‘Bigger, faster, stronger’

Director of Athletics Kevin White saw Duke win national championships in men’s lacrosse and men’s basketball.
Director of Athletics Kevin White saw Duke win national championships in men’s lacrosse and men’s basketball.

As Director of Athletics Kevin White enters his third year on the job, Duke sits in a comfortable position in an otherwise topsy-turvey collegiate sports world.

Although changes in the form of teams moving from conference to conference remain a constant threat, White said he does not foresee ACC expansion coming. In a sitdown with The Chronicle

Tuesday, White emphatically denied that expansion is being discussed within the conference leadership.

“I don’t think it is even being talked about,” he said. “I’m reading a lot about it, but I’m in all the meetings, and we’re not talking about it. There’s a bit of a disconnect.”

To White’s knowledge, the members of the ACC are satisfied with the collection of schools currently in the league.

“Unless something seismic happens, I don’t think anybody has the appetite to enlarge the size of the ACC as we speak,” White said. “I like it the way it is. That’s my strong preference.”

Although White doesn’t think Duke is in any danger of seeing its conference changed, he and his staff do still have a busy year in store.

Duke and the Knight Commission
White talked about the financial side of athletics during the sitdown, noting that spending prudently plays a major role in sustaining a successful athletics program.

The increased focus on finances comes at an opportune time—“Restoring the Balance: Dollars, Values, and the Future of College Sports,” a report by the Knight Commission, was released June 17. The Knight Commission is a reform-minded committee on college athletics, headed by William English Kirwan, chancellor of the University of Maryland, and R. Gerald Turner, president of Southern Methodist University.

The report focused on the sometimes strained relationship between schools’ classrooms and their athletic teams. Spending per scholarship athlete has increased at a rapid rate in recent years, significantly outpacing increases to the academic side of universities, it says.

“I think [the report is] a pretty good reflection of the issues of the day,” White said. “And that group has been a really responsible group for helping higher education better understand intercollegiate athletics.”

The Knight Commission also called for more conservative spending on athletics and greater transparency in schools’ reporting of their athletic expenditures. White said that he believes Duke is transparent and responsible with its spending.

“[Our budget is] $60 million. And the cost of a scholarship here is two or three times more than the schools with $100 million budgets,” he said. “[So] the gap between us and them is even greater than $40 or $50 million. But we find ways to be competitive with about half the resources some of the real big guys have. That’s a pretty good thing.”

Although there are schools nationally that spend more than Duke, White said his goal in the upcoming year is to keep the Blue Devils among the elite athletics programs nationally.

“It’s to try to get bigger, faster and stronger,” he said. “I think everybody in intercollegiate athletics is competitive by nature. No one wants to tread water; everyone wants to find a way to take our collective activity to the next level.”

The changing face of Duke facilities
Also on White’s agenda is improvements to the Blue Devils’ stadiums and practice fields.

“One of the big themes for us is facilities,” White said. “We’re continuing to conceptualize what we might do in Wallace Wade and around Cameron Indoor—not necessarily in it—as the economy improves.”

By far the biggest project potentially on the horizon involves renovations to Wallace Wade.

As previously reported in The Chronicle, the Bostock Group—made up of influential donors and alumni including Roy Bostock, Trinity ’62, John Mack, T ’68 and Grant Hill, T ’94—has put forth long-term plans that would drastically change the 81-year-old stadium. White was not available for an interview to discuss the plans during the reporting of the original article.

Executive Vice President Tallman Trask estimated the cost of the improvements as outlined in the Bostock Study to be $80 to $90 million. White put the number north of $100 million Tuesday but added that nothing is official yet.

“I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves with Wallace Wade,” he said. “We pretty much know what we’d like to do, we’ve got to figure out how to fund it. It’ll be some kind of combination of philanthropic, corporate and the creation of a business plan that will, at the end of the day, deliver the resources to make it happen.”

The Bostock Group will also look at improvements to Cameron. Trask said that any work done to the stadium would not be as visible as Wallace Wade’s, a sentiment echoed by White.

“In the plan, it’s all ancillary things to Cameron Indoor Stadium,” White said. “We’re talking about additives to the current facilities, not talking about changing the current stadium itself. There is a big difference.”

White also said that the athletics department is looking into FieldTurf surfaces for Jack Combs Stadium and Jack Katz Stadium.

An all-weather surface for Jack Combs would mean no more baseball games in Cary, N.C. The team was forced to play games as the U.S.A. Baseball National Training Complex off-campus last year as a result of water damage to the field.

“We want to eliminate Cary from the equation. Cary was a short-term measure,” White said. “We’d like to play more games downtown [at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park], but I don’t how quickly we’ll be able to get to that place.”

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