White family’s state of unity
Despite moves, Florida roots, close bonds keep UCF AD, White family together
Despite multiple moves, their Florida roots and close bonds keep UCF AD Danny White’s exceptionally successful family together.
There wasn’t much room inside the 1972 light blue Volkswagen bug, so Kevin and Jane White made the difficult decision to sell their brand-new wedding presents. It was a sacrifice that would come in handy as the newlyweds hit the road, making the nearly 1,500mile trek from Traverse City, Mich., to Florida.
It was the first of many moves they would make, first as a couple and then eventually as parents of five children.
This decision to move, however, wasn’t about career choices. It was one made out of necessity.
Emerson White, a former syndicated sports columnist in Long Island, N.Y., was terminally ill with cancer and living in the Gulf Coast town of New Port Richey. The couple moved to the small town to be closer to Kevin’s father. Both quickly began looking for jobs, with Jane landing a position as a teacher at Gulf High, where she learned the school was in need of a junior varsity football coach. Luckily, she knew the perfect person for the job.
And with that, Kevin White’s career in athletics began, as did a nearly lifelong connection to the state of Florida. He passed both bonds onto his three sons, UCF athletics director Danny White, FAU athletics director Brian White and UF men’s basketball coach Mike White.
Kevin and Jane White
Mike Aresco recalls the time he and his wife traveled to Ireland with their good friends, Kevin and Jane White, in 2006.
Kevin, athletics director at Notre Dame at the time, had invited a group of colleagues and friends along for an annual getaway to the Emerald Isle. The future American Athletic Conference commissioner couldn’t pass up the opportunity to tag along.
“We had a great time,” Aresco said.
The early wake-up calls to attend morning mass were less than ideal for a vacation trip.
“It’s Notre Dame; you have to have a mass every day,” Aresco recalled of the service performed each day in the hotel. “They made me do a reading one day and I had to pronounce Nebuchadnezzar, but I got through it.”
During the trip, Aresco witnessed firsthand the far-reaching impact that Kevin and his family have had on the college landscape.
“I call them the first family of college athletics,” he said. Aresco isn’t alone. “Everybody that knows Kevin knows that he’s a teacher. He’s taught his children well. He’s taught his coaches well. He’s taught his staff well,” Duke football coach David Cutcliffe said of the man who has been his boss since they both arrived at the school in 2008. “If you look at the tree, including sons and daughters, it may be the greatest tree in all of athletics.”
Kevin White, now 67, brushes off any suggestion he planned his family’s success.
“My life has been so happenstance. It’s just crazy,” said White, who is set to begin his 10th year in charge of the athletic programs at Duke.
White’s career trajectory has taken him to stops at Maine, Tulane, Arizona State, Notre Dame and Duke. Along the way, he and his wife have raised a family of five children: Brian, Danny, Mike, Mariah and Maureen and welcomed 13 grandchildren into the fold.
“I think our family became resilient and they really connected with each other because for a lot of those transitory times, all they had was each other,” Kevin White said while reflecting on the impact many of his career moves had on his family. “I also believe they all learned how to create relationships at a higher level. Create and sustain relationships.
“The relocation business really taught them how to maintain a
relationship.”
Danny said it united the White children.
“I’m really close with my siblings,” he said. “We typically moved going into a summer so you have all summer and you’re a fifth-grader and you don’t know anybody in this town, so you’re hanging out with your brothers and sisters. “It’s just nature.” Jane agreed. “When one of them would make a friend, they would share the friend,” she said. “They could all share the trials of all of these things and it made them all so much more social because they realized when they moved to a new place that it wasn’t the end of the world. They would just make new friends.”
Those bonds are just as strong today as they were growing up.
“We’re all FaceTime addicts. We FaceTime each other about five times a day,” Mariah (White) Chappell explained. “I know my brothers are on the phone with each other like an hour a day. So I think we do all communicate a ton because I think it’s because we’ve all moved around.”
Danny White
Mention Danny White’s name to Mike Brey and the Notre Dame men’s basketball coach chuckles.
“The most injured walk-on in the history of our program,” Brey said with a laugh. “He was injured all the time.”
While his hoops career may not have gone as he would have preferred, Danny White would carry that competitive nature with him throughout his career, eventually landing in Orlando as the athletics director at UCF.
Since taking over the job in 2015, White has overseen record-setting fundraising by his department to the tune of $13.4 million in 2017. Building relationships with boosters and donors is something the 38-year-old White picked up from watching his father.
“I saw as a kid because we would go on vacations with some of our donors and their families and he would build genuine real friendships and I do the same thing,” Danny said. “It makes what we do more fun and it’s the only real way to do it.
“I like being a real person and I enjoy getting to know other people who are passionate about whatever university you’re working at.”
The fruit of his labor can be seen looking out the window of his temporary office in the Roth Tower at Spectrum Stadium. Just below construction continues on the new 38,000-square-foot Roth Athletics Center, which will house the athletics department. It’s one of several ongoing projects White has started since his arrival.
Kevin White is the first to admit his children have surpassed him in their fundraising abilities.
“They’re far better than I am,” he said with a smile.
Kevin never pushed any of his children to follow in his footsteps.
“I remember conversations when I was younger when he was encouraging me to think about other stuff, maybe law school or something different,” Danny recalled.
“I encouraged them to look at other career paths,” Kevin said of the chats he would eventually have with each of his children. “I learned an invaluable lesson; I should have encouraged them to come into athletics and they would have gone in the other direction.
“I could go teach parenting classes. Whatever you say, they’re going to go in 180 degrees.”
Mike White
Mike White is a gym rat through and through.
It’s not unusual to find the 41-year-old UF men’s basketball coach on the court most days, sometimes taking part in a lunchtime pickup game with his coaching staff. Even as a child growing up, White would find his way on to a court, sometimes to the chagrin of his parents or the occasional security guard.
“When we lived in New Orleans, we lived real close to Tulane University and Mike and Danny figured out how to sneak into the gym after hours and they would play basketball with the whole gym to themselves,” Jane said. “Eventually, they invited other kids to sneak in and play after hours.”
It wasn’t the first time the White brothers found themselves bending the rules for the sake of extra time on the basketball court.
Mike confirmed, “We’ve snuck into a bunch of gyms, without a doubt. You may get kicked out two or three times in a day, but you find your way back at 11 p.m. when the security guards have nodded off.
“I remember the facility people at The Pit [Memorial Gymnasium] at the University of Maine despised us.”
And it didn’t matter that he was the son of the athletics director.
“I remember being scolded by my family at least 100 times in our upbringing about dropping his name to facility people and maintenance people,” Mike said.
When a gym wasn’t available, Mike and his brothers would fill their time downstairs in the family’s basement on a makeshift court built by their mother.
“We took those original Michael Jordan Jammers hoops and I would take the backboards off the poles and I would nail them to the rafters in the basement at either end so they could dribble to each end and fight it out,” Jane White said.
With a house constantly full of guests, it wasn’t long before all sorts of people would make their way downstairs to check out the setup. One of those was former Marquette and Utah coach Rick Majerus.
“He came over to a social at my parents’ house and found his way into the basement and he showed me a drill that I used literally every day and one I still use with my guards today. It’s called Majerus handling,” Mike said.
Kevin remembered the corpulent Majerus emerging from the basement “ghost-white and soaking wet after about an hour and half with the kid in the basement and I thought we were going lose him. I was scared to death.”
Danny White added that getting up around 6 in the morning to do drills and workouts with Mike White was something “not a lot of high school athletes were doing.”
“I can’t imagine there are coaches working harder than him on the recruiting trails or doing everything he needs to do to run his program. He’s meticulous and tunnel-visioned and that’s what makes him a good coach,” Danny said of his brother, Mike.
Brian White
Much like his brother Danny, Brian White has built a reputation for being a determined fundraiser.
It’s a skill he developed at an early age whether it was selling candy for his Catholic school or bags of rocks he collected outside a college baseball stadium. He was fearless.
“He’s tenacious. Everybody that knows him, sees it in him,” Kevin White said.
It was persistence that led BrianWhite, dressed in his Holy Name of Jesus school uniform, to march down the street from their home on Freret Street on the Tulane University campus toward the student union. There the secondgrader would set up shop conveniently near an ATM machine, hawking candy bars, raffle tickets or whatever his school was selling at the time as part of a fundraiser.
“He would have the long face and he would say, ‘Would you like to buy a couple of raffle tickets for Holy Name of Jesus Elementary School?’ ” Kevin recalled. “Aw, he killed it. Whatever it was, he was the top guy. It was never close.”
Danny expects his brother, Brian, to put in a relentless effort.
“It’s a competition and he’s competitive so he would win it by a huge margin,” Danny White said. “You couldn’t say no to him. He does a good job about not getting negative or stressed about things.”
Brian vaguely remembers there was a catalog full of prizes for the top sellers and one of those items was a portable television. He imagined watching TV in the back of the family station wagon.
“I had my mind set on this television and that’s what motivated me,” he said. “I’m sure it was a bunch of Tulane students who were thinking, ‘Why is this secondgrader walking around trying to sell me something? I feel bad for him.’ That was probably the biggest motivator.
“But I do remember I got the darn television.”
It’s that sort of tenacity that led Brian, as a first-grader, to turn a profit selling bags of rocks to spectators at University of Maine baseball games. He would collect the stones from nearby bleachers, bag them up and sell them.
“I thought it was a good product. Now I realize all of these people who bought rocks were just trying to be nice to me, but I’ll take it,” Brian said with a chuckle.
It’s that sort of drive that’s helped him during his career in athletics, whether it was at Louisiana Tech, Missouri and or now at FAU, where he became the school’s new athletics director in March. For the first time in his career, he’s in charge of an athletics department.
“I think he saw the fun I was having building this one here and that probably had an impact as well,” Danny said of his brother’s recent move to Florida. “Selfishly, we wanted him here.”
But no matter where he’s at or where’s he been, Kevin White’s impact isn’t far from his son.
“When I think about the way he operates that’s kind of what I think about,” Brian said of his father’s influence on his career. “I think about somebody that operates with a high level of integrity, treats people the right way, very empathetic but humble and vulnerable, and kind of just him.”
Maureen and Mariah White
The White house was always a beehive of activity the night before a Notre Dame football game.
“They would have 500 people at the house and I would come home from swim practice and try to grab dinner before sneaking up to my room,” Mariah (White) Chappell said about growing up in South Bend, Ind., during her father’s tenure in the early 2000s. “It was like a revolving door.
“They always love to have people over and someone is going to end up singing and someone is going to end up playing guitar. It’s just kind of a party.”
Brey stopped by one of those get-togethers when he first arrived at Notre Dame.
“Everyone was there and at least 25 people slept at the house,” Brey said. “NBC executives, big agents, big-money people — [those parties] live in infamy on Friday nights.”
“I loved growing up around a college campus,” said Mariah, who went on to swim competitively at Duke where her father would take over as AD in 2008. “He always had an open house to student-athletes when we were all growing up, so being exposed to that lifestyle was really enticing to me.”
It was that immersion into a lifestyle that led Mariah to a career in athletics as well. She is assistant athletics director at Southern Methodist University.
“I think just the exposure from my dad and brothers having success in it and really having a passion for it, I felt there really wasn’t another field where I would get excited to go to work and be as excited at what I was doing every day with that familiarity,” she said.
Mariah’s sister Maureen is the only sibling not involved in college athletics. Instead, she chose to become a teacher.
“Maureen is the artistic one,” Danny said of his sister, the oldest of the five children. “She wasn’t the one getting up at 6 a.m. doing workouts. She’s more likely to spend eight hours working on poems.
“She’s the only one of us smart enough not to work in college sports.”
“She’s Joan Baez,” Kevin said of his daughter. “She’s a ’60s kid but she didn’t grow up in the ’60s. She thinks all of this athletics stuff is over the top and isn’t afraid to voice it.”
Kevin remembered the family attending one of Maureen’s poetry recitals in which she expressed her feelings on the “family business.”
“We were all there in our Sunday best and she read a bunch of her poetry and largely crushed us,” Kevin said laughing. “She absolutely undressed us about our obsession for sports. We were crucified and the room was roaring at our expense.”
Melbourne
For the White family, vacations were synonymous with long road trips to the beach. No matter where their careers took them or how busy they became, there was always something about the sea that drew them back.
One excursion began what would become a lifelong love of the Sunshine State.
It was the summer after his first year at Notre Dame and Brian White had a job detailing cars at a dealership in nearby Mishawaka, Ind. With just a few weeks left before the start of his sophomore year, he opted to join his father for what would turn out to be a 20-hour car ride to Melbourne Beach.
The pair made the trip along with the family’s 17-foot Boston Whaler in tow, passing the time listening to cassettes on the car stereo.
“He would play Side A of ‘Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits’ and that would play through and he would play Side B of ‘Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits’ and then he would play Side A of ‘Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits’ like it was a whole different tape,” Brian said. “He would keep that going for about eight hours.
“We didn’t realize Bob Dylan had a lot more great songs. We just heard the 12 on the greatest-hits album.”
They stopped along the way at cheap motels, proud of the fact they found a bargain, only to discover why it was such a great deal. Eventually, they arrived on the Space Coast and went to work outfitting the new condominium.
“It seems like everything was green for some reason,” Brian recalled of the décor.
Close to two decades later, the condo is still at the center of the White family — a true home-awayfrom-home.
“It means everything,” Jane said of the location. “It made sense that it would be the beach in Florida because that’s where they learned to surf when they were little, because that’s where we would take our vacations.”
“It’s been a stable sense of home for a lot of us,” Mariah recalled. “We’ve done Christmas there, we’ve done Easter there — every Easter we do a sunrise mass on the beach. All the grandkids, there are 13 of them, have grown up in going there every single summer.”
“From New Port Richey around America and then back to Melbourne; the whole thing is a little mystical to us that we ended up back in Florida,” Kevin said.