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Mark Bedics – NCAA, Associate Director, Media Coordination and Statistics, Marketing and Broadcast Alliances

CoSIDA 25-Year Award

by John Painter, Colgate University Director of Athletic Communications

Bedics ‘Gets It’ as NCAA Media Facilitator
25th-Year Honoree Oversees NCAA Men’s Frozen Four, DI Lacrosse Among Others
 
The NCAA’s Mark Bedics just might be the perfect athletic communications professional.
 
Personable, team player, bridge-builder, go-getter, knowledgeable, enthusiastic, sports fan, family man – Bedics checks all the boxes. At least the ones you want checked.
 
A former boss of his swears no one at their school knew his first name. Another former mentor called him “human caffeine,” for crying out loud!
 
Bedics just completed his 22nd year as a member of the NCAA national office staff and his 25th year full-time in the profession. The Purdue graduate and Allentown, Pennsylvania, native has spent the last 17 years working in NCAA media coordination operations for the association’s 90 championships.
 
Bedics’ love of sports and appreciation for effort and determination are the reasons he is the perfect person in the perfect profession.
 
“The look in the kids’ faces when they get the championship trophy,” Bedics said of his favorite part of the job. “Obviously, it’s the culmination of all of their hard work and effort, and to know that I play just a small role with the media operation gives me a great feeling.”
 
Bedics is most known for his work with the NCAA Division I Men’s Frozen Four and Division I men’s lacrosse championship, but he’s also managed through the years in the Division I Men’s and Women’s College Cup, indoor and outdoor track and field, the Division II Sports Festival, FCS football and wrestling and held part-time roles at the Men’s Final Four and Men’s College World Series.
 
In addition, Bedics has served as the championships liaison to the skiing, rowing, and Division II tennis and wrestling championships.
 
“I just keep getting reminded what a great situation I have,” Bedics said. “We get to work THE best events; we work the national championships. That’s the epitome of the college experience for a lot of the student-athletes. So to be able to put that part of it on is a great thing.
 
“Basically, every year at championship time when we get to see 20,000 people at hockey or 40,000 at lacrosse in the stands watching these student-athletes, being a part of that reminds you that it is so awesome and I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.”
 
Bedics got his start in the profession on a full-time basis under Marquette’s sports information professional Kathleen Hohl.
 
“Even at that young age, he brought a genuine enthusiasm that served as an important reminder how special it was to work in college athletics,” Hohl said. “Plus anybody who can go by one name, you know they are something special. I’m convinced there were people at Marquette who didn’t know his first name. To this day, everybody calls him Bedics.”
 
Former NCAA staffers Mary Berdo and Jim Wright recall fondly their times with Bedics.
 
“I loved working with Mark because he gets it,” said Berdo, who was an associate director of championships for eight years. “He’s a good teammate, he’s fun to be around, he has a million stories and he’s someone who people are drawn to. That’s one of his best qualities.
 
“Mark can walk into a room and add a lot of humor and lightness, but he also can dig in and have a hard conversation with people because he has built that rapport and trust with them. He’s one of those people who is inclusive and always willing to be a friend. He lives what the NCAA is trying to produce in its employees.”
 
Wright was Bedics’ boss for five years when both were with the NCAA statistics service department. Wright recalls that Bedics during his interview for the job was very quiet and reserved. Putting his best foot forward, so to speak.
 
“I was worried that he might have a tough time getting to know people and make friends,” Wright said. “I’m not kidding – within the first three weeks, Mark knew more NCAA staffers on a first-name basis than I did, and I’d been there 24 years!
 
“There’s no way that initial interview could have prepared us for the kind of guy he is. Mark’s one of those classic people – I called him human caffeine – who’s never met somebody he couldn’t have a conversation with or didn’t like to talk with.”
 
Bedics never thought that his college days at Purdue back in the 1990s, during which his love for the athletic communications profession first came to light, would lead to his status as an Indiana resident.
 
He and his wife, Becky, are raising a pair of Hoosiers: Kevin, 14, and Riley, 11.
 
Do Purdue grads in Indiana call their kids Hoosiers? Probably not.
 
But Kevin and Riley can call their dad an innovator and a valued member not only of the NCAA staff but also the CoSIDA family.
 
Bedics and his staff developed from scratch the idea for the NCAA’s Elite 90 Award, which recognizes the student-athlete with the highest cumulative GPA participating in the finals site for each of the NCAA’s 90 championships.
 
Bedics calls it his proudest accomplishment, coming through for then-NCAA president Myles Brand’s to develop an award that stands today as a great way to tie academics to a championship. Elite 90 reminds those attending the championship weekend that the student-athletes in attendance really are also superstars in the classroom.
 
“Myles Brand went to Judy Sweet, and she came to me and asked if I could put together to celebrate academic success at our championships,” Bedics said. “So I asked Julie Bartell on my staff to help me. We wanted something simple to comprehend and it took a couple of years to get it approved. Julie Cromer, who’s now the AD at Ohio, championed it and helped get it approved by the academic committee.
 
“Twelve years later it’s now a huge success, with at least a dozen different conferences doing something similar. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? The amount of comments we receive and seeing the award presented at championships is definitely the highlight of my career and will be my calling card long after I’m gone.”
 
No, Bedics is not retiring anytime soon. But who in athletics communications doesn’t love a good ending? This one might be perfect.