At Georgia Tech, coach Eric Reveno listens and is prompted to action

On a video teleconference call with his team on Monday night, Eric Reveno listened. Georgia Tech’s associate head coach for basketball, Reveno is a 54-year-old white man, a married father of two who was born and raised in northern California and Stanford-educated. In the context of the struggle for racial justice, he described himself as someone whose heart has been in the right place, but hasn’t been as engaged as perhaps he would have liked.

As protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death voiced again the frustrations of people of color, Reveno felt embarrassment that he and others of his age had not done more to advance their cause.

“I think no one’s going to be claiming my generation was the greatest generation, let’s put it that way,” Reveno told the AJC. “There’s not going to be books about my generation, and I’m embarrassed by that, and I’m disgusted by that.”

On the call, one player whom Reveno heard was Malachi Rice, a senior walk-on guard from Indianapolis whose family now resides in Boston. Rice, a 21-year-old black man, comes from a family that takes education seriously. His twin brother Isaiah is a walk-on basketball player at Vanderbilt, and their older brother Solomon was a track star at Columbia.

Being informed is also important. Rice said his mother made him download a news app to his phone so he would know about the world around him.

Rice said that, on the call, he shared his conviction that it was his and his teammates’ civic duty to vote, that “it was kind of contradictory to protest and then not vote. If you feel strongly about something to the point where we’re going to protest, when the election day comes, we need to vote, as well.”

On the same call, Reveno shared his embarrassment over his inaction and vowed to coaches, players and staff that he would do better.

After the virtual meeting, Rice’s comments about voting lingered with Reveno. An analytics junkie, Reveno looked up voting data for his own age group.

“It was just not good,” he said.

He considered his calling as a college basketball coach, and what he had done in that role to encourage civic participation. Beyond helping his players improve as players and pushing them to their degrees, he had helped players learn habits related to their physical and mental health and financial well being, but not as much their civic obligations. In fact, he recognized that the daily life of a college athlete – classes, practice, weightlifting, video sessions, study hall – can be a full-day obligation and hinder voting. Could he help ingrain in his players the habit of voting and help their generation become more conscientious citizens?

He woke up Tuesday morning, he said, and the idea hit him.

“You’ve got to help them vote,” he said. “You’ve got to teach them.”

Reveno’s grand idea is the passage of NCAA legislation to free the roughly 500,000 athletes at the Division I, II and III levels from obligatory team activities on election day, such as games, practices and team meetings. On Thursday, nine Tech teams committed to giving their athletes Nov. 3 off so they can vote. That includes the football team, which is scheduled to play Duke that Saturday and normally practices on Tuesdays. (NCAA rules mandate that teams take one day off per week during their playing seasons. Last season, the football team’s standard off day was Monday.)

There is a degree of symbolism in the idea, which Reveno acknowledged. Any voter who can’t get to his or her polling site on election day can take part in early or absentee voting. Many Tech athletes are registered out of state or far from Atlanta and wouldn’t be able to get to their voting site on election day anyway.

That said, it’s a virtual certainty that at least some of Tech’s athletes will take advantage of the off day to post up at the voting booth. And it’s a message to Rice and Tech’s 400-plus athletes and beyond that the unrest precipitated by Floyd’s death has registered with coaches and administrators, that coaches like Reveno are interested in more than issuing perfunctory statements. Reveno’s idea was met with enthusiasm at Tech, from athletic director Todd Stansbury on down.

“I don’t really care that it started with me or with the team,” Rice said. “I just think it’s so necessary, especially in a time like this.”

With Reveno pushing out the plan from his Twitter account, coaches at other schools have taken hold of the idea.

“I’ve talked to other coaches that I sense are appreciative of something concrete they can do because they want to do something,” Reveno said. “That’s what leadership is, and that’s where the NCAA can lead.”

Reveno’s boss, Josh Pastner, shared the idea with fellow ACC coaches on a conference call.

“Coach (Mike) Krzyzewski, he was all on board about it,” Pastner said. “All the coaches thought it was great.”

Thursday, the National Association of Basketball Coaches issued a call to all men’s basketball coaches to do as Tech had done and make election day an off day.

“Heck, it could be a movement where no school is in session across the country so everyone has the opportunity to exercise the right to vote,” Pastner said.

There was perhaps some serendipity in that it was Rice whose words stuck with Reveno. The two are close, as Reveno recruited Rice, a business administration major who aspires to a career in sports. They have grown to enjoy and appreciate each other over Rice’s three seasons with the Yellow Jackets.

“He’s articulate and mature, so he gives you a good pulse of things,” Reveno said.

As Reveno’s idea, inspired by Rice, ripples throughout college athletics, it serve perhaps as a reminder of the basis of any effective social movement – speaking out, listening and acting.

Said Reveno, “I think the days of finding peace and solace in the fact that your heart’s in the right place, those days are over for me.”