Black Coaches Association To Honor Craig Littlepage
Story Links
May 9, 2006
CHARLOTTESVILLE – University of Virginia Athletics Director Craig Littlepage will receive the Black Coaches Association’s Athletics Administrator of the Year award at the association’s annual awards banquet on June 2 in Miami, Fla. The banquet is held in conjunction with the association’s national convention. Littlepage also received the award in 2003.
Littlepage is in his fifth year as Virginia’s athletics director. He is the first African-American athletics director in Atlantic Coast Conference history. This past year, he served as the chair of the NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Committee. The 2006 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament was arguably one of the most exciting in the tournament’s history. Littlepage was appointed to the committee in February of 2002 and will remain on the committee until Sept. 1, 2007.
He was listed on Sports Illustrated’s list of the 101 most influential minorities in sports in 2003 and 2004. In March of 2005, he was named as one of Black Enterprise Magazine’s Most Powerful African-Americans in Sports.
Four years ago, Littlepage outlined a number of ambitious 10-year goals for the Virginia athletics department and great progress has been made in the area of athletics facility improvements during his tenure. Foremost among the facility projects is the John Paul Jones Arena, a new basketball arena/special events center scheduled for completion this summer.
Littlepage has been a member of UVa’s athletics administration since 1990. He served six years (1995-2001) as senior associate director of athletics, managing all aspects of the athletics department’s day-to-day operations. Before that, he spent four years as associate director of athletics for programs. He originally joined Virginia’s athletics administrative staff in 1990 as an assistant athletics director.
Prior to beginning his career in athletics administration, Littlepage served two stints as an assistant coach with the Virginia men’s basketball program, from 1976 to 1982 and from 1988 to 1990. He held head coaching positions at Pennsylvania (1982-85) and at Rutgers (1985-88). He was also an assistant coach at Villanova for two years and at Yale for one year before joining the UVa men’s basketball program as an assistant coach in 1976.
The LaMott, Pa., native earned his bachelor’s degree in economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1973. He was a member of three Ivy League basketball championship teams at Penn and was instrumental in the Quakers’ drive to three consecutive NCAA Eastern Regional playoff appearances.