New Charlotte 49ers AD Kevin White says football, men’s hoops ‘have to be good’
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- New Charlotte 49ers AD Kevin White will prioritize football and men’s basketball success.
- Charlotte football went 1-11 in 2025; men’s hoops hasn’t made NCAA Tournament since 2005.
- White vows to identify needs and provide resources to improve the two programs.
As the Charlotte 49ers’ new athletic director, Kevin White seems to know what he’s getting into.
White spent the past four years as the No. 2 guy in the athletic department at Clemson, where the football team always goes to a bowl (even in bad years, like 2025) and the men’s basketball team is about to make the NCAA Tournament for the third year in a row.
Contrast that with what he’s walking into as Charlotte’s new AD. Charlotte’s football team just went 1-11. The men’s basketball team hasn’t made the NCAA Tournament since 2005, a two-decade drought that means many of UNC Charlotte’s current students weren’t even born the last time it happened.
“Football and men’s basketball have to be good,” White said this week during a 40-minute phone interview with The Charlotte Observer. “And so we’re going to work together in order for us to figure out what the needs are, in order for us to have more success in those two sports. Because those two sports are going to drive and carry everybody else in the department. We need them to be healthy. We need them to be successful. … We’ve just got to make sure we put the resources around them in order for them to be successful.”
Yes, that’s what needs to happen. I’ve always thought Charlotte was something of a sleeping giant.
But in the two sports that count the most in college athletics, this has been a sleep of Rip Van Winkle proportions.
To wake Charlotte up, the money has to be there. But that’s a chicken-and-egg thing. Winning programs naturally attract more money, but money is required for programs to win in the first place (and even then, sometimes they don’t).
How much money?
White didn’t want to get into that. But colleges legally pay players now, and the rates keep going up.
Other sources tell me that to just field a competitive football team in Charlotte’s conference — the American — you need about $5 million to spread out over the entire roster. Some programs in that league spend far more. For basketball, it’s something like $2 million to $3 million for the roster. Every year.
And none of that guarantees you’re going to win a thing. It just means you have a chance at keeping up with the Joneses.
“But it goes beyond the money,” said White, 46, who was heavily involved in contract negotiations with agents, student-athletes and parents at Clemson in football and basketball. “You have to evaluate the talent the right way. You have to put an appropriate valuation on the roster to get a return off the investment, based on what you’re allocating to that student-athlete. So much factors in.”
White also becomes the first Black AD in Charlotte’s history. He said of that: “It’s an honor. … I think it’s important for young folks to see someone who looks like me to see that they can achieve this. But the goal for me is simply to be the very best athletic director I can be.”
‘Really emotional’ when news came
White takes over for Mike Hill, who was Charlotte’s AD from 2018-2025 until chancellor Sharon Gaber abruptly fired him one October morning for reasons never fully explained (this came only 13 months after giving him a four-year contract extension). During Hill’s tenure, Charlotte joined the American Conference in 2023, won all sorts of league championships in Olympic sports and broke ground on a $70 million expansion of Jerry Richardson Stadium.
But the 49ers never got football right under Hill, even though he hired three different football coaches. Will Healy started well but flamed out. Coach Biff Poggi promised a lot on many fronts and delivered very little before getting fired in 2024. New coach Tim Albin went 1-11 in 2025, his first football season in Charlotte, and is in the midst of a massive rebuild.
The Charlotte men’s basketball team, while a little more successful and now 15-13 this season, never really broke through, either. And fundraising and revenue generation were continuing issues, as they are for all college ADs, but especially the ones at mid-major schools. They all feel like there’s never enough money.
Now comes White. He describes himself as normally “steady and reserved,” like the good high school point guard he used to be.
But when Gaber called him and told him he got the job, White said he was so happy that he got “really, really emotional.” White was in his driveway in South Carolina at the time, and his wife, Jari, saw him through the window and came out to hug him.
“We had prayed about getting a special opportunity for our family,” White said, “and I’m convinced this is it.”
An identical twin brother
White grew up in Chattanooga, alongside his older sister Natalie and his identical twin brother, Kenneth. His father, Jeffrey White, was one of the first Black pharmacists in Chattanooga. His mother, Saundra, worked in the pharmacy as a technician.
The twin boys had basketball dreams, and they went to the legendary Oak Hill Academy in Virginia for their final two years of high school. But high-profile basketball scholarships weren’t in the offing; instead, they got accepted at North Carolina and then tried to walk on to the basketball team.
Kevin White played on the Tar Heels’ junior varsity team for a year (coached by UNC legend Phil Ford). While a college sophomore, he fathered his first child — Justin, who’s now about to enter law school at the University of Michigan. That birth spelled the end of basketball.
“It was time to be an adult,” White said.
His twin brother stayed with it longer, making it to the varsity as a walk-on for UNC’s Final Four team of 2000, Bill Guthridge’s final season as UNC’s head coach. Kenneth Walker has since become a basketball coach himself — first as an assistant coach at Campbell and Tennessee-Chattanooga and now as the head coach of McCallie, the private all-boys school in Chattanooga where the twin brothers attended their first two years of high school together.
“Kenneth got the coaching gene, and I got the administration gene,” Kevin White said.
Legos, lacrosse and fishing
After earning his psychology degree from UNC in 2001, White spent a few years in corporate America and then began working his way up the athletic administration ladder. He credits the former ADs and mentors he worked with — including but not limited to Cheryl Levick at Georgia State, Rick Hart at SMU, Graham Neff at Clemson and Jim Phillips, who hired White at Northwestern and now is the ACC commissioner. (Both Neff and Phillips attended White’s introductory on-campus news conference Thursday).
White and his wife have three children — besides Justin, who’s now in his mid-20s, there is 16-year-old Kamden and 13-year-old Kinley. When I asked White what his perfect day would entail, he names three things: building a Lego set with Kinley, watching Kamden play one of his lacrosse games (White has christened himself the unofficial team videographer) and fishing with his family (controlled fishing, though, in a well-stocked lake where catching something is guaranteed).
It’s a nice series of images and White seems like a genuinely nice guy. He came across well in his news conference, too. But Charlotte 49ers fans are going to move beyond the honeymoon period quickly and want to know what White is going to do right now.
Those fans have been waiting for a long time to see Charlotte 49ers basketball return to the Bobby Lutz days and Charlotte 49ers football return to … well, that program has a few nostalgic days to speak of, but no nostalgic years. The 49ers have only had one winning football season in their brief history, and even in that one they went 7-6.
“There’s no secret,” White said, returning to his earlier point. “In order for our institution to have the notoriety and the prestige and the recognition that we all want to have, we have to be successful in football and men’s basketball.”
The other Kevin White
One oddity: White has the exact same name as a far more well-known athletic director. The “original” Kevin White was the athletic director at Notre Dame before serving as Duke’s AD from 2008-21. (Matt Plizga, who is now an associate AD at Charlotte but previously worked at Duke, now holds the unusual distinction of having worked under both Kevin Whites).
“To me, he’s a legend and would be on the Mount Rushmore of ADs,” Charlotte’s Kevin White said of the other Kevin White. “I’ve met him several times. And I joke with people all the time that I get a lot of emails read because they think that I’m the other White, until they open it up.”
This Kevin White also mentioned some numbers he’s excited about. UNC Charlotte has around 189,000 alumni, he said, and roughly 60% of them live in the greater Charlotte area.
“So there’s a great opportunity to engage,” he said.
There certainly is.
But it’s going to come down to this, as it almost always does in sports:
You’re going to have to win.
This story was originally published February 27, 2026 at 5:00 AM with the headline "New Charlotte 49ers AD Kevin White says football, men’s hoops ‘have to be good’."
