Summer is approaching, but that doesn't mean a slow down for Danny White. The UCF athletic director remains active on a variety of fronts, be it fundraising, sales, managing facility projects, football scheduling and more.
Prior to last Thursday's Charge On Tour in Orlando, White met with the local media to talk about several topics.
How much fun are these events for you?
"I love this event. We've had a great turnout the last couple years. It's going to turn out to be a beautiful night. Hopefully the rain doesn't scare people away. We've had a great time over in the Space Coast last night and Fort Lauderdale the night before. We'll go to New York City later this month. It's fun to get out and meet our fans and alumni."
New York City?
"We have a big, young alumni contingency up there. Our eyes were opened a couple years back at the NIT Final Four. I got to witness the UCF Watch Party bar right there by Madison Square Garden. That's where we're having the event this year. It'll be a packed house."
Is there a satisfaction to see your brand growing?
"I think we have a lot of work to do. We haven't fully engaged this whole city, but it's a whole lot more captivated than it was before. Black and Gold is a much bigger deal in Orlando than it was before. There's a lot of room for growth. I think events like this are important to continue to remind our alumni and the people of Orlando that we're your hometown university, your hometown team. Our student-athletes are really proud to represent this community on a national stage."
When you look at the department as a whole and how many teams have made the NCAA Tournament - What can you say about what this school has done in this athletic year?
"It's been an awesome year. I hope it ends up being our most competitive year ever in terms of the all sports trophy. We won the War on I-4 for the third year in a row. I'm really proud of our women's golf team. Yesterday they made Nationals. That's a big deal. That's top 24 guaranteed finish in the country. Across the board, it's been what we set out to do. We wanted to build a top 25 athletic department across all sports. We saw a lot of them in the top 25 this year. We're going to continue to see improvement."
How much personal pride do you have in hiring many of those coaches?
"UCF is a good place to recruit to. I get probably too much credit for recruiting coaches here. Coaches are smart. They realize the advantages we have here. We have great donors. This community has really stepped up. It's a lot of people putting a lot of effort into giving our coaches every opportunity to be successful. They're recruiting good kids obviously who are proud to build a household name and building UCF into a national brand."
How important will the new American media rights deal be for UCF's bottom line?
"It's a piece of the puzzle. We need to really grow our budget. We've spent a lot of time the last six months doing some valuations and looking at where we are and where do we realistically need to be financially to achieve our goals and to sustain it? I think we need to grow. We've grown our budget by 20 percent the last couple years. I think we need to grow it again by another 20 to 30 percent the next couple years. The television deal is part of that. Certainly, continuing to have great national exposure is a part of that. Continuing to build our fanbase. Bringing in our own revenue. Ticket sales, donations. That's why events like this are important. We'll talk about where we are relative to the stadium tonight. We're getting close to selling that out. Then we want to move to the arena and build that fanbase up. The TV deal is important, but it's one piece of the wheel."
How is the Charge On Tour helping with that and what is the Charge On Challenge?
"The Charge On Challenge is part of the Charge On Fund. For so many of our alumni, whether they can't afford season tickets or they live too far away, this is a way to support the Knights. We ask them to do that through the Charge On Fund. Put your credit card on file and charge on."
How is that going and where do you hope to be?
"Our people are stepping up in ways we've never seen before. We're expecting another record-breaking fundraising year. It's fun to be a place where we're so young. The alumni base is young. A lot of the things we do, we're doing for the first time. In our fundraising, we're seeing a lot of firsts."
The attendance has grown all three years for football. Will that continue?
"It'll grow to capacity this year. We'll sell out on season tickets this year. We'll have single-game, standing room only availability. Very quickly we'll start taking a waiting list and start talking about stadium expansion. That'll be our next opportunity to grow. I'm expecting that we'll sell out season tickets well before the season starts. I think the demand far exceeds the capacity of the stadium right now."
Is adding another level of seating the next step?
"It's inevitable that we're going to have to expand the stadium. It was built to be expanded. Originally designed to go to 65,000. We'll see what that looks like for the next couple years as we continue to build our waiting list and communicate with our fans."
You're wrapping your third athletic year here at UCF. What are you most proud of?
"We came here to a place that was doing it the right way in terms of developing student-athletes. We graduate kids. We compete in the classroom. I'm proud of the fact that we've been able to elevate what we're doing competitively while maintaining and elevating what's going on in the classroom. We just announced our 23rd straight semester of student-athlete GPA above 3.0. One of the top-five highest. Several of our programs hitting record marks in the classroom. For them to do that, while we're having years like this, seeing record competitive success, that just speaks a lot to who our students are as people, our coaches and who they recruit here and for the alumni, the types of athletes they have representing them."
Outside of the office, what do you have planned for the summer?
"This job is all encompassing. We have so much to do. That's what is fun about what we're doing at UCF. I'm always thinking about what that's next thing. Right now we're in sales mode. Once we sell out of tickets, we've still got sponsorships we can sell. Fundraising to get some of these facilities shored up with the Kenneth G. Dixon Athletics Village. I spend a lot of time this time of year getting out to see our alumni and trying to raise money to support our program."
How is football scheduling going?
"We would happy to play any non-conference Power Six in a home-and-home, anybody in the country, we would love to do it. I know it doesn't come as a surprise to hear me say that."
Has anybody called you recently?
"We make a lot of calls. We don't get a lot of return phone calls. It's been really hard. I understand why. It's a difficult proposition. We're getting good. We have access to a lot of talent here. I get their perspective. I wish I would have had better foresight a couple years ago when I first got the job after 0-12, I should have scheduled a whole lot of games because it would have been easier then. But we'll find games. We've been able to find good series with Louisville, North Carolina. The Maryland series which is done now. Pitt and Stanford coming back here. There are people willing to play us. We keep trying to find great opponents to emphasize our home scheduling. We're building a fanbase. What we do at Spectrum Stadium is important to us. Bringing the pageantry of college football to UCF. It's why we built an on-campus stadium. We want to schedule smart to build our program and build our fanbase."
I know you're saying home-and-home, but you see schools like Boise State doing neutral site games. Do you think UCF is becoming a team that could be invited to play in one of those games?
"I think there's no question. We've raised the level where we merit an invitation. Can we get somebody else to play us is another question. We would open to a neutral site game as well. We have been open to that and we haven't been successful finding another team to play us."
Do you have a reaction to Florida playing Colorado?
"No, I don't. They're going to schedule how they want to schedule. We'll schedule how we feel we need to schedule to build our program. I think we can do the same things at UCF that Florida and Florida State did in the 80s and 90s. Hopefully we can grow a little faster. There's plenty of room in the state of Florida to have another monster athletic department. We're coming. That's exactly where we plan to be."
Do you have any updates on the current facility construction?
"The Roth Athletics Center is going vertical. They're working on the second level now. That building will go up pretty quickly. It will go up at some point during the next academic year. We're still working on the timing of that. It's fully funded. We'll next work on some of the other projects for the outdoor spaces. It's constant fundraising and project management dialogue. You guys are probably well aware that construction costs in Orlando are skyrocketing. Sometimes we're kind of like a hamster in a wheel in terms of fundraising. We have a lot of people who have stepped up and we have every intention of getting all that stuff finished."
The more success you have, the more other programs may want your coaches. Do you have the resources to hang on to some of these coaches?
"The critical word is resources. It's important that our resource base is consistent with what our expectations are. Our expectations are rising very quickly. I spend a lot of time thinking about resources, whether it's our facilities or our budget. What I talked about earlier, we have to grow our budget very quickly. We've already grown it very quickly in the last couple years. We've got a lot of work to do. What we're messaging to our fans and donors, the time is right now to capitalize on the success and make sure we take a quantum leap into the hierarchy of college sports in how we fund our programs. Keeping the talented people here is my highest priority."
