By ROBERT JOHNSON
IU Diversity Sports Media Institute

Fred Mitchell was a star place-kicker for his college football team.  Ron Hunter helped lead his college basketball team to conference championships.  Michael Fox worked hard to make his high school basketball team.

Like the vast majority of athletes, they never made it to the pros. But they each have carved out a career in sports.

Growing up in Gary, Ind.,  Mitchell was a member of his school’s newspaper and the football team’s starting kicker. He attended Wittenberg University and became arguably the best kicker in school history, while also reporting on the team for the university’s newspaper. Mitchell was named to the Lutheran College All-America team in 1968 after setting the NCAA Division II record for career scoring by a kicker. 

He literally changed the game in 1974, when he presented to Wilson Sporting Goods the idea of kicking nets, which are now used at both the college and professional levels. For his accomplishments, he was inducted into the Wittenberg University Athletic Hall of Fame in 1995.

Like many athletes before and after him, Mitchell’s life was changed forever by a draft, but this draft may have been the single reason Mitchell never played professional football.

As a male in his early 20s during the 1960s, Mitchell was nearly drafted by the military during the Vietnam War. He abandoned his quest for a job as an NFL kicker and became a high school English teacher instead. After five years as a teacher and football coach, Mitchell accepted a job as a copy editor in 1974 at the Chicago Tribune, where he still works. Over his long tenure at the paper, he has done "beat" writing for many of Chicago’s major sports teams, as well as writing his own column in the Tribune.

 Like Mitchell,  IUPUI coach Ron Hunter has translated his love for sports into a successful career.

From an early age, Hunter knew he wanted basketball to be a big part of his life.  He accepted a basketball scholarship to Miami University in Ohio, where he played in three NCAA Tournaments and his team won two Mid-American Conference championships. After college, he was an assistant basketball coach at UW-Milwaukee for five seasons, then his alma mater for two. In the fall of 1994, he became the head coach at IUPUI.

Within his first four years at IUPUI, Hunter elevated the program from a Division II team to a competitive Division I team. In 2003, his fifth season as a Division I coach, the Jaguars made their first appearance in the NCAA Tournament. He has helped 19 Jaguars play professionally, including guard George Hill of the San Antonio Spurs.

Despite his accomplishments on the court, he has achieved even greater acclaim for his work off the court.

In 2007, he began working with the charity Samaritan’s Feet to help provide shoes for impoverished children around the globe. Starting with the goal of 40,000 pairs of shoes, Hunter has helped the organization receive more than 2 million. Through his work on and off the court during his 15-year career, he has become a bigger sports icon than he probably could have imagined.

Hunter’s long hours in the gym through the years paved the way to his success. Although working hard in practice doesn’t always translate into playing success, it can open opportunities to be successful in other ways, as Michael Fox has shown.

Fox, the Lucas Oil Stadium director, struggled to secure a spot on the end of the bench but decided he would work as hard as possible to make his high school basketball team his senior year. Fox sacrificed all summer, giving up the chance to hang out with his friends to work on his game and get better. In the fall, his hard work paid off and he made the team.

After the season, he was offered a position at Indiana University as a student manager on the basketball team under coach Bob Knight. During this time, he learned the ins and outs of sports management. Upon graduating from IU, Fox became an intern at the Hoosier Dome, which was the home of the Indianapolis Colts. After only a couple of years, Fox became the stadium director, a job he has held for 27 years.

According to Fox, he would not have been where he is today if he hadn’t decided to spend the summer working hard trying to get better. "If my parents had not encouraged me and I had not decided to be best basketball player that I could be and make that team in Richmond, I would never be here."

Fox, Mitchell, and Hunter never gave up on their sports dreams, but instead they adapted them to fit the talents that they had. They show the youth of today that it is possible to have a successful and fufilling career in sports without being a professional athlete.