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through-13 league with a 130-pound weight limit. By the time I was 12, I was too heavy and I had to sit out. So, when I was 13 and an eighth-grader, we talked to the coaches of the ninth-grade football team and they let another kid and me play on the team." Radecic became a three-sport athlete at Brentwood High School, competing in basketball and track along with football, and he thought at first that basketball might be his best sport. Then came one of those serendipitous moments. "When I was a senior, I was the confer- ence MVP and I was being recruited by some smaller Division I schools to play basketball," he said. "But I got a lot more interest from people telling me I could potentially have a good collegiate football career as opposed to a collegiate basket- ball career. I wasn't familiar with the whole recruiting process, but I began getting letters between my sophomore and junior years." A bittersweet time As the football recruiting intensified in his junior and senior years, he sorely missed the counsel of his father, Nick, who had died unexpectedly after his sophomore year. "It was a bittersweet time in my life," he said, getting a little emotional at the memory. His father had always been there for him, especially when he played for the Brentwood Dukes, the ninth-grade football team and the high school football and basketball teams as a sophomore. "Even to this day, when I think back to my college career and the national championship and All-Ameri- can stuff and the 12 years in the NFL, it would have been really great to share that with my dad." Radecic had developed a strong interest in architecture, and while being recruited, another serendipitous moment occurred when his teacher in a mechanical drawing class, Tom Shaneyfelt, raised the possi- bility of earning a degree in architectural engineering. "I had never heard of it," he said. "I had not done any research on it. So, when my mother, Jean, and I began looking at schools, we were looking at schools that had good engineering programs and schools that had good architectural pro- grams. I ended up visiting Purdue for en- gineering, UVA [Virginia] for architecture and then Penn State for the architectural engineering program. Then I went to Princeton, Yale and Brown. I really thought I was going to go Ivy League and I Master plan prioritizes student-athletes' needs P E N N S T A T E F O O T B A L L >> It's been 18 months since Populous unveiled its 20-year Athletics Facilities Master Plan for Penn State's athletic de- partment, and questions remain as to whether Beaver Stadium will ever be renovated in the extensive manner that Scott Radecic's ;rm outlined in its re- port. The football stadium is not part of the initial ;ve-year phase of recommenda- tions. The projects in that ;rst phase are the natatorium, the soccer and tennis venues and a new building called the Center of Excellence that will serve as a headquarters for Intercollegiate Athlet- ics. Athletic director Sandy Barbour continues to say everything will depend on fundraising and it will take multimil- lion-dollar donations and additional revenue before the overhaul of Beaver Stadium can begin. Radecic admits Beaver Stadium is on the backburner due to the need for ex- tensive fundraising. That was the way the master plan was conceived under the direction of Barbour and her sta<, he said. However, Radecic said the Penn State master plan was unique because the foundation of it was "aspirational" and 31 sports were involved. "Not many schools have 31 sports and, in fact, there are not a lot of schools that have more than 22 or 23 sports," Radecic said. "[Penn State] wanted an aspirational plan for every sport, every venue, every coach and every student-athlete. That's not typi- cal of us. We've done dozens and dozens of athletic master plans in our 35-year history. Typically, when I go on campus they'll say we just did this for baseball and we just did this for basket- ball. They would exclude certain sports [from the plan] and focus on a couple of sports and a couple of venues. Every- thing at Penn State that impacted every sport, coach, venue and student-ath- lete was on the table." Radecic said that led to more than 80 extensive conversations not just within the athletic department but also with academic and administrative units of the university and its stakeholders, includ- ing fans. Then, Populous studied each program, with an emphasis on the needs of student-athletes. The analysis cov- ered everything from existing conditions to the "optimum" for each sport in the future. "Certain things came to the top that were more immediate needs," he said. "Every sport may have had a need. But the prioritization of those needs was difficult, because how do you tell someone you're the 13th need? Sandy wanted us to place these in buckets, and as funding came forward from people who wanted to help in certain sports, they would have an opportunity to do that. We created what that roadmap would be from a conceptional design and what that program would [become] and what the cost would be. It was pur- poseful to be aspirational [although] it may be over budget and people may criticize it. The point was, we wanted to document what was the ultimate desire of that coach and that program that would be the best thing not just for those student-athletes but all the stu- dent-athletes."

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