Courtesy: GoDuke.com

DURHAM, N.C. - Officially, Kevin White has been Duke’s new director of athletics for a little over a month. But realistically, as White admitted Monday when he met with members of the local media, he’s just getting started with his new job.

"It’s been crazy,” he said of the last month. “If I may, let me kind of take you through the gymnastics of our world [since being hired at Duke].”

White, previously the athletics director at Notre Dame for eight years, was introduced as Duke’s replacement for Joe Alleva at a hastily called press conference Saturday afternoon May 31.

“From there, we went to a memorial service that night, up in Maine, for a major benefactor,” White recounted. “As I came out of that, I went back to South Bend and tried to sure up a bunch of stuff there. That following week, I found myself finishing a tour of duty with a group called NACDA – the National Collegiate Directors of Athletics Association down in Dallas. So in the midst of trying to learn about Duke and settling things up at Notre Dame, we’re running a conference with about 3,000 participants in Dallas. So it was really hairy. From that point, I came in here for a couple of weeks and then tried to create some time with my family. We actually got together in Melbourne, Fla. I’ve got a bunch of my kids in this crazy business, so our window of getting together is always pretty tight and not negotiable.”

White flew back to Durham Sunday night. He’ll be joined by his wife and youngest daughter – a rising senior in high school – at his apartment, located about a mile from the Duke campus, on Tuesday. Only then will Duke’s new director of athletics really be here to stay.

“I’ve had so many other issues that were there before the Duke opportunity presented itself and now they’ve come and gone,” he said. “So I really feel that this is the time really to dig in.”

White is still trying to learn exactly what needs to be done at Duke.

“What to do first?” he answered when asked whether he’d made any significant decisions yet. “I’m trying to be a sponge and absorb as much as I can. I’m trying to learn as much as I can about, not only about Duke athletics, but Duke University and to some degree Durham, along with everything else.

“It’s coming at me pretty fast. People have been great and have tried to help me get up to speed. The one thing I know is that at this point in my life, I’ve got an awful lot to learn.”

Between the other duties tugging at him over the last month, White has found time to meet with every athletic department senior staffer and with all of Duke’s head coaches except men’s soccer coach John Kerr (“Our schedules just haven’t matched up,” White said. “We’ll probably get together today or tomorrow.”).

“In addition to that, I’ve had an opportunity to meet with a whole bunch of other people on the campus – university senior administrators and folks who have a pretty significant connection to athletics,” White said. “There’s a large number in that group as well. So at this point, it’s been meeting after meeting after meeting.

“The lion’s share of what I’ve heard is people professing great affection for Duke – they love the place. That comes across loud and clear. It’s a pretty consistent theme. We’ve got some things we need to work on and to work at – but by and large, people just love being a part of Duke University. That’s kind of infectious.”

Any consistent themes running through those interviews?

“This is going to sound like Pollyanna, but there’s a real strong theme of excellence,” he said. “Everybody wants to excel. Everyone wants to compete at the highest level and for students and student athletes to have a world-class academic experience. They want it all.”

Duke’s been very successful in most athletic endeavors in recent years, but White knows that repairing the Blue Devils’ football program has to be a high priority. He’s expressed confidence in new football coach David Cutcliffe, hired by Alleva last December. He called the former Ole Miss head coach, “a proven winner with a track record of success.”

“I’ve known David and I thought he was a tremendous hire,” White said. “When Joe hired him, I sent a little note to Joe. [And] he’s hired an outstanding staff. I’m very impressed.”

But White also adds: “David can’t do it by himself. It’s going to take the whole university to rally around David and make this happen.”

He illustrated his point with a story that he used in a business class he used to teach at Notre Dame.

“Let me digress into a story,” White said. “I can remember not too many years ago, I was at the Hall of Fame football banquet in New York. That’s in the midst of the early innings of football coaching search season. And somebody had just made, I thought, a pretty successful hire. I can remember getting on the elevator with a pretty seasoned [athletic director] and I said, ‘Boy, what a great hire!’ And he said, ‘Well, we’ll see if he can get it done.’ I said, ‘What do you mean by that?’ He said, ‘Well, I’ve given him the keys and if he can’t get it done, we’ll get another one in four or five years.’

“By the way, that one didn’t work. I think it’s largely attitudinal. I’ve used an overused expression: It takes a village to raise a child. Everybody’s got to get behind a program – particularly when it’s down... We’ve got to all come together and will it to happen. This is a big thing to get this going in the right direction.”

White is familiar with the Strategic Plan, adopted by the Board of Trustees last spring and likes the vision for Duke’s athletic future that it represents. More importantly, he likes the commitment to Duke’s athletic future inherent in the document:

“I think pretty unique for [the Trustees] go out on a limb and say, ‘We think intercollegiate athletics are pretty darn important and this is what the future needs to look like.’”

White’s most immediate problems will be upgrading Wallace Wade Stadium and Jack Combs Field – two facilities that White suggested, “need a makeover, not a facelift.”

He talked about the possibility of moving the track at Wallace Wade to the school’s “New Campus” which would allow Duke to lower the football field at Wade Stadium and perhaps increase the stadium’s capacity to 40,000 seats. He talked about making Wade more fan friendly by upgrading concession stands and rest room facilities. He talked about improving the practice area – of building a field house and elongating the practice fields. He talked about a major renovation of the baseball stadium.

But before Duke embarks on any of these projects, White would like to see his new school do something that his old school did under his leadership.

“I think we need an athletic master facility plan and figure out what we’re going to do for the next seven to 10 years,” he said. “[We need to] figure out what we’re going to do when we realize benefaction, when we have supporters line up to help us with these projects. It’s very important to show people exactly what it is we’re going to try to do and present a timetable.

“When we went to my previous institution, we contracted a national sporting architectural firm to get a master plan. If you aggregate all the facilities that are already built and the ones that are coming out of the ground [at Notre Dame], it probably represents something like $120 million. Everything we determined that we needed became part of the plan. It’s interesting to see most of it in place eight years later. I think we need to go through exactly the same kind of exercise here at Duke.

“I really want to hear from the experts. It’s easy for us to be pedestrian architects. I would really rather the professionals come in here and take a good hard look at it and give us a sense of what all of this might look like.”

Of course, doing all that Duke needs done is going to take a lot of money and finding that money – either from donors or other sources – is going to be one of White’s primary responsibilities. He did, however, point out that one of Duke’s greatest potential sources of revenue expansion would come from filling up Wallace Wade Stadium.

“It’s challenging, but I think college athletics everywhere is challenging from the financial perspective,” he said. “We’re aspirational. We want to do a whole lot. We want to be the best we can be. But it takes resources. How you prioritize those resources,  hopefully by investing wisely, will have a pretty significant impact on what you accomplish.”

Kevin White still has a lot of work to do before he can start making concrete plans for Duke’s athletics future. But he knows what he wants to accomplish and that’s a pretty solid accomplishment for his first month on the job.