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2 0 1 8 K I C K O F F S P E C I A L of those two seasons. He figured he would be spending the rest of his NFL career with the Bills. "It was a good time being in Buffalo, and we had no intention of leaving," he said. "The next training camp I get hurt and missed some time. I get a phone call from [head coach] Marv Levy telling me I'm an Indianapolis Colt. He explained that because I had been hurt, they tried to pass me through waivers and the Colts grabbed me. They told me they wanted me to play, but in that first season I wasn't getting any playing time, nothing but special teams." Another serendipitous moment or two. He thought that 1990 season might be his last in the NFL and he wondered more about his future beyond football. He re- membered the president of the Kansas City Chiefs, Jack Steadman, telling him about a local architecture company, HOK Sport, that was studying the feasibility of a retractable roof for the sports complex that contained both Arrowhead and Kauffman stadiums, home of the Chiefs and baseball's Kansas City Royals, re- spectively. "I remembered Jack showing me the study," Radecic said. "We started to do some research about construction and architect companies that might do a lot of sports work. We just started calling com- panies. I called Jack Steadman, who gave me the name of Ron Labinski, who was one of the founders of the firm. I called HOK Sport. To show you how serendipi- tous this all was, the person who an- swered the phone when I called was Kelly Fray, who used to work in the PR office when I played with the Chiefs and was now Labinski's assistant. She was very excited to hear from me. I told her I wanted to [mail] Ron Labinski my re- sume, and she said she would put it right in front on his desk. A couple of days later, I get a phone call asking me when I could come in for an interview. "I had an interview on a Tuesday, which is when you have a day off in the NFL. Labinski was traveling, so I had an inter- view with the gentleman in charge of hir- ing. He took me to lunch and walked me around and looked me in the eye and said, 'To be honest, I don't know what to do with you. Labinski is interested in hiring you. But you're not an engineer. You're not an architect. I don't even know what to pay you; you're playing in the NFL. I don't know how long you can work for us.' They weren't hiring, really. So, we moved to Indianapolis and I took the first half of my engineers' exam and continued reaching out to several other firms and had interviews with some. At the end of the day, Labinski and the HOK Sport folks were willing to let me play in the NFL as long as I wanted and they just wanted me to come back each off-season. "So, each year I would start Feb. 1 and work full-time until June 1 and they would give me different tasks. One year I worked on [Charlotte's] Bank of America Stadium, another year I worked on [Cleveland's] Jacobs Field and then [Jack- sonville's] EverBank Field. I did a variety of tasks. One of my first program oppor- tunities was for a training center for the San Diego Chargers. Another year I had to rewrite all the project description pages for the marketing brochures, and that al- lowed me to become familiar with all the different projects that the office did." New opportunities Radecic moved the family back to Kansas City in 1992, and as years passed with the Colts and his playing time di- minishing, he finally decided to retire after the 1995 season. When his attempt to obtain a football coaching job failed, he called Labinski about a full-time job at HOK. "This is really serendipitous," Radecic said. "On the first day I show up as a full- time employee in April of 1997, they tell me they're teaming up with a local Pitts- burgh architectural firm to go after a new training center at Penn State and we want you to be the project manager. So, we teamed with the Reid-Astorino company and interviewed for two projects: the multisport building and [what turned out to be] the Lasch Football Building. The [Penn State] athletic committee decided to split the job… and we got the Lasch Building. So, my first full-time job as a project manager at HOK Sport is design- ing the Lasch Building." The Lasch project led to another oppor- tunity, as Radecic was later named project manager for the 1999-2001 expansion of Beaver Stadium. HOK had previously concentrated on designing professional stadiums, but with his success at Penn State and Virginia Tech, the company created a college division and placed the inexperienced Radecic in charge. He learned quickly. "In the last 20 years, we took a business unit that basically didn't exist with about 3 or 4 percent of our revenues and in the last couple of years we've been as high as 30 to 40 percent," he said. "At any given time, we'll have 40 to 50 active college projects ranging in size and value from a conceptional study of an athletic master plan like Penn State's to a new football stadium. "In 2009, the 13 managing partners of HOK Sport, including me, were provided the opportunity to purchase its global sports entity with some 400 employees from HOK. The new company was re- named Populous to reflect the essence of what the company does in the popular sports culture: drawing people together. Since its creation, Populous has grown to more than 600 employees worldwide. I'm one of the original members of the global Populous Corporate Board. Nearly 15 years after I started the college division, I was also asked to direct their NFL mar- ket. "I'm listed as a founder and senior prin- cipal. I run our collegiate and NFL groups and I'm also a big advocate of the athletic training work we do all over the globe. So, I work collaboratively with our offices overseas. ... We have the most incredible staff of architects who are so dedicated, innovative and creative. It's a really healthy, vibrant place." Memories of Joe Radecic also has found time to raise a family. He is remarried, to Sue Marshall, and is a proud grandfather of four. His son, Matt, graduated from Penn State with a degree in computer engineering

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