Danny White’s UT is thriving

How his ‘ambitious vision’ has paid off for Tennessee athletics

Jack Church, Assistant Sports Editor

April 30, 2025

UT athletic director Danny White fields question from the media after Tennessee announced a new partnership with Pilot. Tuesday, Aug. 13, 2024.

Danny White’s first taste of aggression at Tennessee came before he was even hired.

He spent two days in January 2021 virtually interviewing for the athletic director position with the university’s biggest names — University of Tennessee Chancellor Donde Plowman, UT System President Randy Boyd and Board of Trustees Chair John Compton.

Plowman didn’t want an elaborate process surrounding the AD search. She wanted to finish the job quickly and knew White was the man to lead the next generation of Tennessee’s athletic department. So why wait?

That afternoon, following the virtual interviews, she flew to White’s home in Orlando alongside Boyd and Compton, closing the deal with White within hours of the initial screening.

“When I finished the Zoom with them at like 11 a.m., and they said we’ll be at your front door at six, I was like, ‘whoa, this is aggressive,’ but I also kind of liked it,” White told The Daily Beacon. “This is a university academic leader that operates like how I’d operate if I was in a coaching search.”

While White was impressed with the intensity and competitiveness of Plowman, he still had some concerns, specifically regarding institutional alignment. He worried that Tennessee was a place where coaches or boosters would go around him to the chancellor or system president. Plowman was steadfast in her belief that those would not occur at Tennessee.

She entered the meeting with a draft memorandum of understanding, and White signed it that night.

The contract details were finalized quickly after that, and he was officially appointed to the position on Jan. 21, 2021. Since then, White and Plowman have established trust and been in lockstep with one another.

White’s journey has hit its peak at Tennessee, but it started far from Knoxville. It started in the rooms where his father, Kevin White, was running some of the best athletic departments in the country as his sons were growing up. It continued on through the revitalization of Buffalo and UCF’s departments under Danny White’s leadership before that night in his Orlando home brought him to Knoxville.

Throughout the whole process, White’s vision never wavered. He wanted to build the best athletic department in the country.

Since White got to Knoxville, Tennessee has won 12 SEC championships between regular-season and postseason events. In 2023-24, all 20 teams made the NCAA postseason, a year capped off by Tennessee baseball winning the national championship — the school’s first in 15 years.

Tennessee athletics is at its best, and it’s because of the man in charge.

“The rebuild happened faster than he thought it would, certainly faster than I thought it would,” Plowman told the Beacon. “Everybody wants to be part of a winner, and it’s been this magical thing to watch.”

Danny and his brothers, Mike and Brian, grew up under the tutelage of their father, Kevin. The legendary athletic director retired from Duke’s AD job in 2021 after 13 years. Before that, he served in the same position at Arizona State and Notre Dame.

Kevin White built his own success. He was the first member of his family to graduate from high school and learned everything he knew by trying things out. Throughout his entire career, Kevin never served as an assistant in an athletic department.

He and the people he hired always aspired to move upward, and that upward mobility was reflected in his family.

“Our kids were always around really good people, and people that were making a difference and were aspirational and were in a growth mode,” Kevin told the Beacon. “I do think that kind of transfixed their mentality to kind of follow suit.”

Mike, who took a different path from his brothers and pursued coaching, believed that their father Kevin’s influence helped all three brothers develop a strong sense of character, leadership and ethics.

“(Kevin) always operated at such a high level of integrity, and we always, as kids, admired the way that he treated people and the number of strong relationships that he and mom developed over the years,” Mike said. “That, in a lot of ways, prepared us to really jump into any type of profession.”

Brian took his first athletic director job in March 2018 at Florida Atlantic and immediately made a big decision. Less than two weeks into his first-ever athletic director job and still in his early 30s, he fired head men’s basketball coach Michael Curry and launched a nationwide search.

Having just arrived in Boca Raton, Brian ran the hiring process out of an on-campus apartment with his wife and two kids. He brought in Dusty May, the former assistant coach at the University of Florida, to lead the Owls. While at Florida, May had worked under the leadership of head coach Mike. However, this wouldn’t be the only connection between the White brothers and the May hire.

Five years later, Florida Atlantic made its first-ever Sweet 16 appearance in 2023 at Madison Square Garden. Brian suddenly found himself crossing paths with Danny and Tennessee for a trip to the Elite Eight, something neither athletic director had yet achieved in their careers.

The Owls emerged victorious 62-55, and Danny greeted Brian after the game to express his congratulations. Brian tried to be humble. He couldn’t believe his first-ever hire as an athletic director led to an Elite Eight trip.

“Outside of the birth of my children and being married to my wife, I can’t imagine a more joyous moment than that run,” Brian said. “But there was a feeling of bittersweet as I was sad for Danny.”

Two nights later, the Owls beat Kansas State to get to the Final Four for the first time in program history, a moment that put FAU athletics on the map. The performance was rewarded that summer when Florida Atlantic completed its move to the American Athletic Conference, a major step for a still-developing program.

Brian had business acumen from the beginning, and Danny thinks he has the best interpersonal skills in the family — skills that led him through the ranks and into the Florida Atlantic job he has now held for seven years.

“He’s been a fundraiser since he was like eight years old,” White said. “If there’s a fourth-grade raffle ticket competition, he’s going to win it every time.”

White also boasted strong business skills — skills that he has refined working in one of the premier athletic conferences in the country. His first taste of the SEC was in his role as a senior associate athletic director at Ole Miss in 2009, a job in which he learned what the revenue generation system should ideally look like at the college level.

He immediately began streamlining fundraising operations, starting with the sale of season tickets.

Historically, fans at Ole Miss had to call two separate offices to renew season tickets and make an athletic donation. White wanted to bring ticket purchasing and fundraising together, creating collaboration between the two arms of the revenue machine.

His vision of a tight-knit department quickly became a reality at Ole Miss and a model that he took to other universities.

“What sets Danny apart is his critical thinking,” Allen Greene, who worked under White at Ole Miss, Buffalo and Tennessee, said. “He’s relentless when it comes to problem-solving, applying that drive to every part of the organization until he finds the best solution.”

White left Oxford to become Buffalo’s athletic director in 2012 and further refined his plan there, leveraging connections with the Bills to enact his vision of a pro-style athletic department at the college level. He employed a similar tactic at UCF when he was hired there in 2015, engaging with Orlando Magic CEO Alex Martins to help raise the university’s brand value nationwide.

Since arriving in Knoxville, White has had a sizable impact on Tennessee athletics, starting with his donation numbers.

According to the NCAA revenue and expense report for 2023-24, Tennessee reported $72.7 million in contributions provided and used during the fiscal year, more than three times the donation level when White arrived in 2020-21.

Tennessee’s fans are passionate about winning, and White harnessed that. He recognized that Tennessee was at its best when resources were highest. When those resources fell off, so did the programs.

“I think (the fans) wanted to see an administration that was as competitive as they are,” White said. “It took us a little bit of time to show them that we are and to build that kind of equity with them.”

White’s Tennessee hasn’t known a time without success yet. During White’s leadership thus far, Tennessee athletics has won the SEC All-Sports trophy in all three years.

Strong athletics, and specifically the exposure that the school earns from having programs compete on a national stage, can have a positive ripple effect across the university, driving more students to campus and improving the reputation of the school.

“When we played six games to win the College World Series, that’s like 24 hours of just free publicity,” Plowman said. “So there’s a relationship between that and 63,000 applicants for next year’s freshman class and parents all over the state and country wanting their kids to come here. It seems like a good environment. They want to be a Volunteer.”

White has hired numerous exceptional coaches during his career as an athletic director. The first step in this process remains the same: meeting with the team. White wants someone in that role who can find immediate success and meet the needs of the players within the locker room now. That style started at Buffalo when he hired Felisha Legette-Jack as the head women’s basketball coach, his first hire.

The next step involves a lot of research into all candidates who may fit the job description. It means reaching beyond the typical hiring pool and into uncharted waters. While making a hire for Buffalo’s new football coach, for example, he found Lance Leipold making waves at Division III Wisconsin-Whitewater and decided he was the man for the job.

In a conference that routinely hired inexperienced coaches, White wanted to utilize his resources differently. He hired a successful coach from a lower level who then went on to find success at Buffalo. The Bulls won three bowl games during Leipold’s tenure.

“In my first meeting with him when he came to our house, it became very apparent that Danny White was very much an outside-the-box thinker in his thought process,” Leipold, now the head football coach at Kansas, told the Beacon. “But he had a plan on what he wanted to try to do and why he was doing it.”

Leipold’s interview with White was very important to the decision. White sought to know how Leipold’s skills would translate to the FBS level, and Leipold knew that the resources would be there for him to be successful.

The development of White’s hiring process began with repetition. He had to change out numerous head coaches during his time at Buffalo and many more at UCF. At those schools, he hired future power-conference coaches like Leipold, Legette-Jack, Nate Oats and Bobby Hurley. That experience helped him during the recent hiring process for the Lady Vols, one where he settled on Kim Caldwell.

White saw confidence in Caldwell from the initial Zoom meeting, the same confidence Plowman saw during her first screening with her athletic director. Winning the interview is just as important as having a strong resume. Caldwell thrived in both areas.

“She had a little bit of swagger to her,” White said. “She’s very confident in the system she runs, why she runs it, the science behind it, why it’s successful and the way she explained all that. And then as a basketball guy, just kind of hearing her just break down basketball, talk about it in such confidence but casual ways was different.”

White saw authenticity in Caldwell. He understood why she won at Glenville State and during her year at Marshall, and Caldwell asked White if Tennessee wanted a piece of that success.

He did.

Caldwell exuded that confidence at her opening press conference, one where she immediately shot down any indication that her style of play wouldn’t work at the power-conference level. In her first season, she took the Lady Vols to the Sweet 16 and still has higher expectations for where the program should be. After her inaugural campaign leading the Lady Vols concluded, Caldwell highlighted White’s faith in her confidence as a motivating factor for her throughout the season.

A similar process unfolded when White hired Josh Heupel to be Tennessee’s 27th head football coach. He wanted someone with a distinctive style of play — a coach who would make the rebuilding process fun, even when the results weren’t immediately apparent.

“When it comes to coaches, there’s a thing he’s trying to accomplish, and he’s going to find the person that helps him accomplish that thing,” Plowman said. “I have complete confidence in him.”

White launched Tennessee’s new five-year strategic plan in July 2022 named “Rise Glorious” in reference to the fourth line of Tennessee’s alma mater. One of the goals listed in that plan is to win a national championship at least once every four years. That happened in Omaha last June when Tennessee baseball won the school’s first team championship since 2009.

“It’s been 15 years since we’ve won one of those, and it doesn’t need to be that long for the next one,” White said. “It doesn’t have to be baseball for the next one, although that would be great, but other sports need to be chipping in with some ‘natties’ as well, and I think that’s exactly what we’re going to see happen.”

The plan sets high, lofty expectations, something White has been aiming to achieve since he first stepped foot in a college athletics office. Even before that, he was using lessons learned from his father to climb the administrative ladder.

White developed similar plans at Buffalo and UCF with goals that, at times, seemed too good to be true. His conviction and determination make everyone in his department feel ready and prepared to make it happen.

“In each of Danny’s stops, he crafts an ambitious vision,” Greene said. “Pursuing it can feel daunting, but his unwavering belief in that vision is intoxicating, eliminating any doubt about the path forward.”

The vision behind White’s goals permeates throughout the Tennessee athletics office. Everyone is working toward the same goals for Tennessee, and that vision proves itself with successful results.

“He’s been able to establish clear expectations that people have met, bring people into the program, support those who are there, and provide that kind of support to meet those expectations,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey told the Beacon. “I think he communicates incredibly well, explains the details and the big picture.”

Today’s Danny White isn’t the same Danny White who was hired by Buffalo at the age of 32. He evolved from a college basketball player at Towson and Notre Dame to a coach, then to a rookie administrator and ultimately to a visionary leader. His career progression was quick, but White likes it that way — he’s someone who leaps at an opportunity, no matter how fast or aggressive it may appear. Plowman still jokes with White’s wife — Shawn — about her sudden arrival in Knoxville that January night in 2021 following White’s hiring. Instead of being the aggressor as usual, White was the recipient of an aggressive hiring process from Tennessee’s chancellor.

Neither party — nor the school they lead — has been the same since.

“I like being on a team,” White said. “And I like being on a team in this Pantone 151.”