VMI Q&A: Athletics director Donny White

By Chris Lang

Published: August 1, 2008

Undoubtedly, there are some perks to being in this profession sometimes. Like earlier this week, when I got to tee it up with members of VMI’s athletics department as part of the Keydets’ Coaches and Media Appreciation Day. The best part? The course. The event was held at the prestigious Kinloch Golf Club in Manakin-Sabot, just outside of Richmond. Kinloch was rated 29th on Golf Digest’s Top 50 courses in America list, ahead of courses such as Olympia Fields and Baltusrol, both of which have hosted major championships. Vinny Giles is one of the club’s founding members.

Yeah, I felt a little lucky. We finished dead last out of eight teams, but I really didn’t care. I made birdie on the par-4 15th, my only bird of the summer, and my teammates, which included VMI alum Bert Deacon and VMI chief of staff Walt Chalkley, made me feel like I had just made a big-time shot in a major. Fantastic bunch of gentlemen to spend a day with.

It was a good opportunity for me to meet with some of the Keydet coaches outside of the usual stodgy reporter-coach setting. I played with VMI hoops coach Duggar Baucom, marking my second round of golf with the architect of the Keydets’ run-and-gun offense. I also played with him at the Big South hoops media day two years ago.

To give our readers a little extra insight into VMI athletics, I conducted three Q&A sessions, one each with VMI AD Donny White, first-year VMI football coach Sparky Woods, and Baucom. The three interviews will be posted in their entirety, starting today with my talk with White.

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N&A: You were a coach at VMI—baseball from 1982-87. How much has college athletics have changed in the last 20 years or so since you’ve been coaching, and how has VMI adapted to that change?

DW: It’s changed 100 percent. It’s really a challenge to be competitive with a number of things that are in place in the NCAA. I’m real happy with the direction we’re going and the progress that’s being made. I feel very optimistic. Our baseball program has been doing pretty well. Basketball has had two pretty good years. I think a number of our sports are going to make an improvement this year. But it’s been a challenge. It’s a financial challenge and a recruiting challenge and an attention challenge.

And the NCAA now has the APR—the Academic Progress Rate. For us, because it’s a measure of eligibility and retention, eligibility usually isn’t a problem, but retention is, because sometimes kids don’t want to stay at VMI. It gets back to recruiting the right type of kid and keeping him here. It’s a great challenge for us, and we’re trying to measure up to it.

N&A: Despite the struggles on the field in football (VMI hasn’t had a winning season in 27 years), alumni donations are still pouring in. How does that make you feel about the standing of the program?

DW: It makes me that I’ve got a great obligation to that fan base to field successful teams in football. We’re making progress in the others, and I think they’re pretty happy with the progress we’re making. But we need to get over that hump in football. Last year, for example, we go 0-4 in the Big South. We lead three of those four games in the fourth quarter. Liberty, we weren’t in the game. In the others, we could have won all three of them, and should have won two of them for sure. But we didn’t. So we haven’t gotten over that hump.

We’ve got some good kids coming back this year, some young kids that were redshirted. With Sparky (Woods) keeping the offensive staff, that’s good. We had 500 yards of offense on probably four different occasions. We put a lot of points up, but we couldn’t stop anybody.

N&A: What does it take to make football successful at VMI?

DW: You’ve got to have a really good head coach, who can use VMI to help him build a program, and not run away from VMI. You can’t try to separate the football players from the rest of the corps. They need to be part of the corps, and you need a football coach who understands that. You need a guy who knows the Xs and Os, a guy who knows how to build a team. And you’ve got to retain. We’re running a system now offensively that is favorable. We’re putting pressure on the other team. We’re keeping the ball. We want to shorten the game and hopefully keep the ball out of the other team’s hands.

We have some good numbers there, but we gave the other team too many big plays. I think Sparky recognized that and he’s trying to get more speed on defense, to cut down on the big plays we give the other team. So you’ve got to hire a good guy. We’ve had some good coaches. Don’t get me wrong. But it hasn’t all fit together yet.

N&A: The way that former football coach Jim Reid left, was that a bit of a shock to the institute?

DW: I had two weeks notice. When the Cowboys lost and Parcells hired the Cowboy guy (Tony Sparano) to coach the Dolphins, I knew it was pretty much a done deal for Jim Reid. But it was a shock to a lot of people. He left in the third week of January. We were almost ready to sign the new class. First week of February is the national signing day. Thank God for coach (Brent) Davis, who took over as the interim head coach. He did a great job holding the staff together and keeping the recruits that we had commitments from. They think we signed a better class than we had the year before. So Sparky really didn’t have anything to do with that. He came in after the national letter day as the head coach.

Then he brought it some of his own people and kept the offensive staff. So I’m excited at what he’s done there.

N&A: You’re five years into your membership in the Big South. How do you evaluate that move at this point?

DW: Good question. When we compare RPI numbers in all of our sports with other conferences, the Big South is a good fit for us, in how we match up in a number of sports. We haven’t gotten the job done football-wise. Basketball, we’re coming along. Baseball, we were 14-7 in the conference last year, so we’ve shown we can compete. And that’s a good baseball conference, as you know. We’ve had some new hires the last couple of years in soccer and lacrosse. So I’m very optimistic that we’re going to be in the upper half of the Big South in most of our sports.

N&A: And that wasn’t the case in the Southern Conference?

DW: The Southern Conference, it wasn’t a problem. But since about 1982, the Southern Conference required that we play all eight teams. Prior to that, we only played like six football games in the conference. Then it became eight, and of course, Richmond and William & Mary weren’t part of that league, and we’ve been playing them for 100 years. We wanted to keep that, and that gave us 10 required games. So we had one game to schedule. And we weren’t doing well in any of the 10.

The Big South had a football league starting with only four required games (now six with the addition of Presbyterian and Stony Brook), so that was essentially the rationale. Then we felt the Big South, in basketball and the other sports, was a lot different than the Southern. Like Army and Navy, we needed scheduling flexibility for football. Army gave it away, went to Conference USA, then realized they needed to get it back. So I think we did the right thing. We’ve got the scheduling flexibility, but we haven’t executed. It’s a lot like being on the golf course. We’ve got the shot there, we just didn’t execute it, you know. We haven’t done as well in football as I’m sure our people feel like we should have. That’s all true. I feel badly about it. But that’s behind us.

N&A: Is VMI considering adding any sports?

DW: We’ve got about 110-120 women at VMI, and of course, we’ve added five women’s sports since 1997. We will add a couple more female sports if we can build that number up to 150 or 175. Then we’ll have enough women at VMI to support more sports. But we can’t have all of our women competing in sports. Seventy percent of our male cadets are involved in corps activity, whether it’s parades or drills or what they call rat challenge, rat training. Fifty percent of our women are involved in athletics. Fifty percent of 120 is not a lot. We need more women to continue to support the corps side.

N&A: Thanks for your time, Donny.

ABOUT DONNY WHITE:
YEARS AT VMI: 26 (11 as an athletics director, 15 as a coach)
DUTIES: Assistant football coach from 1971-81; head baseball coach from 1982-87
EDUCATION: VMI ’65 (B.S., civil engineering)
MILITARY BACKGROUND: A commissioned field artillery officer in the U.S. Army, he served a tour of duty in Vietnam and was awarded a Bronze Star, Purple Heart and Air Medal with four oak leaf clusters.