Former Sport Director Recalls Championship Years

Editor's note: Dennis Prikkel was the sports information director at North - Editor's note: Dennis Prikkel was the sports information director at North Park University (then College) from 1969 to 1988 and a longtime publicity director for the College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin (CCIW). His efforts were integral in getting the Vikings noticed both locally and nationally during the 1978-80 championship seasons. Prikkel, now an associate director for the Chicago-based Evangelical Lutheran Church of America Foundation, shared his most memorable moments during a recent interview.

It was the 1980 regional championship game at North Park versus CCIW rival Augustana College. It's five minutes before tip-off and I'm sitting at the scorer's table anxiously waiting for the game start, when a student usher walks up to me and says, "The governor's here, where should he sit?" "He can have my seat," I replied.

For a decade North Park was at or near the top of the collegiate basketball world. Those were heady days for a sports information director who before 1978 had trouble explaining to non-conference opponents that North Park was in Chicago and, no, the city was not part of our name. By 1980 everyone who followed college basketball knew where North Park was and what the Vikings were doing.

I started my 19-year career as North Park's sports information director in the fall of 1969, with great expectations of how I could promote the Vikings athletic program in one of the country's three top metropolitan areas.

The reality of struggling against a pro-oriented news media, who felt obliged to treat three major college programs (Notre Dame, Illinois and Northwestern) - who weren't even in the city - like they were located at State and Madison, left little room on the sports pages for lowly North Park, or even DePaul and Loyola. The few collegiate sports information directors in town all played the waiting game and thrived on the occasional triumphant story or mention in a downtown paper.

Then came 1978 and North Park's vault to stardom. Having paid my dues beforehand, I knew personally many of the writers and broadcasters in Chicago. In a day before faxes and email, more importantly, I knew them personally and I knew their phone numbers. These were heady days for me and for North Park. And despite coach Dan McCarrell's endless mantra of "Low Profile," it seemed that every sports columnist and broadcaster in Chicago made the pilgrimage to the little bandbox gym at Foster and Kedzie.

My friend Bill Gleason of the Chicago Sun-Times, then one of the top sports columnists in the city, covered at least a dozen of our home games for his paper. And almost every Sunday afternoon on his syndicated radio talk show "The Sportswriters" with Bill Jauss and Ben Bentley and others, Gleason would mention North Park in the same breathe that lauded Ray Meyer's DePaul Blue Demons, then in their glory.

There were banquets, Kiwanis and Lions Club meetings, annual trips to the City Council and the mayor's office, hundreds of telephone calls, proud alumni sending me newspaper stories for my clipping albums, newspaper reporters and the bright lights of television with McCarrell trying to 'low key' his way through another interview.

We didn't really have a seat for Gov. James Thompson, an alumnus of North Park Academy. Every seat in the gym had been packed for hours in anticipation of the third meeting of the season between these CCIW superpowers. The Governor wound up sitting in the corner of the gym amidst a surprised Central of Iowa basketball team that had played in the third place game earlier in the evening.

Picking my favorite moments amongst those first three national championships is difficult - there were so many great games and great individual performances - but here are my top three picks:

• Keith French's blocked shot at the buzzer to preserve the 1980 NCAA semi-final championship win over a contentious Longwood (Virginia) team.
• A 1979 "Hula Bowl" victory over #2 ranked Chaminade University of Hawaii in the NCAA quarterfinals at North Park.
• A 1979-1976 overtime victory at Augustana in January 1978 vaulting North Park into the national standings for the first time. It marked the start of three consecutive seasons that North Park was ranked #1 in the nation and three times the Vikings fulfilled their destiny by winning the NCAA Division III championship.