By Joe Vanden Acker
Lawrence
Today magazine, Fall 2006
Dean Walsh, ’82
Maybe Dean Walsh should have been a psychic, because he did some pretty solid
prognosticating back in his days at Lawrence University.
Walsh, now president of Sullivan Walsh Associates, knew just one game into
the 1980 season how good the 1981 team was going to be. After losing 14-13
to Cornell College on the last play of the 1980 season opener, Walsh was contemplative.
“I remember sitting down at Kohler Hall and saying, ‘I don’t
think we’re going to lose another game when we’re here,’” Walsh
recalls. “[Cornell was] the best team, and we gave them everything they
could handle.”
Lawrence’s quarterback was right on the mark, as the Vikings won their
next 18 games before losing in the semifinals of the 1981 NCAA Division III
playoffs. Walsh was under center for that amazing run, despite the fact he
wasn’t recruited to play football at Lawrence.
“I’m sure that a [5-foot-10] quarterback out of Chippewa Falls
wasn’t
real appealing,” Walsh says with a laugh.
Dave Frasch, ’69, played tennis against Walsh when the latter was a teenager
and introduced him to Lawrence. Walsh earned the starting quarterback job after
the graduation of All-American Jim Petran in 1980.
During his two years as a starter, he put together an 18-2 record and completed
196 of 439 passes for 2,682 yards, and 28 touchdowns. Walsh, a senior in the
fall of 1981, remembers some plays that stand out in that memorable season.
The Vikings trailed 20-12 in the closing minutes of the regular-season finale
at Ripon College. The Redmen blitzed, and it looked as if Walsh was going to
be sacked. He miraculously ducked under the onrushing defenders and saw Jeff
Ropella, ’82, behind the Ripon secondary. The play went for a touchdown,
and Lawrence went on to a 23-20 victory.
“Had they sacked me, the game was going to be over,” Walsh says. “I’d
like to say it was the greatest play, but it was pure luck.”
Two weeks later, in the quarterfinals of the NCAA Division III playoffs, Walsh
tossed a 41-yard touchdown pass to Pat Schwanke, ’83, that tied the game
in the first half. He laughs now at the pass, which wasn’t a perfect
spiral.
“Schwanke described it as a wounded duck. I would describe it as a smart
bomb,” Walsh
says. “It kind of wobbled down there. Had it been a spiral, they would
have knocked it down.”
He threw another touchdown pass to Schwanke in overtime, and that won the game
for the Vikings.
Walsh went from running the plays to showing people how to call their own plays
more effectively. Armed with a degree in economics from Lawrence, he attended
Northwestern University’s J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management
and earned a Master of Business Administration degree.
He founded Sullivan Walsh Associates, a performance-improvement consulting
firm, in 1995.
“Life has played out well. I’ve been blessed, with all that’s
happened to me. I think Lawrence is a big part of that,” Walsh says. “For
someone like me, who came out with an uncertain career path, the education
allowed me to go wherever I wanted to go.”
He is married to Beth Sullivan and they live in Arlington Heights, Ill., with
their five children, Patrick, Maggie, Brigid, Maura, and Brian.
Pete Carlson, ’83
Pete Carlson was ready to sit out the 1981 football season. A devastating knee
injury suffered in the 1980 season finale against Ripon College made it almost
a certainty that the big offensive tackle wouldn’t be able to suit up.
Fate, and being a quick healer from the two knee surgeries he needed, put Carlson
back into the lineup for some of the most memorable games in Lawrence football
history.
“I figured I’d be out the whole year,” says Carlson, who
was a junior in the fall of 1981.
When a cheap shot in the Knox College game sidelined All-America tackle Ken
Urbanski, ’82, for the rest of the season, head coach Ron Roberts told
Carlson the team needed him now.
The Beaver Dam native became a starter at tackle, but his comeback was almost
short-lived. In his second game back, the regular-season finale at Ripon, he
re-injured his knee.
“I had gone in early in the game. Mike Allen was our big right guard,
and he blocked a guy right down onto my leg,” Carlson says.
“It hurt like hell. I knew that if I went out, they’d never put
me back in again. By the time we went back on the field, it was all right again.”
That game turned out to be a nail-biter, with a 35-yard field goal from Kraig
Krueger, ’84, in the
waning seconds providing the winning margin in a 23-20 Lawrence victory.
“It was like being in a game where every single play makes a difference,” Carlson
says. “You don’t get that very often. It was tremendous.”
A geology major, Carlson figured he would work for a major oil company following
his time at Lawrence. He started graduate school at Wichita State University,
but after one semester, he dropped out of the geology program.
He instead earned a master’s degree in sports administration from Wichita
State. He coached football and completed his internship at Friends University,
an NAIA school in Wichita. His life then took another sharp turn when he began
working as a third-shift psychiatric technician. He found he could help people,
and that the work fed on itself.
“I was a victim of my own success,” he says. “I got promotion
after promotion.”
But from geology to sports administration to a psychiatric hospital?
“I am the example of the Lawrence Difference,” Carlson says. “When
you go to Lawrence, you learn how to learn.”
Carlson earned an Master of Business Administration degree and now is the administrator
of Aurora Behavioral Health Services and Aurora Psychiatric Hospital. Aurora
Health Care is a not-for-profit organization that employs 25,000 and serves
more than 90 communities in Wisconsin.
Carlson and his wife, Karen, live in Muskego.
Murray McDonough, ’84
When you look at the roster of the 1981 football team, the players are from
places you expect – the Fox Valley, metro Milwaukee, suburban Chicago.
One of the exceptions was Murray McDonough, a defensive back from Lighthouse
Point, Fla.
Growing up near Fort Lauderdale, McDonough says there weren’t a lot of
opportunities to play collegiate football in the Sunshine State, unless you
were headed somewhere big like Florida State University or the University of
Florida. With parents who grew up in the Midwest, McDonough turned his attention
to schools in this part of the country.
“I really didn’t have an opportunity to continue,” says McDonough. “I
wanted to play, and I looked at a lot of schools. Football was really important
to me. I thought Lawrence was a great combination of academics and athletics.
“I came up for a visit during the summer. I was pretty impressed, enough
so that I decided to go there.”
McDonough recalls his teammates going home for a night or a weekend, but that
sort of trip was impossible for him. With that in mind, he says the Lawrence
community always had a helping hand.
“The people there were incredibly nice to me. I would always get offers
for Thanksgiving,” McDonough says. “Coach Roberts, to a certain
extent, took me under his wing. I spent a lot of time with his family.”
As a sophomore in the fall of 1981, McDonough became the starting strong safety
on what was one of the greatest defenses in Lawrence history. While the team
was known for its offensive firepower with All-Americans like Scott Reppert, ’83,
and Pat Schwanke, ’83, the defense gave up an average of 12.4 points
per game, allowed only 11 touchdowns during the regular season, and posted
a pair of shutouts.
“Lawrence always put a lot of points on the board,” McDonough says. “Maybe
that was the difference that year, we had a great defense. Rich Agness was
a great defensive coordinator.”
A two-time All-American and All-Midwest Conference selection, he got his baptism
of fire in the 1981 season opener, an 18-15 win at Cornell College, which would
be one of the contenders for the league title.
“Playing in a big game like that and having a significant role was my
indoctrination,” says
McDonough, who was one of the players attempting to cover Cornell star John
Ward. “He was a big-time player. He was a stud, and we did pretty well
in shutting down their offense.”
The regular-season finale at Ripon College, a stirring 23-20 Lawrence victory,
stands out for what took place during and after the game.
“That was the first time a lot of fans came onto the field after the
game,” McDonough
says. “That had never happened before. I remember everyone celebrating.
I just thought, ‘Wow.’”
A physics major, McDonough was part of the 3-2 engineering program and Lawrence
administrators worked it out so he could complete his civil engineering degree
at the University of Florida.
He graduated from Florida in 1986 and has worked as a bridge engineer at URS
Corp., the world’s largest engineering design firm, for 20 years.
McDonough, who is a competitive distance runner and cyclist, is single and
lives in Tampa.
Ron Reising, ’82
Ron Reising was proud to be a “bluebelly.”
Bluebelly was the nickname given to the defense, and the native of Rochelle,
Ill., was a standout defensive lineman for the 1981 football squad.
“We wore the blue jerseys in practice, and the white jersey was what
the offense used,” says Reising, a two-time All-Midwest Conference selection. “We
recognized we were two different groups but one team. The defense really did
bring an attitude of ‘we can dominate this game.’”
Reising, the chief procurement officer for Duke Energy, the nation’s
largest utility, was one of a number of standouts on Rich Agness’ defense.
Reising says Agness, a 1967 Lawrence graduate, would install the base defense
at the beginning of the season and then tweak it for each opponent.
“I have to give a lot of credit to Rich Agness,” Reising says. “He
would fine-tune it that week to that specific offense. Agness was a huge part
of the success.
“On paper, we were always outmanned. He did a great job of utilizing
the talents and skills of what we had.”
The defense came up big on numerous occasions during that 1981 season, and
Reising remembers when Coe College and star halfback Gregg Trosky came to Appleton.
“They were kicking everybody’s butt. They had a guy (Trosky) who
looked like he was absolutely unstoppable, but we completely shut them down,” Reising
says.
The defense limited Trosky, who finished 16th in the nation in rushing that
season, to a paltry 37 yards on 15 carries.
When the Vikings trailed in the regular-season finale at Ripon College, it
was the defense that shut down the Redmen in the game’s final minutes.
“We were behind. We had to get the ball for the offense, and we had to
get them some field position,” Reising recalls. “The defense put
the offense in a position to win the game. If you went back and looked at that
last series,
that says everything about our defense.”
Reising earned a degree in economics from Lawrence, but it was a high school
girlfriend who pointed him to the school. She had visited Lawrence and told
him, “I don’t think it’s right for me, but you would like
it.” Head coach Ron Roberts started recruiting Reising, and he arrived
in the fall of 1978.
“The academics were outstanding, and it was a chance to continue to play
football, which was very appealing,” he says. “It was a very easy
decision.”
Reising was still able to visit home once in a while, and he took the whole
team with him on one occasion. The Vikings were headed to a game not far from
the Reising family home just south of Rockford. The team bus stopped, and it
became a big deal for Rochelle, a town of less than 8,000 some 25 years ago.
“My parents had all the ovens and all the neighbors’ ovens going,” says
Reising. The team feasted on lasagna, and the local radio station came out
to do interviews.
Reising attended Northwestern University’s J.L. Kellogg Graduate School
of Management for his Master of Business Administration degree.
He worked for many years for Ameritech, the precursor to SBC, both in the United
States and Europe. After a stint as the chief financial officer of Bell Canada,
he went to work as the vice-president of finance and chief procurement officer
of Cinergy, which became part of Duke Energy.
Reising, who has worked for Duke Energy the past four years, married Anne Pouba, ’85.
The Reisings live in Cincinnati, Ohio, and have two daughters, Lauren and Anna.