At 9 a.m. on a Friday in late June, when most people were winding down for the long July 4 holiday weekend, Heather Lyke was locked in, like always.
On the second floor of Petersen Events Center, she bounced between tasks in the University of Pittsburgh’s athletic office wearing a blue shirt adorned with the words “red, white and boom,” a holiday-themed workout the athletic department hosted earlier that morning. After stopping by to show her support, Lyke hoped to tie up a few loose ends before she, too, could enjoy some summer relaxation.
Since she was hired as Pitt’s athletic director in 2017, Lyke’s presence has been felt. In the six years prior to her arrival, Pitt’s 19 athletic teams had captured just one conference title — dual wrestling in 2014. But under her guidance, the Panthers have won six Atlantic Coast Conference team championships. Players and coaches often get credit for wins, but many believe Pitt’s recent success starts at the top.
“She came in and made an impact right away,” Steelers quarterback and former Pitt All-American Kenny Pickett said. “I felt the passion that she had, and all the players felt the passion that she had for the university and the kind of changes that she wanted to make. And I think if you look at from the day she got to Pitt and where the football program and the entire athletic body is now, it’s pretty unbelievable what she’s done.”
Last spring, the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics honored Lyke as one of its 2023 Cushman & Wakefield AD of the Year Award recipients. She additionally was a finalist for the Sports Business Journal Athletic Director of the Year.
Inside her office are shelves and display cases filled with such mementoes from throughout her career. But one thing that is missing is a national championship trophy, something the uber-competitive 52-year-old is motivated to have a team win under her watch.
Many of Lyke’s peers say she demands the best from herself and those around her. With a soon to be expiring contract and a polished resume, could her days in Pittsburgh be numbered? Her name comes up whenever a major university needs an athletic director.
More and more each day, people throughout the country are learning the name Heather Lyke.
‘The little things matter’
Tucked away in Lyke’s office is a box containing thousands of tiny rubber pellets that together encapsulate her leadership abilities.
During her first week as athletic director at Eastern Michigan University, her previous job, she noticed the football stadium’s aging playing surface.
Lyke said she was determined to make a difference — and a splash. To portray the industrial-based culture of Ypsilanti, Mich., Lyke and football coach Chris Creighton decided to replace the football field’s old surface with gray athletic turf.
“We wanted fans to feel like they were in a factory,” she said in an interview with the Post-Gazette. “Like the game was being played on concrete or in a parking lot. That was something people from that area would connect with and embrace.”
Examining the samples, Lyke liked the field color but couldn’t get past a minor detail: Sitting atop the artificial turf were black rubber pellets that, in her eyes, took away from the surface’s full potential.
“I wanted the right color in-fill in the turf,” she explained. “The black didn’t look good.”
Lyke was told by the turf company that the black filler was the only known option — but that didn’t stop her.
“Details matter. The little things matter. You have to have pride in what you do,” she said.
The following season, Eastern Michigan played football on gray field turf coated with similar-colored rubber pellets. While Lyke would make other big decisions during her four years in Ypsilanti, that box of gray field turf is special to her. For the first time in her career, she had the power to create change.
Those close to Lyke say her drive and attention to detail have been present her entire life. Peers and coaches at GlenOak High School in Canton, Ohio, referred to her as a model student-athlete, someone who, as one said, was always “about her business.”
Following four years at the University of Michigan, where she was a member of the school’s softball team, Lyke earned a law degree at the University of Akron. It was there that she discovered her future would be in sports — she landed an internship with the NCAA.
Then she worked in the compliance office at the University of Cincinnati. In 1998, at the age of 28, Lyke was hired to run the compliance office at Ohio State University.
“The need for a really strong-willed, independently minded person in compliance is great at Ohio State,” said former OSU athletic director Andy Geiger, who hired Lyke. “The fan interest there, the culture, is phenomenally supportive, and occasionally too much so. It was a real priority to put a very capable person in compliance, and she was very clearly capable of doing it.”
Lyke worked at Ohio State for 15 years, with new titles and more responsibilities. Encouraged by current OSU athletic director Gene Smith, who replaced Geiger in 2005, Lyke took the next step, becoming Eastern Michigan’s athletic director in 2013.
In addition to turning Eastern Michigan’s football field into “the factory,” she switched the school’s athletic logo from an eagle to a large block “E.” She generated a 51% growth in revenue during her four years there, and she established a winning culture, overseeing 17 total Mid-American Conference championships.
“She was willing to take that risk,” Creighton, the football coach, said of Lyke. “She cared about the athletic programs as much as the head coaches did. She was equally invested. Her work here, her ingenuity, her creativity and leadership are still on display here. Her legacy at Eastern Michigan speaks for itself.”
In 2017, Lyke took another risk, this one at a bigger university that competed at a higher level. She found that the challenges at Pitt were greater than at Eastern Michigan, but so were the rewards.
Cleaning up ‘a mess’
Outside of her office in Petersen Events Center sits a reminder of the work that still needs to be done.
“Those should be all over campus, and they’re just not,” Lyke said, pointing to a light post decorated in Pitt’s colors. “We’re not quite there yet, but I’m hoping with a new chancellor [Joan Gabel, who came aboard in July], we can get there.”
When she started at Pitt, light posts were the least of her concerns when it came to branding. While at Eastern Michigan she changed the color of a football field; during her first year at Pitt, her goal was to change the colors of an entire university.
Lyke recalled sitting at a table during her first ACC meeting with the league’s other athletic directors. Across from her were representatives from North Carolina and Syracuse, which boasted some of the more iconic color schemes in college sports. She sat between her counterparts from Notre Dame and Georgia Tech, in a sea of gold and navy.
She did some research on Pitt’s athletic traditions and notable moments. She determined that the color scheme most connected to the university was the traditional blue and gold “throwbacks” worn during the 1970s and 1980s.
Lyke sought help from Nike, whose experts usually needed 12 to 18 months to analyze how to improve a university’s uniforms and branding. She pushed them to get the work done in less than half that time.
The result of that work is what Pitt fans now see at any university athletic contest.
“Every detail in our uniforms has a purpose,” she said. “The cathedral stripe, because it matches the arches in the [Cathedral of Learning]. The panther head, because it matches the fountain outside the Cathedral of Learning; that’s where it drew its inspiration. The numbers with the arches in them are tied to the cathedral. I like that it has depth to it and it wasn’t just something we picked because it looked cool.”
Lyke’s next objective was to adjust the athletic department’s attitude.
“People were just really comfortable being mediocre,” Lyke said. “The thing that people kept telling me was, ‘We weren’t ready to get into the ACC,’ that we were never prepared. When I got here, we were heading into year six in the ACC, so I asked, ‘When do you think we ought to get ready?’ Because I thought it was time.”
During her first day on the job, Lyke visited Fitzgerald Field House, where she wandered down three flights of stairs and into a small office next to the wrestling room. There, sitting on an end table tucked into a corner, was Pitt’s lone ACC championship trophy.
“I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?,’” she said. “What is it doing there? No one could see it. No one even goes in there. It would be hard to find that room.”
Lyke then asked her staff if anyone knew how many ACC championships the university had won. Some knew, some didn’t. She then asked where the championship trophy was.
“And then it was crickets,” she said.
Addressing the issue with university trustees, she said she was met with silence.
“I was flabbergasted at that because there was no pride,” Lyke said. “That was the mentality I was walking into. There was no confidence or belief that we would ever be good.”
In her first two years, she replaced nine head coaches. Those who were retained received resources that they hadn’t previously enjoyed, starting with extra bodies to help create a winning culture.
“That’s what I like most about Heather,” Pitt football coach Pat Narduzzi said. “She’s like a football coach. She has a motor. She doesn’t stop moving around and trying to help.”
In addition to upgraded facilities, bigger recruiting budgets, higher salaries for assistant coaches, and more staff positions such as nutritionists, she also has let Pitt coaches know that she trusts their respective processes.
“Our relationship has grown over my five years,” said Pitt men’s basketball coach Jeff Capel, who last season was named ACC basketball coach of the year after leading the Panthers to their first NCAA tournament appearance since 2016. “It’s easy to have a good relationship when things are going well. But when things are tough and there are difficult times, which we’ve had a lot, that’s when you see who is really with you. She’s been right there with us, lockstep, since we’ve gotten here.”
‘Great expectations’
Lyke recalls a time when she’d loathe shopping at Dick’s Sporting Goods.
“I’d walk in and there would be more Penn State stuff on display than Pitt gear,” she said. “I would go in and rearrange the clothing racks. I remember thinking, ‘I hope there are no cameras in this area of the store,’ but I’m sure there were.”
She no longer experiences that stress. Pitt’s recent success in numerous sports has made its brand the strongest it has been in decades. Over the past few years, Pitt fans have been able to buy merchandise commemorating ACC championships and Final Four runs — but for Lyke, that’s not enough.
She is proud of how far Pitt has come under her leadership. Last winter, she could be seen cheering at courtside during each of the significant victories Capel’s team experienced in a turnaround season. She also was present at Final Four matches for the men’s soccer team and women’s volleyball team, taking time to acknowledge the fans who made the trips.
Last year, Pitt placed 52nd in the LEARFIELD Directors’ Cup, which measures the athletic success of each school in the country. The Panthers improved 20 spots from the 2021-22 season, and their 469 points were the most the university had ever accumulated.
But conference titles, sport-wide improvement and national semifinal runs aren’t good enough for Lyke. As her athletic department and her career continue to rise, so does the bar.
The start of a new academic year marks 47 years since Pitt last won a national title — its 1976 football team was undefeated. That’s much too long for Lyke.
She is in the midst of perhaps the most ambitious project of her career, Pitt’s Victory Heights campaign. It’s a $240 million effort to build an athletics complex that will include a 3,000-seat arena for volleyball, gymnastics and wrestling, and a performance center for strength and conditioning, sports medicine, nutrition, and mental well-being needs for 16 of Pitt's 19 sports.
Getting the university an outdoor track and helping the Panthers reach the College Football Playoff are other boxes she hopes to check off.
But Lyke’s continued guidance isn’t a guarantee for Pitt moving forward. Her contract expires in two years, and her work at Pitt has made her an attractive candidate for the nation’s top college athletic departments.
This past summer, numerous national outlets listed Lyke as a candidate for the athletic director opening at the University of Southern California, a job that eventually went to Jennifer Cohen, who previously had been athletic director at the University of Washington. But another opening is coming soon, one that has plenty of ties to Lyke: Earlier this month, her mentor Gene Smith announced that he will retire as Ohio State AD in June 2024.
She detests any discussion about her future. When the Post-Gazette brought up the possibility of her leaving during the last of many interviews for this story, the normally relaxed and confident Lyke quickly became reserved.
“You always have to look at opportunities,” she said. “I’m not going to dismiss that. That’s reality. I want to be at a place that has great expectations, and I want to be at a place that does it the right way.”
She continued, “I know we can build a quality team here. I love my staff. I love the coaches I get to work with here. As long as we can put our coaches in a position to compete for ACC and national championships, this is where I want to be.
“That’s the fun of it. You want to go compete for the best, against the best. I think what has been fun here is doing things that people don’t think are possible, doing things that haven’t been done before and seeing people’s reaction. Winning an ACC football championship, that hadn’t been done here. Seeing things that haven’t been done is pretty rewarding because you have to overcome some things, whereas at other schools who have already won championships, you’re just winning another one. How special is winning another championship going to feel?”
With a new chancellor in office and her contract up in two years, Lyke will find out in the near future how committed Pitt is toward her championship standard.
An offer from Ohio State is possible, but would that draw her away from her current home?
“I know Heather well enough to know that her head won’t be turned,” said Geiger, the former Ohio State athletic director.
“She’s a Pitt Panther. She’s got a lot invested in what’s happening in Pittsburgh. If Ohio State comes calling, I’m sure she’d listen, but I don’t know if it’s a slam dunk that she’d just leave Pitt. The Ohio State job is an amazing job, and she might be interested, but she will work right up to the last minute for Pitt.”
Noah Hiles: nhiles@post-gazette.com and Twitter @_NoahHiles
First Published: August 27, 2023, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: August 27, 2023, 5:02 p.m.
