As a four-year letterman in basketball at the University of Mississippi, Hunter Carpenter of Dallas, Texas, knows how updated facilities and equipment can give student-athletes a competitive edge, enabling the Rebels to score wins at the highest levels.
Carpenter and his wife, Megan, recently made a $1 million gift to support CHAMPIONS. NOW., the Ole Miss Athletics Foundation’s (OMAF) fundraising campaign to improve facilities for student-athletes. In response to the gift, the university named the men’s practice court at the Tuohy Basketball Center in honor of the Carpenter family.
“Having been around the Ole Miss ecosystem for nearly 30 years, I’ve never seen the university have as much momentum as it has now. The national brand is at a place where it’s never been in terms of how people view Ole Miss,” said Carpenter, giving credit to Chancellor Glenn Boyce and Vice Chancellor for Intercollegiate Athletics Keith Carter, his friend and former teammate.
“With the current leadership making bold decisions and being determined to be competitive and win championships, I’ve never been more excited about where Ole Miss is both academically and athletically,” he continued.
“We’re also at a place in our lives where we’ve been blessed and I felt like, with all that coming together, it was the right time for our family to make a gift.”
Supported by gifts like the Carpenters’, the newly expanded Olivia and Archie Manning Athletics Performance Center, features the Ririe Family Weight Room, a 10,710-square-foot workout facility with state-of-the-art technology, fueling stations, counseling and sport psychology services, and offices for the nutrition staff.
The Van Devender Family Foundation Locker Room has been enhanced to include a barber shop, hydro tanks, plunge pools, a players’ lounge and fueling station.
New office spaces include separate offensive and defensive team meeting rooms to supplement the existing Roland and Sheryl Burns Team Meeting Room. Office layouts are now streamlined for offensive, defensive, analytics and recruiting staffs.
“From my many meetings with Hunter in Dallas and Oxford, it became clear that he believed in what we were doing at Ole Miss Athletics and wanted to support Rebel student-athletes through our capital campaign, CHAMPIONS. NOW.,” said William Fisher, OMAF director of development. “Generous gifts, like the one we received from Megan and Hunter Carpenter, allow us to provide world-class facilities and an excellent education to our athletes, and for that, we’re extremely grateful.”
Part of the Carpenters’ gift is realized in cash while another portion is a transfer of securities.
“Any time you can give highly appreciated securities in a tax-advantaged way, you can give more to your interests versus giving pure cash,” said Carpenter who chairs the UM Foundation’s Joint Committee on University Investments. “We had some things that had highly appreciated, and we had sold some things and taken public securities and those had continued to appreciate. It was a very tax-advantaged way for us to give.”
Carpenter is a partner of Arete Energy, where he is responsible for finding and executing new deals, monitoring and growing the portfolio and helping to manage the firm’s strategic and investment objectives.
He has invested in energy private equity for over two decades, most recently at RedBird Capital Partners where he led the energy team and the deployment of over $1.5 billion of equity capital across the energy value chain from upstream to energy transition.
Before joining Redbird in 2014, the UM accountancy graduate spent most of his career working for The Stephens Group, a private equity firm investing the capital of the Arkansas-based Stephens family, one of America’s longest-tenured private equity investors.
Carpenter, who earned bachelor’s, master’s and Juris Doctor degrees at Ole Miss in 1999, 2000 and 2003 respectively, credits his UM education for much of his success.
“Ole Miss is so important to me because of where it took me in life, from being very humbly raised in Arkansas with two loving parents, but with really no sense of the broader world, to working with people who went to the Ivy League schools,” Carpenter said, adding that UM was the launching pad to a level playing field in that world. “Because of my time at Ole Miss, people appreciate how I do business in a very relational way and that’s benefited me greatly over time.”
In college, in addition to being a student-athlete, Carpenter was awarded the Taylor Medal, inducted into Phi Kappa Phi, and was an active member of Sigma Nu fraternity, Mississippi Law Journal and Moot Court Board.
Carpenter said he valued his undergrad years not only because Ole Miss Basketball gave him a chance to play on scholarship at a high level in the Southeastern Conference but also because of the faculty and staff who rallied around him.
“All these guys were behind the scenes pushing me toward things that I didn’t even know were possible for me,” said Carpenter, specifically acknowledging then Head Basketball Coach Rob Evans, professors Jimmy Davis, Vaughn Grisham, Morris Stocks, Mark Wilder and Chancellor Emeritus Robert Khayat.
In 2017, Carpenter was named UM’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Distinguished Entrepreneur and, in 2015, he received the Outstanding Young Alumni Award from the Ole Miss Alumni Association. He was named one of Oil & Gas Investor magazine’s “Top 20 Under 40” in energy finance in 2014 and one of the “Top 40 Under 40” by Arkansas Business Magazine in 2011.
He and his wife, Megan, a 2000 UM graduate from Dublin, Mississippi, met at Ole Miss, where she was president of Chi Omega sorority. They have five children.
“Everything I said about Ole Miss, Megan would say the same,” Carpenter said. “For her, being someone from a very small town in Mississippi, her Chi O experience with her advisors and people pushing her to go to Washington, D.C. to work … just like Ole Miss opened up a world of possibilities for me, it did the same for her.”
To make a gift to CHAMPIONS. NOW., contact William Fisher at fisher@givetoathletics.com or 662-915-7159 or online here.
By Bill Dabney/UM Foundation