Grant Leiendecker remembers the exact moment the magnitude of it all sank in.
It was 2010. Butler had just beaten Kansas State in Salt Lake City to punch its ticket to the Final Four, and as the team celebrated in the locker room, the players were just beginning to process what it all meant — not just what they'd accomplished, but where they were headed.
"When we won that game in Salt Lake City to clinch our berth in the Final Four, it kind of hit us all that, 'Wow, we're in the Final Four, but we're in the Final Four in Indianapolis, in our home,'" Leiendecker recalled. "So that was really special and definitely made it even cooler for us."
Sixteen years later, the NCAA Men's Final Four is coming back to Indianapolis. The city also hosted in 2015 and 2021, but this week it also is hosting the Division II and III men's basketball finals and the NIT semifinals and finals. Leiendecker — now the vice president and director of athletics at Butler — has helped put the historic week together from the other side.
* * *
Growing up, Leiendecker wanted to be a dentist. He laughs now at how different his life might have looked.
A "quarter-life" crisis while playing at Butler shifted that path toward staying in college athletics, a decision that eventually would bring him back home. He returned to his alma mater in August 2023 as associate vice president of athletics and was named director of athletics following a national search in January 2024. He officially assumed the role that May after Barry Collier retired.
"The day that I kind of decided that this is the career path I wanted to pursue, in the back of my mind the goal for me was always to come home and have a chance to work at Butler in any capacity, let alone to be the athletic director," Leiendecker said. "It really is a dream job for me."
His mentor in making the transition from the court to the office? Brad Stevens, then the head coach at Butler who is now president of basketball operations for the Boston Celtics.
"He encouraged me to learn more about the administrative side," Leiendecker said. "I knew that I had to find a way to stay around sport and stay around this opportunity to give that same experience back to the next generation."
Stevens pointed him toward Beth Goetz, then Butler's senior woman administrator and now the athletics director at Iowa. Goetz gave Leiendecker an internship and pushed him toward the NCAA Postgraduate Internship Program. Doors opened from there.
"The rest," he said, "is history."
* * *
Leiendecker's road back to Butler took him through several key stops in college athletics. After graduating in 2011 with a finance degree, he interned with the NCAA national office in Indianapolis.
Graduate school and a fundraising role at North Carolina followed, then a move to Marquette, where he continued to grow as an administrator. Along the way, he gained a broader view of how different athletics departments work and what kind of leader he wanted to become.
"Those different athletic department experiences, how they operate, where you invest, how you support your student-athletes, are unique and different. Getting that different lens and kind of shaping who I want to be as a leader, how I want to approach things, building different relationships on campus and building those partnerships were different in both (North Carolina and Marquette)," he said. "So it was very, very helpful and informative to me as I grew as a leader and administrator. Ultimately it helped me get to where I am now."
While at Marquette, Leiendecker got what he called one of the coolest calls of his life, when Butler President James Danko and Collier asked whether he was ready to come home to serve in a senior leadership role. Less than a year later, Leiendecker was named Butler's next athletics director. He succeeded Collier, who coached Butler basketball from 1989 to 2000 before returning to lead the department as athletics director from 2006-24. Collier's influence on Leiendecker remains strong.
"He's so steady in his leadership, very convicted and very values-based," Leiendecker said of Collier. "I'm really grateful for his leadership and mentorship and what he's done for Butler, and now just trying to carry that torch forward and continue to build on what he's already put in place."
The Butler Way that Collier helped define — high character, relentless work ethic, doing things with integrity — isn't just a slogan at Butler. It's the operating system. Leiendecker absorbed it as a player. He's now charged with protecting and advancing it as the person running the whole department against the backdrop of an ever-changing collegiate athletics landscape.
"It's a strong work ethic, high integrity, doing things in a first-class way, being very relational," Leiendecker said of the culture he's building. "Coming to work every single day with the goal of getting 1% better every time we show up. We have to continue to kind of modernize with where college athletics is and is going, but we don't need to sacrifice our values and our culture in order to achieve those things."
At the center of that, Leiendecker said, is the power of relationships. Looking back on his own time at Butler, he credits the people around him — coaches, teammates and staff — with shaping who he became and inspiring him to help create that same experience for the next generation.
That vision has already started to take shape in tangible ways.
Less than a year into the job, Leiendecker secured the largest single gift in Butler athletics history: a $12 million donation from an alum and trustee to support women's athletics and establish the Rebecca Graham Paul '70, MS '75 Athletics Leadership Academy Endowed Fund for student-athletes. It was the second-largest gift in university history.
More recently, he hired former Butler teammate and NBA assistant coach Ronald Nored as men's basketball head coach, a move that reflects his vision for sustaining Butler's culture in a changing environment.
* * *
Now comes this spring and, for Leiendecker, an experience unlike anything that came before it.
Indianapolis is hosting the Men's Final Four at Lucas Oil Stadium, the Division II and Division III men's basketball championships and the National Invitation Tournament finals at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, and the NIT semifinals at Hinkle Fieldhouse, one of college basketball's most hallowed venues and Butler's home court since 1928.
Never before has one city hosted all those championships at once. Leiendecker, as part of the local organizing committee, has been on the inside of planning it all.
"I'm biased," he said, "but I think Indianapolis is the best host city for the Final Four."
He would know. The Fort Wayne, Indiana, native has experienced it three different ways now.
"I've experienced it as a fan," he said. "I've experienced it as a student-athlete. Now I'm experiencing it as an administrator and helping to kind of put it all together."
That student-athlete experience in 2010 remains something he holds close. Even before that run, Butler felt it had something special. Leiendecker said the Bulldogs grew closer and gained confidence during a preseason trip to Italy, where they tested themselves against professional teams.
Still, the Butler team he was on was a Horizon League program that had no business, on paper, doing what it did — taking down Syracuse, Kansas State and Michigan State to reach the national championship and then pushing Duke to the final possession in the championship game before falling 61-59.
The Bulldogs did it again the following year without Gordon Hayward, who had been drafted by the Utah Jazz. Butler won the Horizon League tournament to secure its bid and went back to the title game as a No. 8 seed, losing to UConn 53-41.
"Every single time we laced it up, we believed we were going to win," Leiendecker said. "We believed once we're in, we can beat any team in the country on any given night."
* * *
For all the business of running a 20-sport Division I athletics department — the fundraising; the staff management; the name, image and likeness and Transfer Portal issues; the 500-plus student-athletes — Leiendecker keeps coming back to the same thing when asked what drives him.
"It's the people. Butler is a unique place in that we're a small institution relative to the conference (Big East) and the division that we compete in. Being able to compete at the highest level of Division I is really unique and special, but it's really the people that make it, the people really invest and support athletics," he said. "They care about each other. They care about your growth and development, and it's just a unique place."
He wants the next generation of Butler student-athletes to be able to say the same thing. That's the Butler Way, as he sees it — not just a framework for competing but a framework for living. It's the thing he credits for shaping him, the thing he absorbed from Collier and Stevens and teammates like Nored, and the thing he's now responsible for passing forward.
"Our goal is to make sure that they're well equipped for whatever comes next for them," he said, "and that they have a great time and great memories along the way."
This weekend, Indianapolis will be the center of the college basketball universe. The confetti will fall at Lucas Oil Stadium. The nets will come down at Gainbridge Fieldhouse. For Leiendecker, it will be another chance to see the kind of student-athlete experience that helped shape his own life. Sixteen years after helping take Butler to the Final Four, he's seeing it from the other side. This time, he's not chasing the moment. He's helping build it.
