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Vanderbilt athletic director Candice Lee celebrates a recent win over LSU in women's basketball. Denny Simmons / USA Today Network via Imagn Images
Of the 68 sitting athletic directors at Power 4 institutions, just 21 hired the football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball coaches who are currently working under them.
And one of the 21 stands out for the demonstrated ability to identify coaching talent, support it and put things on a trajectory that previously seemed unattainable. Vanderbilt AD Candice Lee is not the only success story among those three sports — the best three sports to compare among Power 4 athletic departments because all three matter, while baseball is huge in some places, hockey in others, volleyball in others, wrestling at Iowa and Penn State, and so on.
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But Lee’s story is the most striking. The best Vanderbilt football season ever has been followed up by the best start in women’s basketball history (20-0 for Shea Ralph’s No. 5 Commodores, before Sunday’s first loss of the season at No. 2 South Carolina) and a tie for the best start in men’s basketball history (16-0 for Mark Byington’s No. 15 Commodores, now 17-3 and solidly in line for the fourth top-four NCAA Tournament seed in program history).
Lee, known as Candice Storey during her Vanderbilt basketball playing career from 1996-2002, hired Notre Dame defensive coordinator Clark Lea in December 2020, a few months after she got the AD job. He took over a program that had just gone 0-9 and boasted three winning seasons in its previous 38. Lea’s fifth team just went 10-2, narrowly missing the College Football Playoff, featuring Heisman Trophy runner-up Diego Pavia and winning Lea the Eddie Robinson National Coach of the Year Award from the Football Writers Association of America.
Candice Storey Lee gets her own game ball.
Pavia: “To the best AD who extended the best coach in the nation.”
pic.twitter.com/BWn2ihYcwQ
— Alaina Morris (@alainammorris) November 30, 2025
Lee hired Connecticut assistant coach Ralph in April 2021 to take over a proud program on a seven-year NCAA drought — a far cry from a stretch of 25 bids in 26 years that included the 1993 Final Four and consecutive Elite Eight advances when Lee was a junior and senior. This team, led by National Player of the Year candidate Mikayla Blakes, is on its way to a third straight bid and the opportunity to host the first weekend for the first time since 2012.
The trifecta was complete in March 2024 when Lee hired James Madison head coach Mark Byington to take over a men’s basketball program on its own seven-year tourney drought and a 9-23 season under Jerry Stackhouse. Byington started with a surprise NCAA invitation in his debut season and is following up with a team that can do March damage.
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It’s not just that these programs are in the best shape they’ve ever been in at the same time; they’re independently chasing sustained national relevance. Sustaining anything is difficult in college athletics these days, and has been done at Vanderbilt only by baseball coach Tim Corbin.
“There’s something really special about this place, and it starts and ends with Candice Storey Lee,” Ralph said. “And chancellor (Daniel) Diermeier, of course.”
Resources and unprecedented university support of athletics, as directed by Diermeier, have made the Vanderbilt renaissance possible. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been raised to overhaul facilities and chase talent. Still, difficult leadership choices had to be made. Diermeier was available during the hires but empowered Lee to make them.
All three candidates were obvious names at the time, but Lea and Ralph hadn’t been head coaches, and Byington hadn’t done it at this level. That distinguishes these choices from those of some of Lee’s peers who have strong trifectas going — such as Texas AD Chris Del Conte, who made three power hires with Steve Sarkisian, Sean Miller and Vic Schaefer; or Illinois AD Josh Whitman, who was able to land proven football winner Bret Bielema to go with hoops hires Brad Underwood and Shauna Green.
Virginia AD Carla Williams (Tony Elliott, Ryan Odom, Amaka Agugua-Hamilton) and Oregon AD Rob Mullens (Dan Lanning, Dana Altman, Kelly Graves) deserve mention, the former for injecting energy and upside and the latter for finding people to maintain long-term success. Vanderbilt stands out not just for the choices Lee made, but because she sold Vanderbilt to these candidates as well — without having much tangible to sell.
“Both sides are taking a leap of faith, right?” Lee said.
“First of all, I think like-minded people are attracted to each other, and I think that was part of the process with all three of us,” Byington said. “Candice talked about wanting this to be a new age of Vanderbilt athletics, and you could tell this wasn’t just some rehearsed thing she says from one candidate to the other. It’s the same thing when she talks to recruits — she talks to every one of our recruits who come to campus, and it’s absolutely phenomenal. Sometimes I’ll be sitting in the corner listening and I’ll get chills and be like, ‘I want to sign, I want to come here to play.’”
On Lee’s end, she said search firms helped in all three processes to sort through large pools of candidates. For whittling down, she said she relied on each sport’s administrator and her top deputies, keeping the circle “very small” until she had a stronger sense of things and needed more information.
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UConn coach Geno Auriemma was an obvious and powerful voice in expressing Ralph’s readiness for the job, while the parent of a player who played for Byington at Georgia Southern was among the voices who made an impression in his favor. Lee sought to confirm or deny initial impressions that ended up holding true in all three cases.
“Candice understands people,” Lea said. “She has incredible instincts when it comes to the human aspects of leadership.”
The situations were competitive. Lee spoke with all three on the first day she started talking to candidates for each job, and each of those days included conversations with several others.
Lea was a hot commodity at Notre Dame, and though he played football at Vandy, that didn’t guarantee anything. Lee wanted him to know he was a strong prospect separate from his playing history. Byington had talked to several programs coming off a 32-4 season at James Madison. Ralph was about to take another head coaching job in the New England area.
Working in Lee’s favor: Ralph’s husband, Tom Garrick, then women’s head coach at UMass-Lowell, had worked as an assistant coach for Melanie Balcomb at Vanderbilt when Lee was an athletic administrator under then-AD David Williams.
“I’ve never told Candice this, but I was sold on Vanderbilt after 10 minutes talking to her,” Ralph said. “My husband knew her well, and he’s like, ‘This lady is going to do something special.’ He had turned his program around in three years, I had just had a baby, and I’m like, ‘We’re just going to pick up and move our whole lives?’ He said, ‘Yes, we are doing this.’ I’m like, ‘OK, we’re doing this!’”
The things that stood out to Ralph were Lee’s specific passion about the experiences of athletes at Vandy — both had their lives changed by playing college basketball — and the absence of a negative word about former coach Stephanie White and her program.
Shea Ralph: “I absolutely love being at Vanderbilt. This is a dream come true for me, but I’m just gonna keep doing what I’ve always done, put my head down and work and make sure I honor the blessing that I have every day.” pic.twitter.com/M4xVwOtJfm
— Alaina Morris (@alainammorris) January 11, 2026
For Lee, in retrospect, all three coaches checked some of the same key boxes. Three different personalities but “all authentic and all with a strong sense of self,” she said.
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“Everyone understood what Vanderbilt was — which was not all bad, by the way — but also had this zeal and enthusiasm for what it could be,” Lee said. “I have that spark, but I’m looking for that spark in their eyes, and I saw it in all three. And then working with young people, you have to be competitive and all the things that go into winning, but I saw that joy in all three, too. Getting people to follow you, especially today, it’s an art and a science.”
And now, in Lee and these three coaches, Vanderbilt athletics has four people in their mid-to-late 40s doing visible and surgical damage to outside perceptions formed over decades. They’re doing it together, too. Byington and Ralph have shared out-of-bounds plays, among other basketball notes. Byington and Lea talk roster construction and NIL allocation. Last season, Ralph was going through a tough time and called Lee. Lee called Lea.
“Our team just wasn’t in a great place,” Ralph said. “So now I’ve got a sitting SEC football coach in my office for hours, going through my roster, going through things he had done with players in certain situations. It really helped me correct our course, and it’s a great example of why this place is successful. When it comes down to it, what Candice does is hire great human beings.”
Joe Rexrode is a senior writer for The Athletic covering college football. He previously worked at The Tennessean, Detroit Free Press and Lansing State Journal, and covered the Pyeongchang, Rio and London Olympics for USA Today. Follow Joe on Twitter @joerexrode
