Coach K and Dr. White on Duke, improving Cameron, the Duke experience & more
On this week’s Coach K Show, the Duke Head Coach chatted with Duke’s VP and Director of Athletics Kevin White. Dr. White, previously the AD at Notre Dame, Arizona State, Tulane, and Maine, is in his second year leading the athletics department at Duke…
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Coach K: What was your vision coming in of Duke Basketball and football?
KW: I was never as excited professionally as I was when I was invited to come to Duke. I have been doing this a long time, three decades. The opportunity to come to this program at this particular time in history for Duke and its athletic program was really special. It wasn’t lost on me. To be frank, I had the opportunity to work with the very best coach who has ever coached in any sport. That for me, if you do what I do for a living, is very exciting. I’ve learned a ton from you in the last 19 months and I’ve learned a ton from everybody at this amazing place. This is a very special place here at Duke. There are a lot of people who are the very best in their field and I am talking to one right now. Whether it’s Tallman Trask, the deans on campus, my dean at the Fuqua School of Business where I teach in Blair Sheppard… It’s an opportunity to come to a place and be surrounded by superstars.
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Coach K: Kevin, when you first came, there had to be a vision you had based on limited knowledge of Duke University. Now that you have been here 19 months, is that vision the same, better? Where are we at with your vision for Duke Athletics and how do you integrate it with what our university is doing?
KW: You know Mike I would say there is some of both probably. I did have a pretty good sense of Duke in that I was at a similar institution in South Bend (Notre Dame) in a lot of ways. But Duke is top 10 in the U.S. News & World Report, Top 13 best school in the world. Duke is an incredible institution, a powerful place. I guess I knew all of that. I would say the collegiality with the senior administration and the folks on campus — That has really surprised me.
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Coach K: Yeah, it’s a good team.
KW: It’ s a great team. People work here in earnest on this campus.
Coach K: They love being here.
KW: They love being here, and they work in earnest and they want to make Duke bigger, faster, and stronger. That’s exciting if you do what I endeavor to do for a living.
Coach K: You were hired not just to be our director of athletics, you were hired to be the Vice President of this university. What does that mean and how does that help you with your job?
KW: First and foremost that was an honor to be extended that opportunity particularly at a place like Duke. With President Brodhead, it has been really great. He has invited me to sit at the table where a lot of the big decisions are made.
Coach K: That helps us so much to have our boss sitting with the other bosses to integrate what we are doing with everyone else.
KW: It puts me in a position to interpret athletics to the rest of the academy, to the university and maybe interpret the rest of the university back to athletics — Not just all our coaches and support staff but our whole fan base and alumni and everyone else that has an insatiable interest in the Blue Devil program. It just gives me that opportunity to be that conduit and I love that role.
Coach K: Over the course of your first 19 months, you have reached out to every sport and tried to meet personally not just with the coaches of the teams but also the captains to get to know the players.
KW: I must have been here four or five months and I wasn’t learning enough about Duke fast enough. I thought I needed to create a mechanism so I invited the 67 captains in over the course of last year, and I am in the process of doing the same thing this year. I am going to do this every year from this point on, and I can’t believe I didn’t think of it earlier in my career. To have a 30-40 minute conversation about all things Duke, I’ve learned an awful lot. I’ve learned where we’ve been a little weak, where we have a chance to do things a little better, where we’ve been pretty good and I can underscore and support some of those. The young people we have in this program, as you know, are the best and the brightest.
Coach K: They are the reason we are here.
KW: And when you sit down and ask them, they are going to respond in a way that is really profoundly important and meaningful. These young people are bionic. They are the best academically, they are the best athletically. They compete at the highest level, they are involved in service work, they are doing everything. So when they come in to download to you their Duke experience, it’s worth it’s weight in gold.
Coach K: You have always been involved on a national stage with committees. You were the president of the national athletic directors association. You touch other people and learn about best practices and you know what’s going on. You keep us current in that regard.
KW: I hope I do, Mike. It’s been fun. You and I have had, in own way, a great relationship with the late Myles Brand. I miss Myles. Myles was not only a really good colleague and a terrific NCAA president, perhaps the very best NCAA president we’ve ever had, but a guy that was really bright and innovative. He was a great listener. I would get invited down the street from South Bend to Indianapolis to spend time in conversation with Myles when no one was around. I learned more from Myles than I could ever share with anybody.
Coach K: He was a great leader. He knew you weren’t going to get all the information at a committee meeting when people are around the table. Sometimes you have to go around a different table where it is just the two of you… In going forward, there’s a great initiative going on here with the Bostock group. We have a really developing football program with a great guy, a great coach. And we have a men’s basketball program where we’ve been able to compete at the highest level for the past couple decades. Both need work. Would you just explain what you want to get done through the Bostock group.
KW: Sure, I guess just to define the Bostock group really quickly, it is nine or 10 individuals who have come together and subscribed to a vision to not only protect but also enhance Cameron Indoor and Wallace Wade. Those are our revenue-generating venues so to speak. Men’s basketball has been really good to Duke and I should underscore that, for three decades by the way. And has been really good financially to Duke Athletics. It has been the financial driver of Duke Athletics. So we not only have to sustain that, but hopefully enhance that. On the other side of the ledger, football has been a non-producer financially for us for a long, long time. For many, many decades. We’ve got to put together a football business that is vibrant and puts us in a competitive position with ACC programs and the national programs that we compete against. We are not going to be able to do that unless we continue to find ways to build our football business. You can tie both of those levels of effort back to facility work. We are talking about raising a sizable amount of resource in a rather challenging economic time to protect if not enhance Cameron Indoor, and also resuscitate and/or re-invent Wallace Wade. We’ve got a lot of work to do. Before we do a lot of other initiatives around all of our other sports, and they are all important, we’ve really got to do some things with our revenue generators. So, the Bostock group exists to help us protect and enhance revenue generation that will help everything across Duke Athletics.
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Coach K: You arrived here at a tough economic time. I thought what you did — making sure there were no sports cut, making sure there wasn’t a blanket number of people let go — you stayed true to the team that was here and to the sports that were here. Now money-wise, how does the university look at us and where are we?
KW: Having an opportunity to sit at the table like we talked about earlier, I think President Brodhead and Provost Peter Lange and others see intercollegiate athletics as a vital part of the institution. I think we are viewed as being really good stewards of our resources and participating in the downturn not unlike the rest of the institution. We’ve done some things around the margins while trying not to negatively impact the experience of the student-athlete. We’ve been able to avoid wholesale changes at this point and all that’s good. I’ll tell you, a lot of that is because of the benefactions we enjoy from the Duke faithful, the Iron Dukes have been terrific. All the funding that has come through there which is in excess of $12 million a year has stayed strong. Men’s basketball income has been really good to us for a long time and continues to be strong. Football income is continuing to bubble up and become a little bit better. The philanthropic support around this program historically, all the way back to my good friend Tom Butters, has been the key to this thing. I think we are in a really good position. To some degree, we are in an enviable position in regard to our peers.
Coach K: I think we are too.
KW: We are hanging in there, but we are fighting and punching and scratching every day and there’s a lot of work to be done. But we’ve got a lot of people who are up to the challenge.
Coach K: One of my dreams for Duke Athletics is to at some time have every scholarship endowed. That’s one of my goals for my basketball program, I think we have 11 scholarships endowed now. What a good thing that would be.
KW: That would be a great thing Mike and that’s an ideal we need to work towards to. There are so many people that love Duke.
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Coach K: I think what happens is if I endowed a scholarship and I played here and I could see that young man or that young women, it would rejuvenate me to bring back the memories. There’s a great expression. Coach Knight had a great impact on me. I can never pay him back, but I can pay forward — So, teaching Wojo and Chris Collins and Johnny Dawkins. I would like to see us have people who have played sports here say, “let’s pay forward.” Let’s make sure whatever I had that gave me a pretty darn good life could be given to somebody else. I’d love to always be a part of trying to do that here at Duke for all the sports. It would be a heck of a thing.
KW: I would say this Mike. In my short time here it is abundantly clear to me and everybody else here. You’ve put us on the map, you’ve done so many wonderful things. You’re oftentimes uncomfortable hearing when I refer to you as the iconic coach but you are the iconic coach in my mind.
Coach K: You should have told that to the officials last week at a few of our games!
KW: I think it was reverse discrimination, that’s what you told me last night and I think you are right. But anyway, you are not only the basketball coach and you’ve been such a wonderful ambassador of Duke, but boy you’re involved and you’ve been involved all these years in keeping all the other sports growing. You’ve got a huge interest in the entire athletics department and I can tell you from first-hand experience that isn’t the case at a lot of places. That’s really refreshing and also inspirational. You see things beyond your immediate domain and that’s great for Duke and it’s great for Duke Athletics.
Coach K: Well, I appreciate it. I’ve really enjoyed it. This is how we talk all the time, except his language was a lot better and he was much more courteous today than he usually is. No, I am only kidding. Thanks and I hope you’ve enjoyed it.
Coach K and Dr. White at last year’s basketball banquet
