When I was a sophomore at Argos High School, I played left field and batted at the bottom of the order on the baseball team.
We had a good team but we weren’t great. I was a really good outfielder, but I could never catch up with opposing pitchers’ fastballs.
I remember a Saturday in May that year. We had a doubleheader against Bremen. It was an early-morning twin bill with the first pitch scheduled at 10 a.m. Why so early? The Argos prom was that night.
In the first game of the day, I batted ninth and my first time up came with two outs in the third inning.
The pitcher threw me a curve ball and I smacked it down the left field line, but it hooked foul at the last second. He came back with two fast balls that I heard go by but didn’t really see. I took a big swing at the second one just for appearances, right before my teammate Doug Calhoun handed me my glove as we ran out into the outfield for the bottom of the inning.
The pitcher was Dean Huppert.
Yep, THAT Dean Huppert, the one we all saw covering sports in Michiana for decades.
Little did either of us know that our paths would cross on a regular basis from August until March for most of 20 years.
Huppert didn’t throw as hard as I made it look, as his curve was really a slider that not that many people hit as hard as I did that Saturday morning. Dean was a grinder. He had to work harder and use his creativity and know-how to get batters out.
He used that same approach in his work covering local sports on television.
Dean dug deep into local communities to find good sports stories and even better human-interest stories. He prided himself on the number of games he could get to in a single night. He shot video of a few minutes of each game and then buzzed on to the next school. While in transit, he would flip on his radio and listen to the local radio broadcasts to see what the compelling storylines were.
Not only was he not afraid to go out to do stories on kids and teams in smaller towns, he made his reputation on it. He was a hero to the underdog.
Why? Because he himself was an underdog.
He didn’t have a big, booming voice. He’s a good looking guy but he didn’t get his television job because of his looks. He didn’t have a catch phrase.
He just worked harder than everyone else, and we all noticed.
So it was no surprise that WSBT scooped up Huppert when the station merged with WSJV, but it was stunning to everyone when he was told to hit the bricks when his contract expired last winter.
We were angry for him. We were bitter about it. We were wondering what was Dean was going to do next.
In May, we found out.
Huppert reinvented himself again and became the athletic director at Mishawaka High School. He signed up to be in charge of what, I believe, is the most underappreciated athletics program in Michiana, and he is approaching it in the same way he has approached everything else – with hustle.
He recently brought back boys basketball coach Ron Hecklinski, who used to coach at South Bend St. Joe and more recently won almost 280 games in 18 years in Anderson. He has Bart Curtis to lead an already-successful football squad.
He has big ideas and dreams for Mishawaka sports, and he is building his dream one brick at a time, starting at the foundation and working up.
I do not know if Huppert will make it as an AD. I know I won’t bet against him. He certainly will know how to treat the local media when they come to cover his teams (even those who told him he wasn’t good enough to work for them anymore), and he will be very proactive in informing the media of what is going on with the Cavemen.
I do know this, though: NO one will outwork Dean Huppert.
