Behind the Scenes at UVA Athletics

SHARON HOSTLER: Good day, everyone. Happy sort of rainy spring day. But this is the Retired Faculty Association, the University of Virginia, on our last programming for this academic year. It has been terrific to spend the pandemic with you on Zoom. Next year, we have an active program already in process, beginning in September, when we're going to hear from the students about how they have weathered this pandemic experiment that we've all been living through. 

We don't know, just like you don't know-- and I suspect the governor doesn't know and Jim Ryan doesn't know-- whether that's going to be live small group, how it will be. But just know that we will be back. And we welcome all of you to return. 

There will be no dues. But we continue to say thank you. Keep sending those funds because it still does cost something to be able to get the Zoom and the recording and the closed caption. So be generous. It's the end of the year. We're delighted to-- especially our treasurer, Bob Ribando, delighted to receive all your contributions. 

Before I introduce the master of ceremonies for our final session, I would like to thank you all for the opportunity to serve as your president and to introduce Richard Brownlee from the Darden School, who is our new president, who will, I think, take over very shortly. So welcome, Dick. We're delighted to have you in the leadership role. 

RICHARD BROWNLEE: Thank you. Sharon, I want to say thank you to you for leading us through this extraordinary year, where we had to change everything we were doing and how we did it. And thanks to the board. And also, thank you to the UVA Alumni Association and Jessica Weissman, who has worked with us. 

It's taken a real effort to pull this off. And thank you to all of our members for staying with us and participating. We look forward to a great year next year, whatever it will look like. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Thank you. And now is my opportunity to turn the program over to Professor Craig Littlepage. I've just taken my power, right, to announce that. It's a street professorship at this point in time. It's not fully endowed. But it may be after the donations come in, Craig. 

Craig Littlepage is a former director of our athletics department, vice president, and leader here for many years and one of my most respected and delightful colleagues and helped me through the years many times from the School of Medicine all the way to Madison Hall. So Craig, the program is yours. Please introduce us to Ted White. Thank you. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: And thank you, Sharon, not only for the introduction but also for the collaborative work that we did over many, many years. And thank you for the leadership that you provided to the Retired Faculty Association. It's my pleasure this afternoon to introduce Ted White. Ted is the Deputy Athletic Director for Strategic Advancement. And I'm very pleased that he's able to join us today. First of all, Ted, the title, Deputy Athletics Director for Strategic Advancement, tell us what that means. 

TED WHITE: Yeah, we're actually still figuring that out, Craig. That is a new title bestowed upon me in January. First, I would like to thank you for this opportunity. I'm really excited to be here today. 

And I would say to Sharon that for those of us who have been in college athletics for a number of years, you are a professor. You're our professor. And I just wanted to make sure to put that out there. 

So I have been involved in student development and sport performance for years and years and worked with Carla for 14 years before coming to Charlottesville a couple of years ago to join her team. And she asked me to take on a couple of specific projects when I first arrived. And now that those are up and running, she asked me to get involved in what she is calling strategic advancement. 

It's not exactly fundraising. It is partnership development. I think one of our goals, as it was yours for years, was to win championships across all sports without giving an inch on the academic side or the student development side. And there are very few institutions and athletic departments around the country that can even attempt that. 

And we recognize that we are probably not going to ever have the financial resources that some of our competitors have. And so we've got to be really creative and thoughtful about our resource gathering. And so that's what the strategic advancement is all about. It's about trying to find competitive advantages where others may not be looking, whether it's in partnerships or non-traditional fundraising opportunities. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So you grew up in California but ended up spending most of your professional career in the Southeast on the Atlantic Coast. How does that happen? How does that work? 

TED WHITE: Yeah, great question. So I grew up in a California that not many know exist. I grew up in a very isolated, kind of economically depressed area of Northeastern California, where folks either worked in the lumber industry or the railroad industry. 

My parents were from Berkeley and Oakland. And the city of Oakland bought some land up in the mountains to send kids in the summer and to create a satellite community college campus. And so my parents worked on the community college campus in a little town called Quincy. 

And so I grew up understanding when we left Quincy in the summers to visit family in Oakland and Berkeley. I had a real understanding of what a major college campus environment was like. And when I was back in Quincy, I watched kids that were older than me either stay or leave. 

And almost all of those who left left because they had an opportunity to go to college. And about half of those played a sport. And so I grew up thinking that my opportunity to leave that little area was through college sports. 

And when my college career ended, it seemed like a natural fit for me to go into the business and try to impact student athletes. I really saw college athletics as an opportunity to create access to education. So that became a passion of mine. 

I started at the University of California Davis and ended up at UC Berkeley for a few years. But this was in the late '90s, early 2000s, before academic progress rate and graduation rates really became something that was actively measured. And so I became aware that there were a lot of student athletes who didn't really have true access to a meaningful education. 

And I realized that a lot of the great work to be done was in the Southeast. And I had an opportunity to go to LSU and work with their football program when Nick Saban was the coach in the early 2000s. They had a situation where the average freshman football player was on academic probation by the end of their first term. 

And so it was very typical for someone to be admitted to LSU as part of the football team and then immediately fail two or three classes and get off to a really bad start. And so they were looking for someone to come in and help turn that around. And I saw that as a great opportunity. 

Most of my colleagues at Berkeley thought I was crazy. My wife thought I was a little nuts. But we packed up and moved down to Baton Rouge and rolled my sleeves up and really got to work in that space around creating opportunity in this sense of engagement, academic engagement. And that led me to a phone call with Carla, who was interested in creating similar opportunities at Georgia. 

As you know, the SEC competes at everything. And so the work we were doing at LSU started to get some notice across the conference. So the turnaround in terms of grades and graduation rates at LSU after a couple of years got Carla's attention. 

And so we struck up a relationship over the phone. And just started talking shop about of what programs worked, what didn't work, what we'd like to try. And that led to a job offer. 

And so I joined her at Georgia, spent the next 12 years doing similar things, just experimenting and trying to figure out ways to engage student athletes on the academic side and the personal development side. Eventually, that grew into programming that expanded beyond academics. So once we had really established a firm hold on the academic success, we started branching out into personal development, community engagement, leadership development, career preparation, and then into the sport performance side, which I've really enjoyed. And when she took the job at UVA, she invited me to come join her and continue exploring. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Here you are. 

TED WHITE: Yep, that's right. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So you've been at UVA now for three years. What has impressed you the most about the university and the athletics program and your experiences here on grounds? 

TED WHITE: Yeah, it's the people, hands down. It's an incredible environment. And one of my favorite activities is working in recruiting for some of our sports, particularly football and men's women's basketball. But to talk to prospects about the opportunities that exist at Virginia that are unique because of the people who are at Virginia. 

A lot of the work that I've done over the years, you didn't necessarily have the full support of the university, the department, the coaching staff, the community. You might be swimming against the current in promoting academic engagement with elite student athletes. And what I found at UVA was that you're swimming with the current when you're speaking that language. And the partnerships and collaborations that we can create throughout the UVA ecosystem are really powerful and have allowed us to create some really unique programming that just doesn't exist anywhere else. 

Because not only are the people at UVA, whether it's faculty or alumni, administrators, students, world class, but they're really open to connection and collaboration. And it's that combination that I found to be really unique. I've never experienced that anywhere else. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So there's been a focus over the last decade or so on student athlete welfare and student athlete development. Tell us about what UVA is doing to ensure that our student athletes have the tools that they need to reach their potential, both while they're here and enrolled and as well when they leave grounds to start their own careers. 

TED WHITE: Great. Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about that unique program that we developed. And we call it Pathways. And it revolves around five key areas. One is, of course, academics. Another is career preparation, leadership development, community engagement, and personal development. 

Each of those five areas is made up of engagement types. In our minds, we wanted to come up with some traditional and some non-traditional engagement types that really asked student athletes to think outside the box in terms of their experience. So we looked at the research and tried to figure out, what are the most important aspects of the undergraduate experience, the most meaningful and the most lasting? 

And it turns out that while some of them are in the classroom, many are outside the classroom. And so we started collecting opportunity types across those five areas. And I'll give some specific examples in a moment. 

And we front loaded the student athlete experience with assessments and reflective exercises. And so we reached out to a couple of departments on grounds, one being contemplative sciences. Contemplative sciences helped us develop some unique and specific reflective exercises for first-year student athletes in combination with a couple well established assessment exercises. 

Student athletes start digging in and trying to figure out exactly what they may want to do alongside their sport and beyond their sport. And it is related to a career. But it's also related to their values and who they want to be and who they want to impact down the road. 

And then they enter our web-based system with some of that knowledge that they're developing about themselves. And they start making choices on their interests. So it could be a career-related interest. It could be entrepreneurship. It could be economics. It could be teaching. It could be social justice issues. It could be cultural issues. 

And then they pick from the engagement types in each of those five categories. And so, for example, in academics they can pick a faculty mentor. They can pick a class for interest. So rather than taking an elective by path of least resistance, as we call it-- so for years and years all across the country, student athletes have-- when it comes time to pick an elective, they may ask the juniors and seniors on the team, what's the path of least resistance for my elective, the one that's not taught at 8:00 AM or the one that's, quote unquote, "the easiest?" We encourage our student athletes to pick electives based on a passion they might have. 

We look at undergraduate research opportunities, study abroad opportunities, things like that, classes that have projects, things that are really meaningful, and ask students to search by those in academics. Under the career tab, it's things informational interviews with alums and other partners that we may have out in the world, job shadowing opportunities, externships, internships,. And under personal development, it could be organizations across grounds. And then under leadership development, different opportunities for certificate programs or academies that they could join and the like. 

So then a student athlete would hit a button at the end of that selection process. And a customized menu will pop up for them based on their entries. And they'll be put in touch with organizations, departments, faculty members, alumni who are doing that work and passionate about that work so that we can connect the student athlete with those individuals and those organizations to really engage and hopefully fuel their interest forward. 

So they're not just taking classes and checking boxes. They're really engaging and networking and connecting with people and doing meaningful work. And then hopefully that translates to when they graduate and go into the world. And they either give back or they continue interacting with that community online. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So you made a reference to this just briefly in one of your previous comments. But we have a question from one of our viewers related to the types of things that are talked about, particularly by our coaches and administrators like you and Carla, to prospective student athletes. What is it that gets the attention of these 16-, 17-, 18-year-old young people that encourages them and facilitates an interest in the University of Virginia? 

TED WHITE: Well, what we found is that this Pathway program, because it's designed to respond to an individual student athlete's interests, it is really compelling and intriguing to our prospects. One of the things that I've been most impressed in athletics at Virginia is our coaching staff across the board will not-- they are true to the University and true to their own philosophies in recruiting. I have worked at other institutions where you may have coaches that are willing to tell any recruit that has enough talent whatever it is they think they want to hear to get them onto that campus. And then we'll work out the details. 

That is not the case at Virginia. I think our coaches have all been attracted to the University of Virginia because they respect the values of the university. And they want to win championships without giving up anything on the academic side. And so they recruit to that. 

And the philosophy is that if you cast a nationwide net, there are enough really talented athletes in any sport who are also really passionate about other things and want to engage in the full experience. And so the fact that our coaches, whether it's football or men's basketball, women's basketball-- across the board, their original pitches and their searches for prospects include that. So when the parents and students come to meetings with our staff and with myself, they get really excited about the individualization and the customization of the whole experience. So we really don't have to do a lot of the same things that other schools do. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Here's another question from one of our colleagues. A topic of concern nationally has revolved around the number of transfer student athletes and the transfer portal. So many student athletes are leaving their institutions, particularly in the sport of men's basketball, with this thought that maybe the pastures are greener somewhere else. What are the reasons for the trend? And what is it that you think the NCAA and the member institutions will do to address the concerns that so many have about frequency of transfers? 

TED WHITE: Yeah, I'm actually on the Transfer Working Group committee. And so I've been involved in those conversations for the last year or so. I think between the transfer legislation NIL, which I'm sure we'll get to at some point in this conversation, and even the gambling concerns that are coming, there are some very real threats to the way we want to go about this enterprise. 

So we want to encourage student athletes to engage academically and develop as people while they're developing as athletes. And that is unique in the Power Five. There are very few of our competitors that are committed as committed as we are to this across the university. 

And so I have and my colleagues have real concerns about this transfer legislation and the environment because it is a result of public pressure to allow student athletes the same flexibility that coaches seemingly have in terms of leaving a job for another job for a better opportunity. And so the public perception is that coaches and administrators can go anywhere they want anytime they want for a better deal. But student athletes cannot. 

Up until this point, a few sports-- basketball, baseball, football, hockey-- the student athletes were asked to sit a year in residence before they were eligible to compete. And that was because transferring impacts academic progress. So anytime you transfer, you're likely to lose credits. And if you transfer twice, you're likely to lose more credits. 

And so you're less likely to graduate on time. And the research said that in those sports in particular, athletes tended to leave at higher rates than other sports when their eligibility was exhausted. And so the thought was, all right, well, let's ask them to sit for a year. That'll make them think really hard before transferring. 

But it will also give them a year in residence to establish a major that they're interested in, catch up on the front end with graduation percentages, and have a much better opportunity to graduate when their eligibility is exhausted. And I think our fear is that because the graduation rates that have been published and promoted across the country in the NCAA have led people to assume that everyone graduates and there's no problem anymore-- and so let's just open the floodgates and let kids choose where they want to play. And so it's going to be really interesting to see what type of impact that has. 

Our coaches are already struggling with what that means for them in terms of recruiting because it creates a cycle. And we're already seeing the cycle. If one of our student athletes transfers and let's say it's a sophomore and the freshman that had come in under that sophomore is now thinking, oh, I've got an opportunity, and then we bring in a transfer right back over the top of that freshman, that freshman now wants to leave. And so it creates this vicious cycle where kids are coming and going every time someone else transfers in. It makes somebody nervous about their position on the team. And I think what we're trying to figure out is, how do we survive in this environment without giving up what makes us successful? And that's going to be a trick. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So a quick history lesson from a guy that's been in this business since 1973. The transfer requirements up until recent years were that in every sport, student athletes that wish to go to another institution had to sit out the one year, put in that one year of residence. And then the rules started to evolve. And they carved out that all those sports except for football, men's and women's basketball, hockey, baseball-- those other sports, the student athlete that wanted to transfer could seek a waiver. 

And they would have to go through a process at their institution. And they'd have to get a hearing with the people outside the athletics department to get a waiver to be able to transfer to a new institution and then participate in their first year. Those opportunities were not made available to the football, basketball, ice hockey, baseball, student athletes. 

And because of the publicity around student athletes in those major sports, if you will, being treated differently, a disproportionate number of those student athletes that were not given the chance to participate if they transferred right away, ethnic minority student athletes in particular, and the perception that, well, you're letting your coaches leave, you're letting administrators leave, and they don't have any kind of penalty, the public furor over that inequity between the student athlete and the coaches and administrators and the number of student athletes that were ethnic minorities that were being treated differently and much more restrictive, that's how we got to this more permissive legislation, which basically allowed student athletes in all sports that if they wanted to transfer, they could leave and participate at their next institution right away. 

And as that legislation has taken effect, as we see almost every day in the newspapers, there are student athletes that are leaving because of, in some cases, frivolous reasons and not bona fide academic reasons. Sometimes, it may be that they have circumstances at home with a parent or somebody that's ill. But there's got to be a lot of conversation-- I know you're involved with it-- concerning, is there a better way to go about this and monitor it? 

TED WHITE: That's absolutely right. And the conversations that we're having as a committee have already turned from allowing this to happen once to, how can we stop it from happening two and three times? And so the NCAA legal advisors are already talking about, well, if you let them transfer one time and play immediately, there's no argument for stopping them the second and third time. So we could be just really lifting the lid off this thing and being asked to study the academic fallout over the next few years before correcting it again. That's what I'm a little worried about. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Yeah, another topic that's been getting the attention, unfortunately, of the courts, state legislators, and Congress is the topic of the name, image, and likeness. And I know that you're involved with discussions and a lot of conversations around that. For those that aren't familiar, can you give us a CliffsNotes version of what name, image, and likeness refers to? 

TED WHITE: Sure. So name, image, and likeness refers to the ability for amateur student athletes at the college level to benefit financially from their name, image, or likeness. And so it runs the gamut from student athletes who may have other interests outside of their sport that they can benefit from financially while they're in school. Up to now, there's a really rigorous process that they would have to go through in order-- for example, if they were a musician or if they wrote a book, it would be really difficult to profit from those things. And so part of NIL is freeing those student athletes up so that they're able to benefit financially from skills and talents that they have outside of their sport that are really healthy pursuits and they should benefit from. 

Another aspect is marketing, licensing, those kind of things. So imagine at Virginia the sales of Kyle Guy jerseys or Mamadi Diakite jerseys, allowing student athletes to benefit from a percentage of those sales if it's specific to their jersey or their number, selling autographs, hiring an agent, which is a very controversial aspect of this. But that would be allowed. Student athletes would be able to hire an agent. 

Those agents would be allowed to go out and seek marketing deals for student athletes. So for example, a student athlete might be able to make their own deal with Nike outside of the apparel deal that the university and the athletic association have with Nike. They could make a deal with one of our local partners-- Wegmans, for example-- and benefit from those things. 

So there are several states that have passed legislation. And I think Florida and Mississippi are the first to open this up this fall. The NCAA has been put on notice that they better come up with something across the country this summer that allows student athletes to benefit. I think that it's all in the details. 

And the NCAA is obviously trying to come up with some sort of parameter that would stop universities and big donors and coaches from getting involved in using these opportunities as recruiting inducements so that a young 17-, 16-year-old who's thinking about their education makes the choice because they might get a $30,000 deal on a billboard in one town. And they don't factor in the education that they may or may not get. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So absent the NCAA having a standard for name, image, and likeness right now, what we have potentially are 50 different states coming up with their own legislation in this regard and in consistencies between those pieces of legislation which could create a competitive advantage in one state compared to another state, particularly when you're talking about conferences that have member institutions from four or five different states and how those pieces of legislation could be different. What do you think are the chances that the NCAA can somehow get a consensus and come up with a standard and one piece of legislation that applies to all 350 some odd Division I schools? 

TED WHITE: Yeah, that's a great question. I believe that they will come up with something over the summer that could be enacted. I think where it's going to get tricky is that there are going to be several states who would want, whatever the NCAA comes up with, to be more open. 

I think there are a couple of states, like California and Florida, that it's no holds barred. Just let it fly. Anything goes in order to push the envelope and to create a recruiting advantage for the universities in their states. So I think that's where it's going to get a little tricky because the NCAA doesn't want to just blow the lid off the whole thing. You want to create some sort of parameters. 

So I think there'll be some sort of compromise by the end of the summer. But that's my best guess. I know that the state of Virginia is interested in considering NIL legislation. I don't know. It's too late for it to go into this cycle. So I don't know when that would happen. 

We have been working for the past year or so on NIL education for our student athletes. So when this first started coming around and looking like it was a reality, I approached Carla and said, hey, can we get ahead of this and create an educational program that's a little maybe different than what our competitors are looking at and work with our university partners and create educational opportunities that go alongside with our long-term vision for education and prioritizing education? 

And so we've worked with Darden, the law school, McIntire, Baton, and some others to create a layered educational program so that student athletes, if they choose Virginia-- rather than tell them, hey, we can get you X number of dollars by putting you on a billboard, we're going to talk them into the idea that pathways will help them develop their real interests. And then through connections with content experts in our faculty and our alumni base, they can really find out exactly what goes into having a long-term, successful opportunity in that area. 

So if you want to start your own sports camps, for example, we would connect you with the law school and maybe a faculty member in commerce and obviously our compliance department so that you could really dig in and find out exactly what goes into this and how to be successful at it long term and not just look for a flash in the pan, a few quick bucks. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Yeah. So I think as a reminder to our listeners, name, image, and likeness-- and if you agree, fine. If you don't agree, that's fine too. But name, image, and likeness is a step removed from actually paying athletes by-- in other words, this is not pay for play when you talk about name, image, and likeness. Would you agree? 

TED WHITE: I would. This is in response to that. And as you know, Craig, the pay for play argument is playing out in the Supreme Court now. So there is a possibility that we end up there. So we're all watching that very carefully and hoping for the best. 

But my hope-- I've actually come a long way and come around on the NIL over the years. I just hope that we don't nationally lose sight of the value of education because I do not hear in the conversations how we're going to protect the real opportunity for education for student athletes. So I'm hoping that gets reinserted into the conversation. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Right. So another major topic over the past 13, 14 months has been the pandemic. And it's disrupted so many different aspects of our lives. What are some of the impacts that have been most concerning to you as it relates to our program at UVA? And as part of your answer, you could talk a little bit about the terminology, the bubble, what that is, and what it's like being in the bubble, so to speak. So what have been the big issues as it relates to impacts, disruptions on our student athletes and academics, et cetera? 

TED WHITE: Yeah, well, we went into this at the very beginning thinking that we were going to shut down. We started the conversation last April and went into the summer as a team thinking that there's no safe way to move forward. And so we're going to start preparing for a semester or a year without practice or competition. 

And so we started building programming that we thought would be important on the student development side for student athletes that would replace training and practice and travel and competition. It started to become clearer and clearer over the summer that the Power Five conferences in the ACC in particular were going to find a way to move forward and practice and compete as safely as possible. 

And so over time, working closely with experts from the medical system, the ACC, and University of Virginia systems, just months of trying to figure out, all right, how we do this? And starting very, very slowly at first and meeting with every student athlete, particularly the fall student athletes at the end of the summer and saying, you have a choice. 

You do not have to return. You do not have to practice. You do not have to compete. Your scholarship will be held for you. You would be at no risk of losing your scholarship. If you'd like to sit out, that's totally fine. 

And then I think it became this week by week, March through the year, trying to figure out what a bubble looks like at on the college level because it really isn't a bubble. It's the closest thing we could come to a bubble. But the difference between the NBA and an actual bubble and a college, quote unquote, "bubble" is that we could create a bubble around practice and around meals and around travel and competition. 

But that leaves a lot of time for student athletes and students to exit and re-enter that bubble. So that became a real challenge. And so really had to work hard at communicating through and with our coaches to our student athletes that, hey, this is going to take extraordinary commitment to playing your season and playing your sport and being really disciplined when you're on your own time and not putting the team or your coaching staff or your season at risk by exiting any kind of bubble that you would have in your apartment or your dorm room, that kind of thing. 

So a lot of collaboration across grounds, a lot of collaboration across Charlottesville. Some of the unique expenses incurred involved extra buses, extra planes, busing to places like Tallahassee, Florida, instead of flying commercial. So we did without commercial flights. So we said, nobody can travel commercially. 

If you can't do a charter, then you're going to have to do buses. And if you do buses, you have to sit student athletes six feet apart on the buses, which means you have to take more buses. Yeah. Hotels where you either have a single person per room or you're with your roommate so that if somebody tests positive on the road, then you're less likely to contact trace anyone else beyond the person you probably would have already contact traced, which would be your roommate. Lots and lots of little things like that. And then, of course, the testing, just the sheer volume of the testing two and three times a week, depending on the sport, whether they're in season or out of season, to try to catch any positivity early enough in the process where they may not impact anyone else. And then arranging for quarantines and apartments and hotel rooms. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Right. So looking at it as an outsider, which is basically translated to be what I read in the newspaper, you guys have done a marvelous job staying ahead of things. And certainly, to think that there were going to be zero cases was an unrealistic expectation. But were you pretty pleased with the response on the part of the student athletes and the coaches to a very, very limited set of interactions with those people that are important to them, not only their teammates and classmates and so forth but families? These are kids, I would assume, that weren't having access to being able to see their families at events. 

TED WHITE: That's right. So yeah, in season, for example, if you take football, their families were allowed to enter Scott Stadium to watch football games. But they were allowed to interact at a distance for a short period after each game, masked and distanced. But otherwise, yeah, students, once they arrived on grounds in the summer, were not allowed to go home. 

And so basketball, for example, arrived in July, beginning of July. And typically, you can go home for a quick break over Christmas, sometimes right around Thanksgiving. They did not go home until the end of the NCAA tournament in April. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Wow. 

TED WHITE: Yeah. So they made some incredible sacrifices. And they all had choices. They were all given the opportunity to opt out if they felt like this was just too much to ask. And so it really was impressive at how dedicated they were to their teammates and their sport and their development and their commitment to it. Where we saw some slippage was in offseason activities, away from practice, away from competition, if student athletes went home for a break. And they were in an offseason. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Mm-hmm. How about in terms of academic performance? Has there been any impact on academic performance that you could attribute to, lack of full in class instruction? What, if any, have been the academic impacts on the student athletes? 

TED WHITE: Yeah, this is really interesting for me. Because having been involved in academic support for almost 30 years now, for a long time, I argued against online coursework. In the early mid 2000s, there was a push across athletic departments to encourage student athletes to enroll in online courses, particularly asynchronous courses, so that they wouldn't conflict with practice and training and that kind of thing. 

And so for years, I pushed against it. And student athletes at the time would usually clamor for that experience. They thought it would just be easier and better. And of course, that's before I came to the University of Virginia. 

But what we have found-- and it happened pretty quickly-- was that they don't like it. They really don't like the online environment. They can't interact with classmates. They can't interact with their faculty members, in some cases, graduate students and TAs. 

They like the in-person interaction. They can't form study groups that are meaningful because they can't develop those relationships with classmates on Zoom. And so over time, they have slowly kind of shut down in terms of active engagement. 

Last spring, you would see students go into breakout rooms and actively engage. And by the middle of fall, a breakout room was just an excuse for a timed break where all students would just shut their cameras off for however many minutes the faculty member told them they'd be in the breakout room. They just didn't want to do it anymore. 

And so you've got students really struggling with staying engaged. They're fighting through it. Interestingly enough, grades have gone up. And we attribute that primarily to the flexibility and grading options. 

And so you can take courses pass/fail or letter grade now. And so what students will do is if it's not an A or B, they'll take it pass/fail. And so the GPAs are a little inflated. We were probably the only Power Five school in the country that did not beat ourselves on the chest publicly and throw out our GPAs, because we knew that they were artificially inflated. 

We had a 3.6 department GPA in the spring. We had over a 3.5 in the fall. Typically, we're somewhere at 3.0, 3.1. And so we were happy for the student athletes that they got those grades. But we knew that there was another side. 

And in the fall, what we found is that student athletes withdrew from and failed to pass. Now, they changed their letter grade options. So they weren't F's. But they failed to pass more courses in this fall than they had in any semester that we could track. 

So there is a little bit of fallout. It's a little invisible. It's underneath. And it's in some withdrawals and some courses that don't impact GPA. But there is a disconnect and a lack of engagement to a certain degree. They want to be back in the classroom. They want to interact with faculty. They want to interact with the other students. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Great. We got about five minutes to go. And this is a topic that I feel compelled that we talk about a little bit. And so much over the past year has been focused on social justice. 

There's been a lot of conversation around teams nationally that have shown support for the different causes by locking arms, by kneeling during the national anthem, by putting slogans and words on the front and the back of their jerseys, and so forth. You've been a leader among folks within the ACC and certainly here at the University of Virginia on the Committee on Racial and Social Justice with the Atlantic Coast Conference. Tell us a little bit about that experience and what you have learned from it and what you brought to the University of Virginia as a result of those conversations. 

TED WHITE: Thank you for bringing that up. I'm really proud of the ACC for the creation of this committee and for allowing student athletes and coaches and staff across the conference the platform. So I'm excited about that. 

I think nationally, there are some opportunities as well. But from the beginning of the spring, when it became clear after the situation with George Floyd's death that people wanted to express their passions, we started engaging our student athletes and encouraging them to dive deep into their emotions and to go beyond hashtags and t-shirts. So that's what we asked of them. 

And a year and a half ago when we were first developing Pathways and we came up with one of the interest areas was social justice-- so that was baked in from the beginning-- we ran a pilot study with Curry and Paul Harris, Professor Paul Harris, to learn more about our Black student athlete experience. And we spent a summer doing this with some focus groups. 

And what came out of it was the formation of a student athlete-run organization. And it's called BOSS Black Student Athletes Offering Service and Support. And they are an official student organization. 

Another group of student athletes formed a social justice student organization. And so we work through those groups and the general student athletes and Pathways to find out what students are passionate about and then encourage them to get involved with organizations and faculty members and departments, like the Equity Center on grounds, to do more than just post something on social media, do more than just wear a t-shirt pregame. 

We understand the value of those things and support those things. But for example, our men's basketball team, a large percentage of our student athletes decided to take a knee during the national anthem and did so for the entire semester or the season. We met several times as a team, had the team and staff meet with several members of our university community, including the Racial Equity Task Force chairs, and asked them just to think and be able to express why they were taking a knee during the anthem and be able to clearly express their personal reasons for that and to respect teammates who may not want to kneel for the anthem and vice versa. 

So our thought is always just to dig deep for each individual and encourage them to get involved, whether it's voting and voting rights, fair housing, access to health care, education. We actually have a leadership academy. And we call it an Ethical Leadership Academy. 

It's a two-year curriculum. And because we were in Zoom this year, we weren't able to execute our originally planned second year curriculum. And so we broke our 30 students up into five categories of six students each based on their interests. And their job this semester is to identify organizations and alumni and faculty who are doing work around social justice issues and create opportunities for themselves and then opportunities to feed back into pathways for future student athletes to engage in. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Great, great. And one closing question. In your position as the deputy director of athletics, you have to have an interest in every sport and every student athlete and every coach. But I'd like for you to tell the audience that you have an interest in one specific team, a Major League Baseball team. Who is that team? And how the heck did your affinity with this Major League Baseball team start? You and I have had this discussion. 

TED WHITE: That's right. Yeah, we share this. So I'm a lifelong New York Yankees fan. I played baseball in college. So I'm a baseball fan. My uncle played for the Dodgers. My father-in-law played for the Giants. My son is a pitcher at the University of Michigan. So baseball runs through our family. 

And I joke all the time. I told you guys a little bit about where I grew up. And so in the '70s, in an isolated little mountain town in Northern California, you had the TV that was about, three feet high but sat on the floor. And you had to go over to it and click it on and wait for it to come on. 

And you got four channels, including PBS. And so you got a couple baseball games a week and a couple football games a week. And that was it. And so I was five hours away from the teams in the Bay Area. 

And so they were no different to me than any other team. It was who I saw on TV that were my hometown teams. And at that time, in baseball, it was either the Reds, the Dodgers, or the Yankees. And in football, it was the Raiders, the Steelers, or the Cowboys. And I ended up picking the Cowboys and the Yankees and sticking with them for better and for worse. 

Right now, the Cowboys, it's a lot worse. But I've been a lifelong Yankee fan. And I enjoy getting to be a fan. You know this, Craig. You can't really do that. You don't get that when you're working in college athletics. And so that's my one little outlet as a sports fan. And I enjoy that. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Great. Well, I'd just like to thank you, Ted, for spending an hour with us and the Retired Faculty Association this afternoon. And intercollegiate athletics for our audience is facing some of the most significant challenges in the history of NCAA sports in this next two to three years. 

And I would say that the University of Virginia, with Carla Williams and Ted White and the other staff members at the university, are the types of leaders that we know will be involved in so many of these discussions and will come up with solutions that really do preserve the types of things that we have all become sports fans of particularly at the college level, the reasons that we've become college sports fans. So we thank you, Ted, for not only your time today but for the work that you and your colleagues are doing in the athletics department. 

You're running a great show over there. You guys are so well regarded nationally in so many things that you do. So thank you again. Thank you also for your friendship and for making me feel still being a part of the athletics program at the University of Virginia. Thank you very much. 

TED WHITE: Thank you, Craig. And thank you for making it so easy on us. It's been an easy transition. You did a phenomenal job. And we feel very fortunate every day to be able to work in this environment that you created. So thank you. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: You know where to reach me. But you won't need me. I know that. Thank you again for being with us.