Courtesy of Yale Athletics

On Tuesday, Yale Athletics announced that Director of Athletics Vicky Chun’s contract has been extended through June 30, 2026.

Chun, whose hire was announced in February 2018, started working for the University in July of that year. Previously, she served as vice president and director of athletics at Colgate University. In this role, she was the first Asian American woman to be the athletic director of an NCAA Division I program. At Yale, Chun is the first woman and Asian American to serve in the position.

“I am thankful for the support I have received from President Salovey and the Yale leadership,” Chun said in the Yale Athletics press release announcing her contract extension. “We will continue to build upon the strong foundation of academic and athletic excellence for our 900 student-athletes. Yale is a very special place, and it’s an honor to be a part of a community that produces world leaders.”

Chun is the only person in NCAA Division I athletic history to be player of the year and subsequently coach of the year in the same conference. She won championships in both roles for volleyball as a student-athlete and then head coach at Colgate, where she received a bachelor’s degree in 1991 and then served as head coach of the volleyball program from 1994 to 1997.

“With Vicky’s steady guidance, Yale’s athletic programs have sustained superior academic performance over the past few years, and we are currently tied for best in the country for graduation success rate,” Salovey wrote in the release. “At the same time, our student-athletes have given us plenty of other reasons to celebrate, with national championships, conference titles, and postseason wins. Of course, there have also been glorious historic victories like the Yale over Harvard win at the Yale Bowl in 2019, also known as the revenge of the Yale–Harvard tie of 1968.”

Over the past three years, the announcement noted that facility restorations have taken place at the Gales Ferry Boathouse, the newly-renamed George H.W. Bush Field and Coxe Cage. Additionally, a field house near Reese Stadium, a facility for Yale’s soccer and lacrosse programs, is nearing completion and will include an athletic medicine and sports performance space, a team center, locker rooms and offices.

Newly appointed Student-Athlete Advisory Council President and women’s tennis player Chelsea Kung ’23 expressed her support for Chun’s contract extension.

“Having Vicky Chun as our Athletic Director has been huge for Yale Athletics as a whole,” Kung said.  

“As an Asian American woman, seeing AD Chun prosper amongst a heavily male dominated industry is inspiring to me — as well as so many others. I look forward to seeing the results of her ongoing efforts towards making Yale Athletics and the overall student-athlete experience even more successful than ever before.”

Since becoming Yale’s athletic director in summer 2018, Chun has filled head coaching positions for five programs. She hired women’s hockey head coach Mark Bolding from Norwich University in April 2019, promoted fencing head coach Haibin Wang from his previous role as associate head coach in May 2019, brought on women’s golf head coach Lauren Harling from Indiana in June 2019 and hired men’s tennis head coach Chris Drake from Dartmouth in June 2019.

Chun’s first hire was former women’s soccer head coach Brendan Faherty, who left Yale amid allegations of misconduct in November 2019 after being hired in December 2018. She then promoted Sarah Martinez to the role of women’s soccer head coach in December 2019, less than a year after Martinez joined Yale as the program’s assistant coach.

The athletic director position at Yale is named after Chun’s predecessor, Tom Beckett, who retired in June 2018 after 24 years on the job.

James Richardson contributed reporting.

EUGENIO GARZA GARCíA
Eugenio Garza García covers baseball, golf and athletic phasing. Originally from Monterrey, Mexico, he is a sophomore in Branford College majoring in Economics and English.