How College Basketball Coaches Help Promote Voting, Civic Engagement Among Student Athletes

Over the summer, Joe Kennedy spoke with Eric Reveno and Lisa Kay Solomon about All Vote No Play, a non-profit organization they had founded two years ago. They were proud of what they accomplished, helping thousands of college athletes register to vote and learn the importance of civic engagement. Still, they thought they could do more.

Each of the three had devoted themselves to the project, providing non-partisan resources to college coaches, administrators and athletes, but they also had full-time jobs: Solomon as a designer in residence and associate professor at Stanford University’s design school and Kennedy and Reveno as assistant men’s basketball coaches at Holy Cross and Oregon State, respectively.

After thinking it over, Kennedy decided in September to step down at Holy Cross and become All Vote No Play’s first executive director, a role that suited him well considering his experience in politics and passion for working with coaches and athletes.

“Joe’s got the background,” Reveno said. “He’s the natural to be the leader of moving this forward…He’s got the polish and the experience and knowledge to really strategize and figure out how to link those arenas of college athletics with voter registration, citizen building and civic engagement.”

Kennedy grew up in a basketball family: his father, Pat Kennedy, was an NCAA Division 1 head men’s basketball coach from 1980 to 2015 for six schools, including stints at Florida State and DePaul. And in the 1960s, his uncle, Bob Kennedy, founded what would become the Hoop Group, which today is a leading grassroots basketball organization that runs camps, clinics, leagues and tournaments throughout the Northeast.

As a child, Kennedy remembers his father watching C-Span and reading newspapers to follow what was going on in the political world, but no one in his family had run for office. He first started seriously getting into politics as a student at NorthwesternNWE
, where he played on the basketball team and majored in education and social policy.

During the summer of 2006, Kennedy worked in Washington, D.C., in the office of then-U.S. Senator Barack Obama. Craig Robinson, an assistant coach at Northwestern with whom Kennedy had grown close, is the brother of Michelle Obama, Barack’s wife.

“That really opened the door to being in that world and really seeing how the government works, how Congress works, and meeting some unbelievable people,” Kennedy said.

After graduating from Northwestern in 2007, Kennedy worked on Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign and then in the White House’s Office of Public Engagement during Obama’s first two years in office. Kennedy had several responsibilities in the White House, including helping with Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! Initiative to reduce childhood obesity and organizing and running the events when professional and college sports teams visited the White House after winning championships.

In October 2010, Kennedy left the White House to join Northwestern’s men’s basketball staff as director of operations working under Bill Carmody, who had coached Kennedy in college.

“I decided to jump on that opportunity,” said Kennedy, who was a three-time Academic All-Big Ten selection in college and a team captain as a senior. “Basketball was always my first love. Going back to my alma mater, it just seemed like a unique opportunity.”

After three years at Northwestern, Kennedy spent a year working as director of player personnel under then-head coach Craig Robinson at Oregon State and a year in the NBA as a video coordinator with the Sacramento Kings. Kennedy got back into college coaching in 2015 as an assistant when Carmody was hired as head coach at Holy Cross.

In early June 2020, Kennedy was working in that same role at Holy Cross when he saw a Tweet from Reveno, who was then an assistant at Georgia Tech. Reveno had been in a team meeting via Zoom the day before in which the players and coaches were talking about protests in Atlanta surrounding the murder of George Floyd.

“One of the players said, ‘Everybody’s got ideas on what we can do, but is anyone gonna vote?,’” Reveno said. “The next day, I woke up, and it was sort of an epiphany.”

That day, June 3, 2020, after consulting with Georgia Tech head coach Josh Pastner, Reveno sent out the following via Twitter: “Federal election day, Nov 3rd, needs to be a NCAA mandatory off day. We must empower, educate and guide our athletes to be part of the change. We need action. There is symbolism in every holiday and it’s powerful.”

Until then, Reveno hadn’t been involved in helping anyone vote, a situation he looks back at with regret, although he was far from alone in coaching circles. Reveno was highly educated with an undergraduate degree and MBA from Stanford and had built a strong reputation in basketball circles as an assistant at Stanford and Georgia Tech and head coach at the University of Portland. And he spent countless hours helping players in all aspects of their lives away from the court, just not when it came to politics.

“I was competitive, and I was doing basketball, and I grew up in a generation where I’m not really that into politics was a cliché that we used,” Reveno said. “What we’ve learned in the last 10 years or so is that democracy doesn’t do great if we aren’t involved. And it’s as non-partisan as it could be. Our democracy depends on people voting.”

He added: “I know there are a lot of coaches like me that are good guys, good women, that just needed that sort of push and guidance and how to do it and how to set it up. I said, ‘We need to do better.’”

Shortly after sending that Tweet, Reveno reached out to numerous coaching friends, including Gonzaga’s Mark Few, who was immediately aboard with the idea and got the National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC) involved. Reveno’s wife suggested he name the initiative All Voice No Play, and it stuck.

Kennedy had never met Reveno before, but he heard about the initiative and reached out to help, too. Kennedy helped get involvement from the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, an affiliate of the non-profit Civic Nation. Others coaches were also heavily involved, including Boise State assistant Mike Burns. In all, more than 1,200 coaches representing 83% of NCAA Division 1 schools in 2020 signed a pledge to register all of their eligible athletes to vote and support voter education and turnout.

In September 2020, at the behest of the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, the NCAA Division 1 Council approved legislation that stated athletes would not practice or compete on the first Tuesday after Nov. 1 every year, coinciding with Election Day. The rule served as a major win for Reveno, Kennedy and every other coach involved.

“I wanted to make it a rule so that we wouldn’t lose focus,” Reveno said. “I knew at that point the 2020 election was going to have good participation and get good attention. But I was worried about 2022, 24, 26, and I was really worried about 10 years from now. What’s it going to be like in 10 years? I wanted to systemically impact this so that it’s a habit of coaches to do this type of fundamental team building.”

This year, the Division 1 Council amended the rule, allowing teams that are competing in the championship portion of their seasons to take a day off for civic engagement activities within 15 days before or after Election Day. Teams not in the championship portion of their seasons are still required to not practice or play games on Election Day.

“I’m OK with that,” Reveno said. “Let’s say you’re a volleyball team and you play on Wednesday. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that volleyball team practicing (on Tuesday).”

He added: “Like any NCAA thing, it’s a little bit jumbled up and not as clean as you’d like because there’s so many cooks in the kitchen. But the fact that it’s in there and people talk about it, and the fact that they even argue about it, I love. The fact we’re talking about it is great.”

Besides voting, All Vote No Play is also about informing athletes with non-partisan resources such as videos and online materials to support civic engagement during non-federal election years. Solomon has been the driving force behind creating and designing those materials.

Two years ago, Reveno contacted Solomon after he noticed she had created Vote By Design, a website offering free, non-partisan materials for teachers and students. Reveno’s players at Georgia Tech began using those materials, and Reveno last year asked Solomon to create materials for the broader college student audience. She was excited to help.

“I know the power of student athletes to be influencers on their campus,” said Solomon, who played tennis at Cornell. “They’re often the most popular. They’re often the most watched. But they’ve been almost systematically overlooked from a civics standpoint. I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, if you could get these prominent leaders on campuses to model pro-social behaviors, pro-democracy behaviors – what does it mean to be a good citizen and not just a voter – that’s a game changer for our future.’”

Solomon mentioned a few athletes who have taken leadership roles on their campuses in promoting voting and civic engagement such as UCLA quarterback Chase Griffin, Stanford basketball player Sam Beskind and University of Pennsylvania volleyball player Elizabeth Ford. In September, nearly 2,000 people also participated in an All Vote No Play Zoom call featuring speeches from Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry, Stanford women’s basketball coach Tara VanDerveer and former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.

“We’re just creating civic wins and civic joy in ways that allow student athletes to do what they do best – to inspire others,” Solomon said. “For me, it’s been this personal project of inspiration and resilience, frankly…I find it endlessly inspiring.”

The All Vote No Play leaders have been encouraged about the increased engagement among athletes and young people in general. For instance, a Tufts University study estimates that 50% of people between 18 and 29 years old voted in the 2020 Presidential election, a 11 percentage point increase from 2020.

Still, Kennedy sees much more room for growth and uses a sports analogy to state his care, comparing the percentage voter turnout to free throw shooting. He plans on doing that through more outreach to coaches, administrators and players, an emphasis on fundraising and just having more time to devote to a cause that’s become a passion for him.

“We’re nowhere near where we should be,” Kennedy said. “I want to get these young people to be shooting the ball like Steph Curry, where they’re shooting 92% from the foul line. They should be voting at 92% as a voting bloc….We want to be the leading organization in the country that’s really making a difference with young voters.”