Candice Storey Lee believes Vanderbilt’s new facility will make “journey” to success worth it

Nashville–This time last year Vanderbilt had a different feel about it, so did the feeling around the job that Vanderbilt Athletic Director Candice Storey Lee was doing. 

At that point Vanderbilt was coming off of a 2-10 football season in which it lost every conference game by 15 points or more and was in the midst of a men’s basketball season that would ultimately end with less than 10 wins and a “mutual parting of ways” between the program and then head coach Jerry Stackhouse. 

A year later the department’s 2024 rèsumè includes a bowl-eligible season, a football win over No. 1 Alabama, a 15-4 start in men’s basketball and a basketball win over No. 6 Tennessee. It’s also bolstered the overall health of its men’s and women’s basketball programs with the completion of a “state of the art” practice facility. 

That facility took years of construction, as have Vanderbilt’s programs. Storey Lee believes each step of the build came as a lesson. 

“We’ve been on a journey for awhile,” Storey Lee said on Friday. “Last year was a great opportunity to grow and to learn. There’s no parts that have been easy. Even the most challenging times have been rewarding. I didn’t sign up for easy. I do feel that we have and we are moving in the direction to have everything that we need to compete at the highest level.”

A year ago today a statement like that would’ve been laughed off as a spin job from Vanderbilt’s higher ups. Like ‘of course she has to say that’, right? 

Now it feels as if Storey Lee has evidence to back up her claim. She believes she got to that point as a result of what her department experienced a year ago. 

“You can’t get to this year without last year,” Storey Lee said. “There’s no regrets. It’s just continuous learning.”

The learning curve for Vanderbilt has historically come slowly in regards to its facilities, but its multi-year process is finally complete. As Vanderbilt’s coaches, which Storey Lee says are the “right” ones, look around at what’s been built next to Memorial Gymnasium believe the process was worth it. 

“I think it’s the best facility in the country,” Vanderbilt women’s basketball coach Shea Ralph said. “This gives us the opportunity to go out and recruit the best student athletes in the country.”

Sustainability in recruiting–and results for that matter–has often been hard to come by around these parts. Ralph’s program hadn’t made the NCAA Tournament since 2014 before making it as a first-four team last season and Byington’s hasn’t made it since the 2016-2017 season. 

The hope around Vanderbilt’s newly-built Huber Center is that it could impact winning for an extended period of time. That comes with the reality that facilities have had to take on a different role in the current landscape of college athletics. They’re still valuable, but Byington–like many others–has shifted his mindset elsewhere.

“If you said what’ No. 1 and what’s No.2? NIL is No. 1,” Byington said. “You need everything, if you’ve got top-notch facilities already then you pour into NIL. We were just lacking in a training facility.”

The days of Byington and Ralph’s teams having to practice in an unbearably warm gym in the summertime, the AC in Byington’s offense going out and the teams having to plan their practice schedules around each other are over. That doesn’t mean things are neccessarily holly and jolly on West End.

It does mean that Vanderbilt has caught up in some ways, though. At the very least it sends a message.

“I just think the signal that it sends is so important,” Storey Lee said. “It can be hard to quantify, but the signaling and the credibility that come with showing you have made an investment [are important] that backs up [what you’re saying]. You can have the aspirations, but you have to have the resources that support the aspirations and I think this clearly signals that.”