Kaiden Pope
Reporter
On Feb 24, several Parkland graduates and one former Parkland staff member will be inducted into Parkland’s Athletic Hall of Fame for 2017.
All of the former students to be inducted were very successful athletes and the staff member, Stephen Brown, was the former coordinator of CobraSports, the online broadcast of play-by-plays of Parkland sports games.
Brown first came to work at Parkland in 1979, when he was the director of broadcasting and the general manager of 88.7 WPCD FM, Parkland’s radio station. He also began Parkland’s cable and video station, PCTV.
PCTV’s early programming covered Parkland sports games, beginning with basketball and extending to softball when he was impressed by one of his students involved with the team. Brown then began to cover every home game and every sport, posting them on the cobrasports.net website in December 2009 and January 2010.
CobraSports covered over 100 games in their first year, 2010, and has covered thousands of games since. The games are available both as audio recordings of the play-by-plays on the website after the game, and as live audio streams.
Brown explains that in 1985, Parkland was having a budget crisis and needed to make cuts to staff. Brown opted to move from managing WPCD and PCTV to teaching communications, so as to ensure that no one currently employed at WPCD and PCTV would be fired.
“I did broadcast since I was 14 years old, and by the time I moved to teaching I was ready to move on to something a little different, while staying with broadcasting a little bit.” Brown said. “And then there was this student who made it fun. It was an everybody wins kind of deal.”
When Brown retired in 2012, a former student, Brian Schutte, took over Brown’s COM 150 Sports Broadcasting course and the management of CobraSports. Schutte says that the program, while directed by himself, is manned by students.
Schutte says that the program offers a scholarship for participating in the CobraSports broadcast. It’s a Fine and Applied Arts Activities Scholarship that includes a half-tuition waiver for different outlets, including WPCD, the art department, theater programs, and CobraSports.
Schutte says the scholarship program acts very much like an internship. Students are required to work for a number of hours, which offers them hands-on experience not frequently offered to underclassmen at larger universities.
“I’m really thankful for the experience and the time that I had with Brown at the beginning because he was such an experienced instructor.” Schutte said. “He really showed me the effective ways to improve my own skills, and then how to take those skills and teach them to students. Nothing makes you feel better than seeing a student who was reluctant to go on the air at the beginning of the semester, and see them grow and improve and take the mike and develop their own air personality.”
According to Brown and Schutte, Academic Vice President Nancy Sutton was also instrumental in the administration and funding of the project. Schutte says that because she was the department chair for the fine and applied arts program, her involvement was necessary for getting the COM 150 Sports Broadcasting course on the curriculum.
“She views CobraSports as being very important to be tied to the educational institution.” Schutte said. “She’s still very involved in the decision making from an administrative standpoint.”
Originally CobraSports planned on putting the games on the radio station but decided against it.
“The audience we’d built for the radio station wasn’t the audience who wanted sports! We initially thought about putting the games on the station on a delay basis, at midnight or something, but as we thought about that, that made less and less sense,” Brown said. “So we sort of borrowed from what others had done, and what we could do with a digital audio recorder and the Internet. And so one thing led to another.”
While Brown was inducted into the Hall of Fame as a coordinator and staff contributor, most of the inductees included in the honor were Parkland graduate athletes who achieved success through the Parkland sports programs.
Eric Xidis, a former student who graduated in 2001, was among those who achieved a substantial amount of athletic success in baseball. While he no longer plays, due in part to an arm injury, he received a kinesiology degree and remains a die-hard baseball fan.
Xidis was the pitcher for the Parkland Cobras Baseball team in 2000 and 2001. In 2001 he was named the All-Conference Pitcher of the Year, as well as both the All-Region and All-American honors. He has held the season win record of 13-1 since 2001 and led his team to the NJCAA World Series for the first time in Parkland sports history.
Xidis received a full scholarship to the University of Illinois at Chicago for baseball. There he brought his team at UIC to the NCAA Baseball Tournament in 2002.
In addition to being offered the award to the Parkland Hall of Fame in 2017, he was inducted into the UIC Hall of Fame. He currently works in the digital advertising and marketing industry.
Xidis says his grandfather was the driving force behind his participation in baseball. He gave Xidis some very valuable lessons that applied equally to baseball and to life.
“My grandpa wrote me a note when I graduated from Parkland in 2001, it said ‘if you fail to prepare, prepare to fail.” Xidis said. “I think that in sports you have to fully engage in the college process, academic, team life, and community life. What you do now is going to affect what your future holds, and if you’re not fully engaged, you are preparing to fail.”
Xidis explained that his daily routine of exercises, weights, running, and throwing in the bullpen during the week leading up to practices and games was just as important as how he played during the games. It was the preparation for success that allowed him to succeed.
