College sports tie that bonds Georgia basketball's Mike White and Tennessee's Danny White

In certain respects, the path to Mike and Danny White making their living in college athletics began by “pounding the rock,” as Danny called it, on driveways as kids growing up.

Just don’t expect a quick answer on how many different places they hooped it up along the way.

“I couldn’t even answer that question,” Danny White said. “We moved around quite a bit as kids. I do remember shoveling off the driveway in Maine so we could get some shots in. We had the basement going in Maine, an unfinished basement, nailed some Jordan Jammer hoops to the rafters so we had a full court thing going on down there. In New Orleans, my mother tells us all the time, the neighbors would call the police on us because we’d be playing basketball until 2 in the morning on a Friday night."

More Bulldogs: What Mike White sees in his first UGA basketball team and role of NIL in assembling roster

Also: Two basketball coaching hires. How UGA filled its openings with & without a search firm

Mike White is set to coach his first game as Georgia’s basketball coach next Monday.

First, there’s a little matter of a monster football matchup Saturday between the Bulldogs and Tennessee where younger brother Danny just happens to be the athletic director who brought with him from UCF second-year coach Josh Heupel

Danny smoked a cigar in the locker room when then No. 6 Tennessee upset then No. 3 Alabama 52-49 on Oct. 15 (“That one someone handed to me because I didn’t realize we were smoking cigars in the locker room," he said). Kevin White, their father, was at the game as well and took in the scene.

“I’ll tell you what, I almost got sick with all the cigar smoke, but it was fun,” Kevin White said. “It was great fun.”

Kevin is retired now. Well, sort of. He ended a 47-year athletics career including 38 as AD including at Duke, Notre Dame and Arizona State, but he’s still pretty busy.

He’s a professor, teaching a sports business class in the MBA program at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and an athletic consultant for Huron, a professional services firm.

Four of his five kids remain very much in the world of college athletics.

“Only one of us is smart enough to do something different,” Danny cracked.

Son Brian is athletic director at Florida Atlantic. Daughter Mariah Chappell is assistant athletic director for administration at SMU. His oldest, daughter Maureen, teaches English at Notre Dame Prep in Scottsdale, Ariz.

“It was not by design to say the least,” Kevin White said by phone from Arizona where he took a short vacation to visit his grandkids. “In fact, I think they would all separately tell you I strongly encouraged them to chart their own course, do their own thing and I was terribly unsuccessful in that parenting skill I should say. … I love every second of it, to be honest.”

Mike got into coaching as an assistant at Jacksonville State in 2000 and Danny followed as a basketball graduate assistant at Ohio in 2004 before going into administration at Northern Illinois.

Mike White leans on his family through the ups and downs of a pressure-packed job, most recently seven seasons as Florida’s coach.

“The support I think is probably unparalleled,” he said. “The moral support from your inner circle I would assume is really unique for someone in my seat to be able to have those outlets and resources. Just the simple moral support of, ‘Hey how are you doing? Tough loss last night.’ I thought you guys did this well, that well. They are able to call and say, ‘From a coach’s perspective give me your two cents on this.’ A lot of time it’s just one cent I’ve got. And vice versa.”

Danny says he talks often with Mike and it’s helpful to have a “someone that is a high-profile head coach in a revenue producing sport that I can have open, candid conversations with. I think he helps me be a better AD.”

While Kevin White tried to climb the career ladder, the siblings formed a bond that still exists today.

“There’s a family text they’re on all day every day—all of them,” he said. “These guys can’t go a day without touching base with one another. They’re very reliant on each other emotionally and they’re very passionate about each other’s plight in the world. It’s kind of really great. …These guys are pretty unfiltered and they poke at each other in ways that would probably surprise people when they see their public demeanor.”

Two nonfamily members take part in the family text, Kevin said: Duke athletic director Nina King and her husband Rick. Nina King succeeded Kevin White at Duke and has worked with him going back to Notre Dame starting in 2005.

“They’re like siblings to our kids and vice versa,” he said.

Nina King was there in mid-July in Dublin, Ireland to celebrate early the 50th wedding anniversary of Kevin and Jane, along with all five of their kids and their spouses and 13 of his 16 grandchildren. The actual anniversary date is Dec. 22.

King was among some 20 of White’s former colleagues that surprised him by coming overseas to share the moment. They included Stanford AD Bernard Muir, former Penn State AD Sandy Barbour and former Florida State AD Stan Wilcox who is now with the NCAA.

Mike White has crossed paths with his brothers during his coaching career after four years starting on the Ole Miss basketball team.

When he was an assistant in Oxford, Danny ran the athletic foundation and bought the house next door to him. When Mike was head coach at Louisiana Tech, Brian worked at the school for two and a half years as associate AD, marketing his brother’s team as “The Dunkin’ Dawgs” to the Ruston community.

“I would say it’s a lifestyle growing up within college athletics,” Brian said. “Not only was my father a big influence, but heck my mom is probably a bigger sports-obsessed human being than my dad. She may be the biggest sports fan I know.”

Kevin and Jane met attending St. Joseph’s College in Indiana where he was a track sprinter and lived in Trevor City, Mich. after they got married but moved to New Port Richey, Fla., to help care for his ailing father.

“We ended up teaching and coaching like crazy,” Kevin said. “My wife was an education major and had designs on teaching and coaching, but I did not. I thought at that point I would move into maybe the banking community.”

He coached cross country and track and was an assistant football and wrestling coach at Gulf High School. Jane coached about everything at Clearwater Central Catholic —swimming, gymnastics, volleyball, women’s basketball, track and cross country.

“Whatever they hell they needed,” Kevin said.

Jane and Kevin coached track at Central Michigan next and the family moved to Mt. Pleasant.

There was a brief stop at Morehead State in Kentucky until the school dropped the track program. Then it was off to Flint, Mich., where Kevin was the district AD for the school district and then Cape Giradarou, Mo., where he coached track.

All that before Mike finished kindergarten.

He lived in Dubuque, Iowa from first to fourth grade when Kevin was AD at Loras College, then to Orno from fifth to eight grade when he moved on to Maine and then New Orleans from 9th through 12th grade when he was AD at Tulane.

“I was the only one of our five that went to the same high school, I believe,” Mike said.

Georgia is the 18th state White said he’s lived. That includes time playing for the New Mexico Slam in the International Basketball League.

All that moving growing up made making lasting friendships hard.

“We relied on each other,” said Mike, who has five kids with wife Kira, who played volleyball at Ole Miss and has a law degree. “We’re a pretty close, tight knit family. It also taught some skills in terms of developing relationships. My circle is very small and I’m very family oriented. My experience as a kid probably was a factor in that.”

The White kids grew up going to games, practices and having events with donors or athletes at the house.

“It just became what we knew and what we were around and who we were,” Brian said.

“When you’re a kid in this business, just like my kids today, you’re in it and you’re completely immersed in it,” Danny said.

Mike, now 45, is the second of the five White kids. Maureen is 49, Danny is 43, Brian is 39 and Mariah, who swam at Duke is 31.

Before Tennessee, Danny White was AD at Buffalo and UCF where in 2016 he hired Katie Abrahamson-Henderson who jumped to Georgia as its head women’s basketball coach soon after Mike White did. Danny played basketball at Towson and Notre Dame.

Mike White relied on his family as a sounding board when he uprooted his career by leaving Florida where he reached four NCAA tournaments but was feeling some pressure and decided to go to Georgia.

On the March day he interviewed and accepted the job, he spoke to his father, Danny and Brian.

“I think it was a great opportunity to build something that can be built,” said Danny, who vouched to Mike about Josh Brooks, the Georgia AD he knows from SEC circles. “I think most people feel like the Georgia basketball program’s best days are ahead of it and I think Mike had that perspective and I agreed with him. …We just kind of talked it through. It was a big decision for him and his family.”

Kevin White said his conversation with Mike boiled down to: ‘What do you think you want to do and why do you want to do it? I’ll try to help them get to a conclusion but I won’t make the decision for them. I’m not good at a lot of things. I think I’m pretty good at that.”

Danny hopes to get to town a day early this week. He plans to bring his whole family to stay with Mike and Kira and the kids for the big weekend.

Kevin is making plans to visit Athens to see his son coaching the Bulldogs and of course visit his grandkids.

“We’ve got it mapped out pretty good,” he said.

He recalls coming to Athens before for a speaking engagement once and some NCAA championship events in various sports.

“The restaurants and pubs downtown,” he said, “it doesn’t take an Irish-Catholic guy to get excited about Athens.”

This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: How college sports made Mike White and Danny White closer to family