Nearly every NCAA Division I college athletics director in the country has their hands full with the winter and spring season crossover right now, going from basketball to gymnastics to softball and every sport in between.
But the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s AD Bubba Cunningham has also taken on Milan, Italy, for the last few days of competition at the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics.
Cunningham has served as the AD at UNC since November 2011, witnessing numerous national championships for the athletics programs at the school. North Carolina has had 115 Tar Heels, including student-athletes, coaches, alumni and medical staff, represent 18 different countries in the Olympic Games.
He witnessed American Alyssa Liu capture gold in women’s individual figure skating, the country’s first gold in the event since 2002 at the Salt Lake City Olympic Games. He also watched the U.S. men’s hockey team advance to the gold medal game with their 6-2 victory against Slovakia Friday night.
However, he isn’t just at the Olympics for fun — he is here for a bigger role.
Since 2023, he has been on the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee Board of Directors. Cunningham is joined by top United States Olympic names, including track legend Allyson Felix and bobsledder Elana Meyers Taylor, who captured her first Olympic gold medal earlier this week. This is his second Olympics on the board — his first in 2024 in Paris — and third attending, with his first one coming in 2002.
As part of the board, he works directly with Sarah Hirshland, the USOPC CEO, helping to be a voice for college athletes, many of whom have aspirations to compete at the Olympic level later in their careers. As the only country without a governing body to fund the Olympic movement, college Olympic sports support is vital to the success of the United States Olympic Team.
“Our Olympics are funded by college sports — over 500,000 student-athletes at college and over $2 billion in financial aid, and all of our students are the pipeline to the Olympics,” Cunningham said.
Cunningham works alongside the other USOPC Board of Directors members, communicating with different governing bodies throughout the world.
“We work with the national governing bodies for each of the individual sports, so obviously you have the ones that are in the summer games and the winter games,” Cunningham said. “It’s been a great experience, and we want to ensure there’s a pipeline of collegiate athletes to the national governing bodies.”
Outside of watching the Winter Olympic events, Cunningham is participating in various board meetings as his group tracks the medal count and starts to prepare for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics. It will be the first Summer Olympics on American soil since the 1996 games in Atlanta.
While each Olympics has planning challenges that the board works through, hosting the Olympics in the United States brings a whole new layer of logistics that the USOPC Board of Directors must consider.
“When you’re the host, it just gives you a lot more complications,” he said. “So we’re going to spend a lot of time working with LA28 to ensure that all the guests and all of the people from all over the world have a great experience in Los Angeles. So our focus will shift, in addition to the team competition, to the logistics of making sure it’s a great event.”
UNC has had a prestigious school reputation for decades, and Cunningham’s role at UNC for more than a decade helped open the door for him in his current USOPC board role.
“Given the success that our teams have had, that allows people to ask you to do things,” Cunningham said. “So my job at Carolina has given me these opportunities to represent Carolina and represent college athletics on the national and international stage.”
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