Faith in WCU student-athletes leads to fundraising challenge to Greek alumni

By Melanie Threlkeld McConnell

White, a financial adviser, believes in lifting people up to create not only stronger communities, but a better world. So, he’s putting his money where his mouth is by issuing the Catamount Club Greek Challenge to members of his former fraternity, Sigma Chi, and other WCU Panhellenic groups to help plug the financial gap caused by COVID-19. The Greek Challenge allows alumni members of WCU sororities and fraternities to band together to raise scholarship support for Catamount Athletics. Now in its seventh consecutive year, the Greek Challenge has raised more than $3.5 million toward student-athlete scholarships.

And it’s especially important this year. The WCU Athletics program anticipates losing more than $1 million in revenue during the 2020-2021 school year because of the pandemic. Money raised during the “Whee Are One” fund is intended to provide “immediate-use funds” for expenditures associated with the cost to compete, practice and train during the 2020-2021 academic year, said Ryan Jones, associate athletics director/development and ticketing.

White, a member of the Catamount Club, is all in. WCU athletics were important to him as a student — he never missed a football game — because they kept him connected to campus, they were fun and they were free. He’s now in a position, he said, with his own two children grown, where he can get more involved in supporting the university and its student-athletes.

“As I have done better in my career and life, I believe it’s really important to give back. I think it’s very important that we talk to and mentor these kids, said White, who earned a finance degree in 1989 and an MBA in 1991. “We want to make sure they’re successful in playing here, but we also want to make sure they’re educated, because we’re all going pro in something. We want to make sure that the 99.99 percent who don’t go pro in football, basketball or whatever the sport have an excellent education and they’re able to have a successful career and build a family. That’s very important to me.”

Through his participation in his church’s mission work, White said he has seen first-hand how people’s lives can be changed or “re-booted” by someone lending a hand. “I have seen some college athletes who don’t focus on their education, play four seasons and go home to live in poverty,” said White. “I don’t want that to happen with the kids who play sports at WCU. That’s why I’m really focused on this issue.”

White’s fondness for his fellow Catamounts goes back to his own college days when he transferred to WCU from the University of Alaska Fairbanks after his freshman year, following his roommate who had been recruited to play tennis for the university. White’s family had moved to Alaska from California when he was 2 years old so his father could secure work on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which, once built, would transport oil from one end of the state to the other. He grew up in Copper Center, a small village of 300 to 400 residents who primarily were Athabaskan Indians. By the time college rolled around, White was tired of the cold.

“I have lived in the South pretty much for the rest of my life, so I equate myself as more of a Southerner than anything else at this point,” said White, who owns homes in Santa Rosa, California, Las Vegas and Bristol, Tennessee, locations where he and his wife maintain business offices.

White said he thrived at WCU, working as a resident adviser on the first floor of the south wing of Leatherwood Dorm and becoming a founding member of the university’s Sigma Chi chapter. The university’s impact on him, he said, was “enormous.”