Mike Wade makes donation to Athletics

Mike Wade, a former two-time Academic All-American at Western Carolina University, will tell you that football is the greatest metaphor for life: to survive you have to get back up every time you get knocked down — and you will get knocked down, he insists, many, many times.

Wade made a $1 million planned gift to support WCU’s athletics and arts scholarships and programs — one of the largest gifts given to the Catamount athletics program and one of the largest gifts ever by a former student-athlete. He created two endowed scholarships and named them after his mother and stepmother: The Billie and Barbara Wade Endowed Athletics Scholarship, with an estimated gift commitment of $450,000, for WCU student-athletes, and the Billie and Barbara Wade Endowed Arts Scholarship, with an estimated gift commitment of $50,000 for students majoring in a program in the David Orr Belcher College of Fine and Performing Arts.