These 10 unheralded Tucsonans are making a difference, Greg Hansen says

Greg Hansen's summer project

Over the previous five weeks, Star columnist Greg Hansen profiled 10 under-the-radar Tucsonans who make a difference in the local sports scene. They range from a UA facilities guru and a pair of golf executives to a basketball official and onetime high school coach. Scroll through Hansen's 10 picks below.

June 17: Andrew Wack

About 110,000 golfers walk into the pro shop at the Randolph Golf Complex every year and about 109,999 get the following greetings:

“How’s your knee, Bob?”

“Did the pool guy I recommend work out, Jeff?”

“I heard you shot your age, Vanna.”

It is golf’s version of “Cheers,” where the man behind the counter, Andrew Wack, knows everybody’s name.

One day last week at the Grand Lake Golf Course high in the Colorado mountains, I bumped into Tucsonan Jim Thompson, who frequently plays at Randolph’s two courses, Randolph North and Dell Urich, in the winter.

I asked if he knew Wack.

“Love that guy,” he said.

Talk about a difference-maker.

Retired IRS official David Cook plays golf two or three mornings a week at the Randolph complex. Cook sometimes arranges tee times for eight or 10 of his golf partners and the numbers don’t always work out, especially when the tee sheet is booked from 7 a.m. until noon.

“On occasion, I mess up and have more golfers than I have tee times,” says Cook. “Andrew always says ‘don’t worry, we’ll work it out.’ And he does.”

Once, on Wack’s day off, Cook paid with a credit card instead of with his season pass. When he got his bank statement, he noticed an unexpected charge for green fees.

“I went to Andrew the next day and within two minutes he found my charge and credited my account,” says Cook.

It’s not about money with Wack, it’s about engagement. Invariably, while waiting to check in, I notice that almost every golfer carries on a personal conversation with Andrew.

“Good luck with your new car, Mike,” Andrew will say.

“See you next week, Andrew,” the golfer says.

When my friend George Yost, a regular at Randolph for almost 30 years, moved to Colorado last year, he walked to the counter to pay for his final day of golf in Tucson.

“No charge for you, my friend,” said Wack. “It’s on me.”

In an often unfriendly and cold industry ravaged by the economy and diminishing numbers, Wack is a one-man welcoming committee.

The Illinois-born, Maryland-raised son of a U.S. Department of Agriculture worker drove his ’66 Mustang to Oro Valley about 30 years ago to visit his sister. He liked the area immediately and a day later walked to the pro shop at Oro Valley Country Club and applied for a job.

He was hired the same day. Except for a brief stint working at a golf club near Palo Alto, California, Wack has worked at El Conquistador Country Club, SaddleBrooke Golf Club, the Silverbell Golf Course and for about the last decade, Randolph.

Things you wouldn’t know about the modest Andrew Wack: He was once a scratch golfer and a golf instructor, before turning strictly to the meet-and-greet retail business.

“I had three surgeries for skin cancers on my face,” he says. “I took the hint and decided to get out of the sun as much as possible.”

He surely gained his helpful demeanor from his father, who moved his family to Africa for the Department of Agriculture when Andrew was just a kid. His dad helped developing countries learn how to irrigate crops and install plumbing and flooring in their modest homes, and how treat people the right way.

“Andrew is the consummate professional in facilitating and managing the clubs that utilize Tucson’s municipal courses,” says Jim Normoyle, a Raytheon official who chairs the Sunrise Golf Club. “The thing that stands out about Andrew is his attitude. He has a way of making each club, regardless of the number of members, feel like they are walking into a country club where he knows everyone’s name.”

Before OB Sports was hired to conduct the day-to-day business and course operations of Tucson’s five city golf courses, Wack was often a middle man trying to explain why bunkers had not been raked, or why drinking foundations didn’t work, or why the greens were so bumpy.

Someone would walk in and say “Andrew, why is the pin on No. 5 on a mound in the middle of the green? It’s impossible!”

A few minutes later someone would open the door and say “Andrew, you should check out the sand trap at No. 3. It’s a big pool of water.”

“Obviously the courses are in better shape now,” Wack says. “I have a lot of respect for OB Sports and what they’ve been able to do. I get comments about the improvements every day and it makes my job easier.”

Wack usually arrives at the pro shop at 5 a.m., works on the books and prepares for another day at “Cheers.”

In late May, I was in the pro shop when a man opened the door and said “Andrew, I shot 72. If I can do that six years from now, I’ll shoot my age.”

Golfers can be insufferable, often recounting shot-by-shot sequences that seem interminable. As usual, Wack was an interested listener.

“How’d you do over the water at No. 17?” he asked.

“Put it in that back bunker,” the 72-shooter said. “And, hey, maybe you should tell those OB Sports guys that there’s only one rake back there. Had to walk around the whole bunker to get it.”

Wack laughed.

“Next time don’t put it in the bunker,” he said.

The man waved and walked away smiling.

June 20: Suzy Mason

Because she was a baseball catcher growing up in Canandaigua, New York, Suzy Mason qualifies for any baseball term you want. Here’s the one that fits best: She is a five-tool player.

She helped to hire coaches.

She successfully operated a host site for the NCAA basketball tournament.

She engineered the security for a tense Territorial Cup game.

She wore a hard hat to work to supervise a $30 million makeover of McKale Center.

She coordinated a construction project for as many as 280 workers per day to build the $72 million Lowell-Stevens Football Facility.

Mason’s title is a long one: senior associate athletic director for event management and facilities. She’s an Ivy League grad (Cornell) whose strength is her versatility; she works in the dust and dirt and also in a dress.

“I’m a boots-on-the-ground kind of person,” she says. “It’s a fun dance.”

A week ago, Mason was in her windowless office at McKale, bouncing between four ongoing construction projects that will cost $66 million. She stopped briefly with associate Matt Brown to watch live webcams of the massive swimming, softball and football makeovers.

“Matt said, ‘Watch this guy on the Komatsu backloader. He’s unbelievable,’” she said. “And he’s right. I’ve got so much respect for the skill it takes to run a backloader or an earthmover.”

Did you ever think you’d hear that from an associate athletic director at a Pac-12 school?

A few years ago, Arizona athletic director Greg Byrne gave a tour of the bowels of a torn-up McKale Center. We walked into a dark corridor accompanied by sounds of power tools and hammers crashing against a wall.

Mason walked out of a dark space, hard hat in place, a purposeful expression on her face.

“We’re going to run the work crews in shifts until midnight,” she told Byrne. “We’ve got to get finished on schedule.”

As Mason walked away, Byrne spoke the way he would speak when someone like Scooby Wright sacked a Sun Devil quarterback.

“Suzy’s in control,” he said. “It is very comforting.”

In 20 years at Arizona, Mason has touched ‘em all, another baseball term from her ballplaying days in Canandaigua. She has been involved with ticketing, security, fan engagement, concessions, lodging, TV replays, NCAA volleyball tournaments, NCAA softball super regionals, and accommodating a training camp for the Phoenix Suns.

That’s just a partial list. Once, when the ZonaZoo was at its most popular, she had to tell 600 students that they couldn’t get into Arizona Stadium. That being-the-bad-guy routine is not in any job description, especially for a people-person such as Mason.

“One of her assets is the ability to tell you what you need to hear, not just what you want to hear,” says the man who hired her, former UA athletic director Jim Livengood. “That alone is an art form.”

Mason is married, a mother of two — “I’m a softball mom,” she says proudly — who says that “every day is different.”

How in the world did a Cornell grad, a varsity basketball player, wind up at Arizona?

“Every winter I’d watch basketball on TV and I’d see that old cactus-and-sunset logo on the court at McKale Center and it drew me to watch Lute Olson’s teams,” she remembers. “After I graduated from Cornell, I moved to North Carolina to get a master’s degree. I never had a plan to move to Arizona.”

But she got to know a guy who knew a guy who knew the late Boyd Baker, a top functionary in the UA’s physical education operation. One thing led to another and Baker contacted UA assistant athletic director Dick Bartsch, and it wasn’t long before Mason drove to Tucson sight unseen.

She has gone from an intern to director of internal operations to a bunch of titles and responsibilities that reflect her ability to get things done.

This summer she is booked, dealing with project managers, demolition experts and work crews who are charged with completing a $25 million Arizona Stadium project by Aug. 31, and to stay on schedule to have an $8 million Hillenbrand Stadium re-do done by Feb. 1.

“It’s an ambitious schedule but it can be done; we can’t be late on these things,” she says. “We’ve got our swimming team practicing at Amphi High School twice a day. We’ve got 277 student-athletes taking summer classes. Our softball team will hold fall practice at Lincoln Park. We have to maximize every square-foot of property we have to make this work.”

Mason doesn’t get the easy stuff, like scheduling basketball games or staying in five-star hotels to oversee a football trip to Stanford or Colorado.

“Her people skills and work ethic skills are over the top,” says Livengood. “I’ve been around a lot of great people during my career, but I’m not sure I’ve ever been around anyone better or more task-oriented than Suzy.

“Honestly, she could be the AD at any university in the country and they would immediately be better. The UA is so very lucky to have her.”

The old-school Mason grew up in a neighborhood where the summer games were Wiffle ball, kick the can, kickball, flashlight-tag and anything you could invent. “I’d stay out until dark,” she says. “My neighborhood was mostly boys so I had to learn how to speak up to keep up. I’m sure that’s where I got my leadership skills.”

As Arizona spends $66 million to maintain pace in the demanding Pac-12, Mason has developed friends foreign to most at big-time athletic departments: project managers, engineers, architects and Komatsu drivers.

“I love the challenge of this,” she says. “It lights my fire.”

June 24: Bob Scofield

Here is Bob Scofield’s work schedule from hell, November through March: Fly to every conceivable airport in Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Utah, North Dakota, Washington and Oregon.

Travel delays? Snow-covered highways? Bring it.

You do this to officiate 91 college basketball games in 130 days, a referee’s version of “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” all serenaded by people calling you bad names.

When it’s over, after officiating your 20th NCAA Tournament, you decompress, fly to Italy with your wife and book an excursion along the Amalfi Coast. The boat stops next to 30-foot high cliffs.

So much for kicking back.

“There were a bunch of young guys saying, ‘Come on, old man; jump,’” Scofield remembers.

This is nothing compared to officiating a Sweet 16 basketball game with 15,000 people judging every whistle you blow.

So you climb the cliff, take off your shirt, peer into the Tyrrhenian Sea and … it’s go time.

Bob Scofield is no old man. The calendar says 60, but you can’t do what he does and have a Pac-12 basketball coach shout, “Hey, old man, you blew that call!”

He is, instead, a tough sonofagun, the son of a New Jersey policeman who has become something of a godfather to Tucson’s basketball officiating community.

For 25 years, Scofield has been much more than a basketball ref. If you know someone in Tucson who officiates high school or junior-college basketball, at any level, he or she probably attended one of Scofield’s training camps, often held in conjunction with longtime Tucson Pac-12 referee Chris Rastatter.

“I think so highly of what Bob’s doing that I’m going to send my son to his camp next summer,” Pima College coach Brian Peabody said. “I have Bob speak to my Pima teams every year about player-ref relationships. It has helped dramatically. Very rarely do we get caught up in the officiating.”

Last week, Scofield held a two-day camp at Pima College for 42 referees. For 12 hours a day, they officiated high school summer games. Scofield is not an easy grader. If you don’t do it right, you will have difficulty getting an assignment for a Class 2A junior varsity game in Tombstone.

“Of the 42 we had, about three passed the eye-test,” says Scofield, who grew up in Denville, New Jersey, about 20 miles from New York City and moved to Tucson in 1988.

“I take this with total seriousness. There is a shortage of capable officials in Southern Arizona. I want these guys to work hard enough to get a break like I got and work their way up the system. There just aren’t a lot of diamonds in the rough right now.”

This is a break:

Scofield broke into the Southern Arizona officiating system in the early 1990s. He started at the bottom even though he had long-ago refereed college games involving Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference schools like Siena, Marist and Iona.

“I’m working a JV game in Nogales when Mike Hart spots me and asks what I’m doing working a JV game?” Scofield remembers. “He calls Boyd Baker, who was the king of the officiating system in Southern Arizona and the next thing you know I’m doing all the big games: Salpointe, Canyon del Oro, and those Cholla and Sunnyside games when they had state championship teams with Chuck Overton and Jermaine Watts.”

Mike Hart was one of the leading officials in Southern Arizona history, brother to Pima County Sports Hall of Fame athletes/officials Bobby and Larry Hart.

His word was gold.

“You could see Bob had the right stuff,” Hart said. “He’s a pro.”

Soon, Scofield was working the 1996 state championship game that featured future Arizona All-American Mike Bibby of Phoenix’s Shadow Mountain High School. It was one of five state championship games Scofield officiated.

By then, Scofield had worked about 250 top high school games and advanced to call ACCAC games, from Yuma and Thatcher to Pima College. He was all over the map, but he was also on the map.

Then came another career-turning break.

In 1996, one of the Big Sky Conference’s leading officials slipped on the ice leaving Washington State’s Beasley Coliseum. He tore an ACL and was out for the season.

The Big Sky phoned Scofield and gave him the injured referee’s schedule.

“They threw me into the fire,” Scofield said. “That was my break.”

By 2008, Scofield became the first referee to officiate a men’s and women’s NCAA Tournament game in the same season — the UCLA-Mississippi Valley State men’s game in Los Angeles and the Georgia-Iona women’s game in Norfolk, Virginia, in the same week. By 2016 he was selected to work the women’s Final Four.

Scofield grew up a baseball player at Morris Knolls High School in New Jersey. He got a job with the postal service, and when he followed his wife to Tucson, to the UA, he continued what would be a 30-year career as a mail carrier before retiring a few years ago to concentrate strictly on officiating.

First game officiated: Marshtown High School in New Jersey, 1981. Pay? $25. Now a Pac-12 official can make as much as $4,000 per game.

It seems impossible to be a full-time mail carrier and Pac-12 basketball referee simultaneously, but Scofield did it for almost 20 years. It’s crazy.

His schedule continues to be slightly manic: From November through February, Scofield is often out of town five days a week, working three to five games from North Dakota to San Diego.

Then he really gets busy.

“After the season ends I do at least eight weekends at camps and seminars before August. You’ve always got to keep getting better.” He has worked Lute Olson camps, scrimmages and Red-Blue games. He has assigned refs to Sean Miller, Joan Bonvicini and Niya Butts’ camps at McKale Center.

It doesn’t mean he escapes the heat.

Last week Scofield was officiating girls summer league games in Tucson when the mother of a high school player had words with him.

“It’s not unexpected,” he says. “The parents think it’s easy. I mean, did you watch the NBA Finals? Those refs are the best in the world, and look how tough it was for them.

“I’ve been doing this for almost 40 years, and I’m still trying to get it right.”

June 27: Landyn Lewis

You know you’ve made an impact at The First Tee of Tucson when one of your golfers, 16-year-old Hailey Tellez, will play in Wednesday’s Pro-Am of the PGA Tour’s Quicken Loans National in the Washington, D.C., area.

You know you’ve made remarkable progress when your high school golf prep program offers 12 hours of instruction this week from 2001 U.S. Senior Open champion Don Pooley and by Susie Meyers, chosen as one of America’s Top 100 golf teachers by Golf Magazine.

Progress? It’s when more than 450 Tucsonans register to your program at El Rio Golf Course, which doesn’t count those who participate in First Tee of Tucson programs at Sewailo Golf Club, Forty Niner Country Club, the Rolling Hills Golf Club, Crooked Tree Golf Course and at the Country Club of Green Valley.

“Our goal is to make Tucson an empire for junior golf in the United States,” says Landyn Lewis, the program and life skills director of the First Tee of Tucson. “I have imagined this. I can see it continuing to grow. It’s kinda all over town.”

The growth and success of the First Tee of Tucson was about as predictable as Landyn Lewis becoming its dynamic leader.

I mean, isn’t golf a dying sport? Isn’t it too slow for millennials? Too expensive for most, especially kids?

The son of 1981 Sahuaro High all-state basketball player Gary Lewis, later the varsity basketball coach at Tucson and Catalina Foothills high schools, Landyn grew up in basketball.

“I wasn’t very good in golf; I didn’t start until I was 15,” he says. “I got my first job as a cart boy at Tucson National and worked my way up to the golf shop as a merchandiser.”

Once he dedicated himself to golf, it wasn’t long before Lewis shot 64 and was awarded a scholarship to play at Pima College. “I literally practiced eight hours a day,” he says.

It’s the same kind of commitment that turned The First Tee of Tucson — founded in 2007 — into one of the most significant sports opportunities for boys and girls aged 6 to 17 in Southern Arizona.

“Landyn really believes this is his mission,” says Judy McDermott, executive director of the Conquistadores, who operate the nonprofit First Tee of Tucson. “He doesn’t say no to anything. Everything is ‘yes.’ He really wants to grow the game and believes, like I do, that golf is a game of a lifetime, available to everyone.”

On a hot day in May, Lewis and McDermott, among others, played 100 holes of golf at El Rio, raising about $60,000 for the First Tee of Tucson. It’s an ambitious organization that has created an umbrella under which now operates the historic Ricki Rarick junior golf program, as well as the Southern Arizona Junior Golf Association.

It’s not a competition-based firm in which you are defined by your score or your golf success.

The First Tee’s 4,000-square- foot clubhouse at El Rio Golf Course, funded by the PGA Tour and the Conquistadores, is more like an academy for lifetime success. For six days a week, you can spend as much time on a computer as on the driving range.

It’s amazing that a bustling and growing organization like the First Tee of Tucson has just two full-time employees: Lewis and Vicky Gonzalez, who is director of participation and volunteer services.

“We found Landyn at Tucson National and arranged to have him volunteer for us at the Crooked Tree Golf Course,” says McDermott. “He did not yet have his PGA accreditation, but we were so impressed that we sent him to Phoenix for training, and he took it from there. He was the one we were looking for.”

Lewis first distinguished himself in Tucson by raising about $45,000 for a Cherry Field memorial for his childhood friend, Chris Moon, a former Tucson High and UA baseball player who died from wounds sustained after he stepped on a roadside bomb in Afghanistan in 2010. In addition to his First Tee duties, Lewis plans to award college scholarships — Moondog Scholarships — worth about $8,000.

He pours himself into the First Tee program with no less enthusiasm.

“My top priority is making sure everyone knows about the opportunities available to them at the First Tee,” he says. “Not every kid in our program wants to be on the PGA Tour someday. We’re not trying to build the next Annika Sorenstam or Tiger Woods. Our No. 1 goal is to provide a life skills curriculum for kids. This is a learning center, an awesome place for young people to be active and make new friends.”

Golf can be an intimidating game for anybody, especially for those just learning to swing a club. That’s part of the reason the game has been diminished by a lack of play the last 20 years, especially among those in the First Tee’s age range.

Lewis is fighting that; he has been exceptional at making the game more friendly.

“I relate it to when I played basketball at Tucson High,” he says. “I was nowhere near one of the best players on the floor, but I had an attitude that the more I learned about the game, the more I could help the team and the more fun I could have. I’ve translated that to golf, and it’s my passion to teach the kids that golf can be a bridge to life.

“It doesn’t have to be frightening or confusing. It can be fun.”

July 1: Joan Liess

Joan Liess has worked for the Colorado Rockies, the PGA Tour, the U.S. National Senior Olympics, the Tubac Golf Resort, the National Finals Rodeo and, most notably, La Fiesta de los Vaqueros.

She was general manager of Old Tucson when Old Tucson was the heavyweight of all local attractions, a time when you could still imagine John Wayne bursting through a saloon door to punch a rustler in the kisser.

Liess made her mark in what used to be a man’s world, and much like John Wayne, if she ever is intimidated , you’d never know it.

“Joan is a godsend,” says Gary Williams, long-time general manager of the Tucson Rodeo Committee. “I wouldn’t want to do this without her.”

A few years ago, I discovered that my all-access credential to La Fiesta de los Vaqueros included a space in the chute – a platform maybe 5 feet away from world champion bull riders and 1,600-pound bulls famously named Bodacious and Tornado.

At first I thought this couldn’t be possible. Five feet from Bodacious and the great Ty Murray? There is no better seat in sports.

So I asked Joan. “Can I really stand next to the chute?”

“Follow me,” she said, grabbing her cowboy hat and clomping in her cowboy boots through the dirt at the Tucson Rodeo Grounds. Once next to the chute, you could feel the ground shake. The bull slammed against the railing as Ty Murray gathered himself for what he hoped to be eight seconds of glory.

It was almost paralyzing, a combination of fear and excitement.

“I get chills every time I go to the platform,” she said again last week. “I just love the cowboys. They’ll say ‘hi ma’am,’ tip their hats to you and then all hell breaks loose.”

Joan Liess might’ve been a sportswriter in another era, but when she grew up in St. Louis, newspapers weren’t yet hiring women to write about baseball and football. She would often accompany her father, George, to old Busch Stadium — he was a long-time usher and employee of the Bell Telephone system — and sit in the press room as sportswriters banged out their stories on the old typewriters of the day.

She met and became a fan of Hall of Famers Lou Brock and Stan Musial, and maybe that’s why she has felt at home working in marketing and media relations in many of Tucson’s most significant sporting events over the last three decades.

“I moved to Tucson in 1981 after working as a copywriter and copy chief for a advertising department in St. Louis,” Liess says. “I met Bob Shelton, who ran Old Tucson, and he hired me to be his marketing director.”

A few years later, Liess became Old Tucson’s general manager. Talk about a fast track.

I met her in the mid ’80s. She arranged a press conference for the great Merlin Olsen, who was preparing for induction into the NFL Hall of Fame.

Olsen was working on the set of “Father Murphy” at Old Tucson. I introduced myself to Joan after the press conference, and told her that I grew up in Olsen’s hometown, and was friends with his twin sisters and brother.

“Let me get Merlin for you,” she said. “He’d probably like to meet you, too.”

And so for five minutes, I sat with “Father Murphy” at Old Tucson, thanks to Joan Liess.

And that’s the way it has been for over 30 years. Whether at the Tucson Open or the Tucson Rodeo, or wherever, Liess has put on a clinic of how to make a reporter’s job flow.

“It’s funny how it all worked out,” she says. “I grew up hanging out with my parents at the ballpark and always dreamed of being a sports reporter. I guess I found a way to stay involved.”

Liess operates her own marketing firm, and sometimes you wonder how she makes it work. For years, she represented both the Tucson Open and the Tucson Rodeo, which were held simultaneous to one another.

It’s quite a commute from Tucson National Golf Course to the Tucson Rodeo Grounds. Somehow she made it work.

“Joan works with the Conquistadores and with us, running back and forth between the two, and I’ve never seen her drop the ball,” says Williams. “Nothing falls through the cracks. She just makes it all run seamlessly.”

Maybe she learned how to juggle successfully in the 1990s while operating Joan Liess and Associates. One of her clients of the day was the Ringling Bros. and Barnum &Bailey Circus at the Tucson Convention Center.

Juggling. The circus. Get it?

That was a decade in which she represented the Colorado Rockies. It wasn’t unusual to see her talking to Rockies manager Don Baylor, arranging to have some of his ballplayers visit Tucson schools to talk with students.

These days, Liess works almost exclusively for the rodeo and for the Cologuard Classic, a PGA Champions Tour event. One requires cowboy boots and loud music, the other more a discreet decorum.

“I’ve never heard anyone say a negative word about Joan,” says Williams. “I think we all have come to appreciate how hard she works and how professional she is. I’ve known her for 36 or 37 years, and I tell her ‘Joan, you can’t retire until I do.’ I think, someday, we’ll both ride off to the sunset together.”

July 4: Tim Bentley

A few weeks after Tim Bentley completed four years of what he calls “kick-your-ass chemo” treatments, he drove to the Tucson Racquet Club intent on regaining his fitness.

“I could barely jog, so I mostly walked,” he remembers. “I had taken so many big, fat doses of radiation, I joked with friends that I could set off alarms.”

Bentley began his running career as a Sabino High School freshman in 1981, and ultimately finished 11th in the state finals. But it isn’t the 11th place finish he treasures. It’s the mentorship and direction given by long-time Sabercats coach John Brooks.

“Coach Brooks totally changed my life,” Bentley says now. “Running came to define me.”

With lymphoma finally in remission, Bentley stepped onto the Rillito running trail. At that moment, John Brooks — yes, coach Brooks — was walking on the trail with his wife.

“How the heck does that happen?” Bentley asks, a tone of awe in his voice. “Mr. Brooks basically taught me how to be a runner, how to be competitive. That’s what saved my life. My attitude had been that I’m going to kick the crap out of cancer and be the best patient they’ve ever had. I got that attitude from Mr. Brooks.

“How did I see this man at the end of treatment, the first time I went back to running? I’m telling you, there’s something special happening here.”

That same “something special” has defined Bentley’s dedication to the Tucson running community.

He was the president of the Southern Arizona Roadrunners club. He is the Arizona representative for the Roadrunners Club of America. He was the fitness director at Canyon Ranch. He was the head track and cross country coach at St. Augustine Catholic High School for seven years. For almost a decade he operated the Spring Cross Country Classic at Lincoln Park.

He even volunteered to run the Thin Mint Sprints to raise money for the Girl Scouts of Southern Arizona, and organized a Fit Kids series of races that involved more than 2,000 Tucsonans. Long before he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 2009, Bentley helped raise $125,000 for the American Cancer Society’s race/walk to the top of “A” Mountain, an event that involved 4,000 people.

And that’s just an abridged version of his involvement in Tucson’s running industry. This is a man who makes a difference.

After running at Glendale Community College and NAU, earning a degree in broadcast journalism, Bentley went to work in marketing and sales in both Tucson and Kansas. He is now an advertising, marketing and wellness official at Tucson Medical Center.

A few weeks ago, Bentley was training on the Rillito trail and happened to pass Tucson’s iconic Olympic distance running medalist Bernard Lagat.

Lagat nodded to Bentley, who waved back and later joked that Lagat was probably thinking “I hope that old man is OK; I might need to call for help.”

Instead, it’s Bentley who runners in Tucson call for assistance.

“Tim has established himself as a vital part of the running community through simple care and concern for everyone around him,” says Pima College track and cross country coach Greg Wenneborg.

“He’s always been a great guy, but seems to have had an awakening after contracting and quietly defeating leukemia. He now seems to have figured out how to truly live life and appreciate every day. He does what he enjoys and brings others along with him. He seems to be having the perfect midlife crisis without the crisis. I’m very honored to know the dude.”

Bentley refers to the running community as “my tribe.”

At St. Augustine Catholic, he coached seven-time state champion distance runner Nico Montanez, who went on to become an All-American cross country runner at BYU and is now training in California for the 2020 Olympic marathon trials.

Of all the miles Bentley has run since his freshman year at Sabino, he has never run a marathon. That will soon change. He has been running 50 miles a week in preparation for July 29’s Jack and Jill Marathon in Seattle. He has a not-so-simple goal: to break the 3-hour 30-minute barrier, which would qualify him for the 2019 Boston Marathon.

It’s a goal that fits with his let’s-do-things-that-make-us-happy approach to life.

“When I moved back to Tucson in 2006 I realized something was missing, something that would make my brain happy and my heart feel good,” he says. “That missing element was running.

“I appreciate it even more now because I’m very lucky to be alive. I beat the odds, or fate, or whatever you call it. When I was going through cancer treatment it was like someone punched you in the face twice a week, and you keep coming back for more. What it taught me was that I don’t want to miss anything.

“I’m going to take full advantage of this second chance.”

July 8: Ted Schmidt

Nothing in Ted Schmidt’s early life suggested he would be involved in soccer, and not just involved in soccer, but as iconic Tucson coach Wolfgang Weber says, “Ted is a catalyst, one of those guys who come around once in 100 years.”

Soccer?

“I didn’t see it coming,” Schmidt says.

He has a passion for baseball, and was the president of Canyon View Little League. He was a scoutmaster for the Boy Scouts. He graduated from the UA law school and became a prominent Tucson trial attorney. He is a fisherman of the first rank. He was among the first to buy into Lute Olson’s dynasty, purchasing 10 up-close season tickets, traveling to all of Arizona’s Final Fours.

Schmidt even tried to be a cowboy.

“I entered a rodeo in Apache Junction,” he remembers, laughing. “I was going to be a bareback bronc rider. I stayed on that horse for about two seconds and broke my wrist. That was the end of my rodeo days.”

More? If you’re ever at the College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta, take a look at Chuck Cecil’s plaque. Schmidt — then president of the Southern Arizona Chapter of the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame — did the exhaustive legwork to get the Arizona safety inducted into the Hall of Fame.

But about 20 years ago, Schmidt’s youngest daughter, Savanna, became a soccer player and everything changed.

Ted Schmidt is now the president of both FC Tucson Youth soccer and the Pima County Junior Soccer League.

That’s soccer times two and then some. Who does that?

More than anyone, Schmidt was responsible for construction and funding of the Ann Schmidt Kickin’ It Clubhouse, a 4,000-square foot structure that houses FC Tucson Youth Soccer (formerly the Tucson Soccer Academy)

“People ask me if I was a good soccer player and I tell them I never played,” he says. “I didn’t really care for it.’

Now, more than anyone, Schmidt is the caretaker of Tucson’s most successful youth sports program, soccer.

“When we founded the Tucson Soccer Academy, we were leery of lawyers who get involved with huge organizations. Typically, they take them over,” says Weber. “We wanted coaches to run the TSA; we wanted the board dominated by coaches. We didn’t want anyone — parents or lawyers — to hijack the organization, or run it into the ditch.”

“Ted has been exactly the opposite. It’s odd, because I don’t think Ted knew much about soccer at all.”

Schmidt chuckles when asked about his entry into soccer. “I think I was viewed as a dissident rabble rouser,” he says.

If you stop by Brandi Fenton Park on east River Road you will see a monument to the successful work of Schmidt, Weber and founding coaches Dave Cosgrove and Charlie Kendrick. The Kickin’ It Clubhouse is surely the best of its kind in Southwest youth soccer.

It has a fitness room, a film room, artificial turf, a video room, a physical therapy room, and an area where parents can lounge in a TV room while their kids are playing soccer.

After 18 years of productive soccer — reflected by 31 state championships among Tucson boys and girls high school teams – Schmidt and the TSA high command cut through political boundaries and scored its most grand victory: It merged with its rival, the Tanque Verde Soccer Club a few months ago, to form FC Tucson Youth.

Schmidt then engineered an alliance with Phoenix Rising, a United Soccer League franchise on track to soon get an MLS franchise. The ultimate benefit is that now FC Tucson Youth has enough financial resources to offer scholarships to needy soccer players.

“All of this was huge, just huge, for Tucson soccer,” says Schmidt. “It allows us to affiliate, in part, with the Arizona women’s soccer program. We’ve been trying to make this happen for years.”

Schmidt’s decades as a trial attorney, his get-it-done approach, was vital in getting TSA to merge with the Tanque Verde club and form a super soccer organization of about 2,000 players. Although it seemed like a minor detail, neither club wanted to fully lose its identity.

What would they name this mega soccer organization?

“It was a potential deal-breaker,” Schmidt says. “It was like trying to merge the UA and ASU football programs. There were a lot of sensitivities”

But once Schmidt brokered with Phoenix Rising, both clubs won. FC Tucson Youth solved the identity problem.

What’s next? Schmidt has been tireless in working with city and county officials to get more availability of precious (and limited) soccer facilities in Tucson. He worked so hard that he was granted the right to do the scheduling himself. But that’s not close to the end of it.

“I’ve met with the mayor and many others and asked them to please install more lights,” he says. “You can’t wrap all of this up by 6 in the evening. Now that we’ve got 2,000 kids, it’s going to be hard to ignore us.”

July is Schmidt’s month to do his own kickin’ back. He spends much of the month fly-fishing at his little piece of paradise in Colorado, but the soccer season begins Aug. 1 and it’s go-time again.

“Ted has made people in Tucson understand we’re not the evil empire,” says Weber. “We get along and we’ve stayed true to our mission, which is the development of the kids.

“Where we are now is due, in a large degree, to Ted. I can’t say anything but great things about this guy.”

July 11: Keith Martin

On the morning of the Fourth of July, Keith Martin drove to his office at the Pima College athletic department and went to work. He wasn’t on anyone’s schedule. No events are planned until August.

Not a soul employed by PCC would’ve been surprised by this. It is what Keith Martin does.

“We’re getting our basketball court resurfaced from July 16 to August 3,” he says. “So I wanted to make sure there are no surprises. Oh, man, the result is going to be awesome.”

Martin’s enthusiasm is part of the fabric of the PCC athletic department.

“Keith is Mr. Pima College,” says Edgar Soto, the school’s athletic director and former baseball coach. “He’s very protective of our facilities and everything we do. He cares so much.”

On the Fourth of July, Keith Martin got all jacked up about resurfacing the Aztecs’ basketball court. If you find a man like that, don’t let him go.

Since he was hired as PCC’s athletics operations manager in 1998, Martin has worked for six athletic directors. The one constant is that Martin gets the job done, year after year. A few months ago, the school honored him for 20 years of dedicated service. Ever humble, Martin was caught off guard.

“Wow, do you have the right guy?” he asked.

He is surely The Right Guy.

If you ask Martin about a typical workweek, there is a rare silence. He loves to chat. But this question stops him.

“There’s no typical workday or workweek,” he says.

But here is what he did one February day last winter: He arrived early on campus to set up facilities for a track meet that began at 9:45 a.m. Then came the baseball program’s alumni game, followed by men’s and women’s basketball games.

He went home at 11 p.m.

“I drove home feeling like I’d done something worthwhile,” he remembers.

The thing about being the athletics operations manager at a place like Pima College is that nobody has the money to build a million-dollar batting facility or install a $5 million video board in the basketball arena.

“It’s a fiscal challenge unique to junior colleges,” says Martin. “Our 30-second shot clock for basketball isn’t in good shape. But we keep it functioning because we don’t have money to replace it. I’ve got lots of longevity out of our assets by being proactive.”

Martin remembers the days when future four-time Olympic distance runner Abdi Abdirahman, working on a student financial aid package, helped fold towels in the laundry room. But that financial aid plan no longer exists. It leaves the dirty work to Martin.

A few weeks ago, he transported 33 boxes of football gear to the campus, each weighing 65 to 80 pounds. He approached this with the seriousness of an auditor doing his income taxes.

“I’m responsible for the distribution and inventory of every piece of equipment in our department,” he says. “It’s a lot to look after, but my marching orders are to be on top of it, and I enjoy that component of my job.”

Not much is out of his reach.

When the Aztecs wanted to live-stream a football game at Kino Stadium, Martin figured it out. He ran a line of cable from the baseball press box to the sideline and got it to work. Soto sometimes shakes his head in wonder at what Martin gets done.

“He’s a lifelong learner,” says Soto. “He’s a black belt in karate. He’s a certified massage therapist. He plays the guitar. He was a Pac-12 volleyball official for about 20 years. He can grow grass, he can fix the gym floor, you name it.

“If you are ever stranded in the forest, Keith Martin is the guy you’d want with you. He’d figure out a way for you to survive.”

Martin didn’t wander aimlessly into this career in Pima’s athletic department. He was a teenage athlete of note, an all-star on the famous Cactus Little League baseball teams of the 1970s that included future St. Louis Cardinals catcher Tom Pagnozzi and New York Mets outfielder Mark Carreon.

He became fascinated with the Tucson Sky professional volleyball teams of the ’70s — “blown away,” he says — and enrolled in advanced volleyball classes at PCC when he was still at Rincon High School.

By 1992 he was PCC’s head volleyball coach. He soon became one of the Pac-10’s leading volleyball officials, spending 18 years refereeing games at every Pac-10 school. He was so good that he was hired to work Team USA international volleyball games against Cuba and Poland.

But when Pima offered him a chance to be chief of athletics operations, he left coaching.

Well, sort of.

He has helped his wife, Heather Moore-Martin, coach four state championship volleyball teams, two each at Catalina and Salpointe Catholic high schools, and most recently helped Heather launch beach volleyball as a sanctioned high school sport in Arizona.

“I’m the lucky one here,” he says. “I get to be around all these wonderful people every day. And the one thing I’ve learned is that it’s not about wins and losses. A few years ago, one of the former women’s volleyball players invited me to her wedding.

“I can’t remember how her teams did at Pima; maybe they went 0-18. But when she invited me to her wedding, it was like they went 18-0. Little things like that are what makes this job so rewarding.”

July 16: Bill Leith

Picture this lifetime memory for 7-year old Bill Leith of Beacon, New York:

On September 26, 1961, Bill’s father, William, returned early from his job at IBM and instead of telling his son to “get out the bats and mitts” as he often did, he told young Bill they were going to Yankee Stadium.

“It was a Tuesday night, a school night,” Bill remembers. “It was something special.”

Baseball has always been part of the Leith family DNA. Bill’s grandfather, William “Shady Bill” Leith, pitched in the big leagues, for the 1899 Washington Senators and for a handful of minor-league teams in Connecticut, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. His son, William, was the New York district director of the Babe Ruth baseball organization.

When Bill and his father arrived at Yankee Stadium, that night’s lineup between the Orioles and Yankees featured Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra and Brooks Robinson. Ordinarily, those future Hall of Famers would be enough incentive to get a father and his son to drive the 60 miles from Beacon to the Bronx.

But on this night they came to see Roger Maris, who, with 59 home runs, was in hot pursuit of the most revered number in sports: Babe Ruth’s mystical record of 60 home runs, set in 1927.

In the fourth inning, sitting above the third-base dugout, William and Bill Leith watched in awe as Maris hit his 60th home run.

Unforgettable.

Fifty-seven years later, on the Fourth of July, Bill Leith had another unforgettable baseball moment. As he stood on the turf at Kino Stadium, he looked into the stands and shook his head in awe as about 8,000 people watched his creation, the Sun Belt College Baseball League, and its 2018 All-Star Game.

“Oh my God,” he said to his long-time baseball partner Bill Fronzaglio. “Maybe we have something here.”

That’s the understatement of the year in Southern Arizona baseball.

Since Leith retired nine years ago from the UA’s facilities management organization, he has become Mr. Baseball in this town.

He took command of the Connie Mack, American Legion and Pony League programs. He created a league for high school freshmen and another for high school varsity players. Finally, in 2012, he began the Sun Belt College summer league.

“We said, ‘Let’s see if this sticks,’” he said.

This is what you might call “sticking”: In nine years, Leith’s grand idea to grow baseball in Southern Arizona has involved 1,200 teams, 15,000 players and about 5,000 games.

And because Leith and Fronzaglio established the entire operation as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, it’s not about the money. It’s all about baseball for Southern Arizona boys from 10 to college age.

Results?

“With Bill, nothing was or is impossible,” says former Desert Christian High School baseball coach Grant Hopkins, whose state championship teams of 2013, 2014 and 2015 were heavily involved in Leith’s programs. “He dreams big and puts in the time and effort to get it done.

“It’s one thing to have good ideas, but it’s a rarity to see people actually follow through with those good ideas and turn them into reality. The Tucson and Southern Arizona baseball community owes him such a debt of gratitude.”

Asked what his schedule is, Leith says, modestly, “Let’s see, I’ll be at the Kino baseball complex on Monday night and Tuesday night. I’ll be there Wednesday and Thursday night, too. And of course I’ll be there Friday and Saturday night.”

Tucson isn’t the first baseball community to profit from Leith’s devotion to baseball.

In 1992 he was elected to the Dutchess County Sports Hall of Fame — that’s his home turf near West Point, New York — for his involvement in youth baseball. The former All-County first baseman, a lefty, does not wish to take credit for Tucson’s mushrooming youth baseball operation.

“Look, Bill Fronzaglio handles the fields, all the umpires, the scheduling. He’s invaluable. And I got many of these ideas from the days I would sit with (ex-major leaguers) Doug Jones and Tom Waddell at Tom’s baseball training center, The Yard. We had all these empty fields, especially after the (Triple-A) Sidewinders left town. The high school coaches were so helpful: Len Anderson of CDO, Rod Allen of Sabino, Grant Hopkins and men like that bought in. We couldn’t have done it without them.

“I thought youth baseball in Tucson needed some help. Once I retired, I needed a hobby. This is it.”

The Sun Belt College Baseball league involves players from Arizona, California and as far away as Ohio. It’s makeup is about 75 percent those from Southern Arizona. Some of the area’s top names are participating this summer — including Nogales’ Marcel Bachelier and Tucson High’s George Arias Jr., who are bound for Arizona’s baseball roster in 2019, and some of Tucson’s leading high school players, such as Cole Altherr and Tyler Wiltshire.

Coaches? Former minor-leaguers Carlo Colombino, Gilbert De La Vara and Antonio Fernandez are part of the summer league landscape.

Leith moved to Tucson in the early 1990s and became involved with the CDO Little League. Why Tucson?

“I had relatives here, plus I had grown up watching Jerry Kindall’s teams win all those College World Series,” he says.

“I thought it would be great to live somewhere you could play baseball 12 months a year. All five of my kids went through the Marana school district and have gone on to wonderful careers. Moving to Tucson is about the best decision I ever made.”

Leith’s many summer league programs end this month. The fall league programs start soon, so it’s not like he’ll kick back and hit the beach. He is also the chairman of the Tucson Youth Baseball Association, founded by ex-New York Yankee and UA slugger Shelley Duncan, an organization that includes prominent Tucson baseball names like Blake Eager and Shane Folsom.

For Leith, the baseball season never ends.

“For this to work,” he says, “you have to have a presence, people have to see that you put in the time.”

In Tucson baseball, Bill Leith is front and center.

July 18: Patsy Lee

After All-American linebacker Sean Harris was pictured on the cover of Sports Illustrated as part of Arizona’s famed 1994 “Desert Swarm” issue, he agreed to sit with me during lunch at Camp Cochise and talk about his upbringing.

I asked about his role models at Tucson High School.

“I played for Charlie Cook and Todd Mayfield,” he said. “And I loved Patsy Lee.”

Was that your girlfriend, I asked?

“She was my basketball coach,” he said. “She’s the best.”

When I returned from Arizona’s football camp that year, I went to the Star’s library and found an envelope stuffed with archival news about Patsy Lee. How had I missed her?

She was the first female to coach a boys high school team in Tucson history — Cook hired her to coach the Badgers’ freshman basketball team when Harris was 15 years old — and it wasn’t just a stunt or an emergency fill-in. When David Gin coached Palo Verde to the 2000 state championship game, the assistant coach sitting next to him was — yep — Patsy Lee.

The great-granddaughter of a Chinese immigrant to Tucson, Patsy Lee quietly retired from 40 years of coaching a few years ago.

There should’ve been a celebration, or an induction ceremony into the Pima County Sports Hall of Fame, but Lee has never been one to elbow her way into the spotlight.

And she didn’t really retire at all. Today she is part of the LPGA Girls Golf of Tucson program, helping girls ages 7-17 learn the game.

She also volunteers for the First Tee of Tucson, and there’s no way the young women she helps to hit a golf ball understand what she means to Tucson’s sports community.

“She’s the most giving person I’ve known,” says Mayfield, the head football and track coach at Tucson and Palo Verde high schools for almost three decades. “She’s always taken care of everybody else’s kids. She even did our stats and our film stuff. If you wanted to get things done, you called Patsy.”

There’s no way anyone could have seen this coming.

Patsy’s older sister and brother got straight A’s. Her aunts were school teachers. Patsy didn’t want any of that, anything that didn’t include a ball or a bat.

“I was a jock,” she says, the 1960s term for ballplayers. “I grew up in the streets by the El Rio Golf Course playing softball and baseball. First base was a mailbox. Second base was a hubcap. I think my mom looked at me as a troublemaker because I was always at the YWCA, playing this, playing that.”

Before she enrolled at Tucson High in the mid-’60s, Patsy and her mom, Jean, talked about the future.

“Where can you get a job that pays you to play?” Jean Lee asked.

Here’s the answer: Over four decades, Patsy Lee was the head coach of Pima College’s softball team, the girls track coach at Tucson High, the boys volleyball coach at Palo Verde High School and an assistant coach of so many sports at so many places that even she has difficulty putting them in order.

She worked for some of the top names in Tucson sports history, from Gerry Lybeck, Will Kreamer, Tim DeMarchi and CeCe Hall to Mayfield, Cook and Gin. She counts as her mentor Mary Hines, the legendary state championship volleyball coach at Catalina. She has worked coaching clinics for Hall of Fame softball coaches such as Mike Candrea.

“I got my first coaching job, girls volleyball, at Tucson High because no one wanted the job,” Lee says with a chuckle. “At the time, the Tucson gym was being remodeled so we had to drive to Catalina every afternoon and wait for Mary Hines’ team to finish

“Well, Mary walks out and says, ‘Can I help you, Patsy?’ Remember, she’s my rival. But she took me under her wing and I can’t tell you how much that meant. I was all into coaching after that.”

After Lee’s first 10 years of coaching, Cook, a former all-state basketball player at THS, asked her to coach the boys freshman team during a period that the Badgers turned out such notable players as Harris and future college players Eric Langford and Val Hill.

“As long as you know basketball, they won’t care,” Cook said. “They’ll follow you.”

And so they did.

If you ask Lee about her playing days — the period that prepared her for a 40-year coaching career — she is all modesty.

“When I began high school, the only girls sports offered were tennis and gymnastics,” she says. “So I went out for the tennis team and got cut. I moped around the gym until I found out there was a girls volleyball program on Saturdays. Believe me, I never left the gym after that.”

After enrolling at the UA, Lee became a mainstay on the Wildcat volleyball, softball and basketball teams. Upon graduation, she indeed found out that someone would pay you to play.

Now, without a full-time coaching job, Lee plays golf. Lots of golf. She’s a regular at her neighborhood course, El Rio, and at the Randolph Golf Complex.

“It’s a lot like coaching,” she says. “Sign me up. I’m hooked.”