Colorado’s players aren’t pretending Derrick White’s return is just a nice storyline. For the Buffaloes, the former star and current Boston Celtics guard has quickly become something more useful: a living, breathing basketball reference point who can speak from the top of the sport and still knows exactly what Boulder feels like.
Colorado brought White back as its president of basketball strategy, and since then he’s been around practices, offering advice and functioning like an extra coach when his schedule allows. That presence has already started to shape the 2026 roster, with three players - Rider Portela, Barrington Hargress and Noah Feddersen - laying out what White has meant to them in exclusive interviews with Colorado Buffaloes on SI.
Portela, a freshman entering his first season with the Buffs, is getting that kind of guidance earlier than most players ever do. He arrives in Boulder as the highest-rated member of Colorado’s 2026 class, with 247Sports listing him as a four-star recruit and Rivals ranking him as a three-star.
For him, White’s value goes beyond basketball instruction. It’s also about seeing what loyalty to a program looks like.
“Honestly, it’s crazy,” Portela told Colorado Buffaloes on SI. “I’m very lucky, just getting to see that level, an NBA guy coming back to show how much he loves the program.”
Hargress has taken a different lesson from White, but it has landed just as hard. White’s message, he said, has been about the details - the kind that can get overlooked when a player is chasing the next level.
“[Learning from White] has been huge,” Hargress said. “The few times he’s come in here, he’s dropped some jewels for us, like to understand that everything is important.
He’s a guy who’s made it to the pinnacle of the basketball world. He has a gold medal, and he has an NBA Championship.”
That line - “everything is important” - has stuck with Hargress because it reaches into the day-to-day work, not just the highlight moments. He said it has forced him to look at his offseason approach differently.
“So, when somebody [like White] tells you that everything matters, you really have to re-evaluate and understand if you’re really giving all that you have,” Hargress said. “Just taking in anything that he can give, I know it's big for me because he’s where I want to be, and I know it's big for the other guys.
The more that he’s around, the more that we have somebody else who’s done it in our position and is doing things that we all hope to do. It's a big push for us.”
Feddersen, meanwhile, is still getting acclimated to Colorado’s culture, but he’s old enough and experienced enough to understand the value of having White around. He called the opportunity to learn from him a major bonus, especially given everything White is balancing in his professional and personal life.
“It’s really awesome that he’s coming back and doing this,” Feddersen said. “With how much he’s got going on in his professional career and with his family, to come back to where he went to college and have an impact and support us and teach us stuff, it’s been awesome.”
White hasn’t been a constant presence, but when he has shown up, the players have noticed. Feddersen said White was at practice a couple of weeks ago and spoke with the team afterward, leaving an impression that fits the rest of the feedback from the roster.
“He was at practice a couple of weeks ago and talked to us afterwards. It was really cool to learn from him and learn from his experiences,” Feddersen said. “…Couldn’t ask for a better resource; he’s an NBA Champion, a gold medalist, so it’s been really awesome having him around.”
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