to team facilities across the athletic campus. Facility investment at the collegiate level is increasingly a competitive necessity — recruits evaluate practice environments, training technology, and the physical quality of team spaces as seriously as they evaluate coaching staff and program history. The Huber Center represents the kind of commitment that programs in competitive conferences must make to remain credible recruiting destinations.

The broader context for Lee's tenure is the shift to a revenue-sharing model in collegiate athletics — a structural change that requires ADs to think differently about financial sustainability, donor relations, and the long-term economic case for each infrastructure investment. The decisions made now, in this transitional period, will shape athletic department balance sheets for the next decade.

What Lee's recognition illustrates is a point that holds across the amateur and professional sports spectrum: facility quality and leadership vision are inseparable. The buildings a program inhabits are a statement about its ambitions, its resources, and its commitment to the people who compete and work within them. The Huber Center is one piece of a larger institutional argument that Vanderbilt Athletics is making — and the Sports Business Journal has judged that argument as among the most compelling of the year.

[Read the full piece](https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Articles/2026/05/11/sports-business-awards-athletic-director-of-the-year-candice-storey-lee-vanderbilt-university/)