Being the SEC’s first Black female athletic director brings happiness tinged with sadness
She weeps for much of the 106 even though she knows full well how to handle the frontier. Already she has attended 13 schools and lived in Kansas, Germany, Alabama, Virginia, Puerto Rico and Alabama again. “I think it exposes you to a lot of different people,” Candice Storey Lee would say 24 years on. “I think it teaches you to adapt and adjust. I really appreciate it as an adult more than I did growing up.”
She cries because change will dislodge some tears, and her parents stay quiet because they clearly know how to raise a capable human being unless you want to nitpick about that time with the stick shift. “And I started thinking: Maybe this wasn’t the right decision,” she says in the year 2020.
By 2020, you can gauge precisely how misguided it was.
At Vanderbilt, she played basketball for six years through two crushing injuries and suboptimal playing time, for a coach who would tell the Tennessean newspaper in 2002 about her leadership and “wisdom” and “people skills” and capacity to “shortcut issues, problems.” She volunteered at a clinic for abused children, tutored at a community center, read to patients at a children’s hospital, counseled in a D.A.R.E. program, volunteered at Ronald McDonald House, agreed to tour-guide kids on football Saturdays.
She got a degree. She got another degree. She got another degree. She became a university intern. She became an athletics academic adviser. She became a compliance director. She became an associate athletic director. She became the senior women’s athletic administrator, a deputy athletic director, an interim athletic director. In mid-May 2020, she became the first Black female athletic director in the history of the SEC.
Maybe she did end up fancying Vanderbilt.
“If there’s somebody who can speak negatively about her, I haven’t heard it yet,” said Jerry Stackhouse, men’s basketball coach and former NBA all-star.
“She’s a tremendous addition to our league and is going to be one of the dynamic leaders on the national stage for years to come,” said Kentucky’s Mitch Barnhart, the dean of SEC athletic directors.
“Empathy is in her bailiwick,” said Jim Foster, who coached her at Vanderbilt.
After all, she has been through some been-through: two knee replacements, two knee reconstructions, the need for a cane for two recent years as a still-young adult, gratefulness for a surgery that shooed the cane.
One other detail: She begins her role during a global pandemic with the odd American position of athletic director more unenviable than ever. She has grappled already with aplenty, including the fact that Vanderbilt had its first football game in three weeks Saturday because the coronavirus left its roster depleted with positive tests and contact-tracing necessities, so that Coach Derek Mason went on the radio before the game and said, tellingly, “I’ve got enough players right now.”
Good grief. Yet surely no university copes with this lousy sliver of history with a combo of athletic director and chancellor more charismatic than that at Vanderbilt, the only Power Five university with a Black athletic director, a Black football coach and a Black men’s basketball coach.
First, there’s the sports-historic athletic director with all the happiness and sadness therein, who says, “First, I feel a great sense of responsibility,” and: “You know, because for me, from a personal point of pride, doing a good job is important. Right? But it’s also because you hope to create opportunities for other people. There is some sadness in the sense that I know that there are some highly qualified people who just have not been afforded the opportunity that I am fortunate enough to have. And so there is certainly a sadness around that because it is certainly not a lack of talent; it’s just a lack of opportunity. And you know, I do think I feel very strongly about that and the fact that being the first of anything is a humbling thing, but it’s also important that that first leads to a second and a third and a fourth and a fifth. And that responsibility is not lost on me.”
Second, there’s the new chancellor from Berlin — the real Berlin — that rare chancellor who comprehends the power of sports partly because he can recite pretty much the entirety of West Germany’s 2-1 win over Johan Cruyff’s Netherlands in the 1974 World Cup final in Munich.
Long before Daniel Diermeier started at Vanderbilt on July 1, he alighted in this bizarre land in 1988, at LAX, with $1,000, two suitcases and a graduate fellowship at the University of Southern California, soon to partake in the oddball human ritual of joining 90,000 to watch fellow students play American football.
He witnessed Rodney Peete and Southern California win, 31-22, over Troy Aikman and UCLA in the Rose Bowl. He witnessed Notre Dame’s 27-10 win in Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum that doused USC’s national title buzz. He felt “the whole intensity and often what college sports can do for a campus and how it can bring people together.”
Obviously a dawdler, he went on to teach at Stanford and the University of Chicago, becoming provost at the latter (which jettisoned big-time football in winter 1939-40), until he joined Vanderbilt and another leader you would never have guessed last century. Now he speaks fluent American, as in: “I don’t want there to be an inch of daylight between us” — university and athletic department — “and this is very important to me because, I think, you know, when things go bad — well, one, not the only reason, is when athletic departments drift away from the university.”
Together they cope with this particular worst of times, and Diermeier said this on a video call with Lee and a reporter: “When Candice and I are thinking about this, I don’t want to speak for her, but the way I’m thinking about it is, you know, I get these emails where people say, ‘Oh, Daniel, you know, congratulations and this, but we’re so sorry.’ (Lee laughed knowingly.) And my response is, ‘No, if you have the opportunity and the privilege to lead something, an institution that you believe in, what a great time to lead.’ Now you’re making a difference. You want to be prime minister of Britain from ’40 to ’45, not from ’50 to ’55. Because that’s when you can really have an impact on an institution.”
The athletic director and former post player know the importance of knowing how to pivot. “Everybody comes to Vanderbilt having been a star in their own ring, whatever that means,” Lee said. “And then Vanderbilt will teach you to adjust, and it will make you feel vulnerable, and it will force you to grow and hopefully thrive in the circumstances and with the cards that you’re dealt. And I think that I can relate to coming to Vanderbilt thinking that things were going to turn out one way and they turned out wholly different, and I hope that that resonates with kids because part of what we’re trying to teach young people is to pivot and to be nimble but to take advantage of this opportunity to transform yourself.”
So way back then, her parents hugged her goodbye. She met a roommate who would become a chum. She walked the campus. Early on, as she would tell it six years later at a basketball banquet, she heard some sound near a tree and just had to know the source, lowering her head toward the ground only to have the sprinklers rage. “Pure Candice,” Foster said of the story, adding, “Her curiosity is still part of her.”
She reeled at 4:30 a.m. alarms and 6 a.m. practices. She called home complaining and heard her parents say the proverbial “It’s going to be hard, but anything worth doing is hard. If somebody hurts you, you call us. If there’s a catastrophe, you tell us. But the coach yelling at you or getting up early in the morning, that doesn’t count [as a catastrophe].” They sent her handwritten cards of encouragement.
But “her personality, she was a leader,” Foster said. “She would initiate — a lot of kids are reluctant to at that age. She wasn’t reluctant. She assumed the responsibility.” Five and a half bumpy years on, future WNBA player Chantelle Anderson would tell Maurice Patton of the Tennessean: “Recruiting Candice may have been the best thing Coach Foster could have done for me, and he didn’t even know it. She keeps me sane — both game-wise and in life situations.”
That sounds rather like an athletic director, visible but in the near-background, striving to shortcut problems. Her meetings, Stackhouse said, are “kind of concise, organized. We know what we’re there for.” And “at the same time, she’s like a sister to me. I can have candid conversations when it comes to me and my family.”
Her background supplied a layered insight, Foster said: “You realize the value of the trainer. You realize the value of the strength and conditioning people. You understand your teammates.” He said, “She didn’t let many opportunities go by that she didn’t walk out a smarter person, a more well-rounded person.”
Well, there was that time she walked out of the first car her parents bought her. In their house of early wake-ups and promptly made beds, her father approached the teaching of how to drive a stick shift with “a military briefing,” she said, with “diagrams” and “color-coordinated pictures.” He then seethed from the passenger seat when she sputtered as her mother stood in the yard resisting laughter. “That may be the only time my dad was disappointed in me,” she said, yet by the next morning, he had traded for an automatic.
A long way down the road from that road and the weepy road, she’s a pandemic-time athletic director who knows the value of struggle in her bones and, of course, ligaments. “Before the pandemic, I was still on a cane,” she said. “And now I’m walking unassisted, and I’m telling you, I’m so grateful for that. Right?”
