Stephen Minnis
Benedictine College, Atchison
Add up the pieces: Law degree. State prosecutor. Private legal practice. State regulatory director for 14 years at Sprint Corp. So of course Stephen Minnis is president of Benedictine College today—sometimes, you get to the perfect fit by an indirect path.
A native of Kansas City, Kan., Minnis split his youth between Wyandotte County and St. Joseph, where the family moved when his dad took a job at Missouri Western. And that’s where the first link in his Benedictine connection was forged. At Bishop LeBlond High School, he says, “all my teachers were either Benedictine sisters or graduates of Benedictine College, so it was natural that I would go to Benedictine College for school.” And he did, graduating in 1982, picking up not just a degree, but his wife, Amy before heading to Washburn Law School.
With J.D. in hand, he started in the Johnson County District Attorney’s office, where he would work with some of the biggest names in recent Kansas legal cirlces. And after going into private practice and working for Sprint, the Benedictine link resumed, with a role on the board of directors for 12 years. When Dan Carey left in 2003, Minnis won the job. Since then, he says, the staff, community and supportive Catholics have made big things happen at Benedictine: Enrollment is up 75 percent, 10 residence halls have opened, the campus has a new $21 million academic building and a satellite campus in Florence, Italy has been opened; new programs in nursing and engineering are in place, and a $50 million fund-raising campaign beat its target by 40 percent.
Christie Brungardt
Fort Hays State University, Hays
Determination and resiliency. They show up in a lot of personal stories of people from Kansas, particularly those raised on a farm, like Christie Brunghardt. Those early years near Anthony, in Harper County, were about “learning how to work hard, integrity, not depending on everyone else,’ Brunghardt says. “For me, being the oldest daughter of six siblings, it impacted me over my lifetime—I always felt a sense of responsibility about everything.”
The determination factor showed up in Brunghardt’s life when she earned her Ph.D. at the age of 54. “After having been involved in starting, owning and operating several businesses for 15 years, I decided to go back to school to get a master’s degree in Organizational Leadership,” she says. That’s when Fort Hays State offered her a full-time teaching job in the Department of Leadership Studies, which eventually piqued her interest in a doctorate.
The resiliency factor came through under the most horrific circumstances any parent could imagine: In 2008, her 20-year-old daughter was killed by an older boyfriend in Lawrence. Processing her grief, she and her husband started Jana’s Campaign, a non-profit aimed at raising awareness of domestic violence issues, and 1100 Torches, an effort to encourage people to get involved in volunteer work.
Gregg Marshall
Wichita State University
Wichita is a city teeming with captains of industry and high-rolling entrepreneurs. But no one—repeat: no one—is the talk of that town in 2014 quite the way Gregg Marshall is. In just seven years, he’s taken a purported “mid-major” basketball program at Wichita State and turned it into the winningest team in the land over the past two seasons.
Last year, the Shockers sneaked up on the rest of the country, announcing their presence with authority in a stunning NCAA Tournament upset of No. 1 Gonzaga. This year, Marshall has upped the ante, driving WSU to the first undefeated regular season in the U.S. since Nevada-Las Vegas turned the trick in 1991. At 34–0 and heading into this year’s NCAAs, the Shockers have a record 111 victories over the past four years. Not bad for a Southern boy who ventured outside of his native region to take the WSU job before the 2007-08 season. A native of Greenwood, S.C., he went to high school and Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, graduating with an economics and business degree in 1985.
He paid his dues as a coaching assistant at various small Southern colleges for 11 years, then took over at Winthrop College in 1998. By 2006, his 15th-seeded team was on the brink of beating No. 2 Tennessee in the Big Dance, then proved it was no flash in the pan by beating No. 6 Notre Dame as an 11-seed a year later, setting the stage for the WSU job offer. Measured improvements in the Shocker program marked the run-up to last year’s headline-making. WSU won the NIT Championship in his fourth year, and cracked the Associated Press Top 25 in 2012.
How far can the Shockers go? Hard to say, but this is certain: Marshall is now one of the hottest coaching prospects in the country.
Andy Myers
Pittsburg State University
Andy Myers spent his youth outside Indianapolis under the guidance of two parent-educators. That nurtured his scientific curiosity, and in Indiana, “if you wanted to major in science or engineering, Purdue was first on the list,” says Myers, now the director of the Kansas Polymer Research Center at PSU. “I thought I wanted to be a physician, but met all sorts of creative, intelligent people at Purdue.” So he stuck with chemistry, and after being exposed to research, the hook was set.
“I knew that was what I wanted to do,” he says. His work at the polymer center is a hat tip to his grandparents, who all had some connection to farming, he says. “We work on agricultural feedstocks as an alternative to petroleum as a starting material,” Myers says. “My grandfathers would have understood and appreciated the story of soybean oil to new products, even if they didn’t know what a polymer was.”
A professional relationship with scientists from the center took root in 2000, and after being invited to visit, the new building in Pittsburg, “I saw so many opportunities and saw that PSU had made a huge investment in polymer research, and I thought, ‘I want to be part of that.”
And it was so. His role, he says, entails “building connections between technical areas, between disparate people, and between science and business.”
One might not think of Southeast Kansas as a research center, but the building he works in, Myers says, “is as good as any research facility I’ve been in. …It’s got everything you need to do a high level of research in a safe and inviting atmosphere.”
He considers himself lucky to work with talented and creative scientists, and most of them, Myers says, have worked in the polymer industry, so “we appreciate and value the economic aspect of technology. We’ve been successful in transferring technology outside the university, and have a mandate to continue to work towards that goal.”
Shane Cordell
Little River High School, Little River
In small-town Kansas, they may have a passing interest in the Chiefs—or, if you’re far enough west, the Broncos. The sport’s fan’s blood really starts to boil, though, with the program right there in town, and that means high school football and basketball. And that’s why Shane Cordell could probably be anointed King of Little River without many complaints.
For 34 years, Cordell has labored on the sidelines of his alma mater, coaching football for 29 years and girls’ basketball for 34, and doing a bang-up job at both. His football teams won three state titles (in seven championship-game appearances), and his overall record there was 204–94. He topped that with basketball, where the girls have gone to state 14 times, won four straight titles, posted a state-record 91 straight wins, and this past season, pushed his victory total past 600. He even had a pair of state-champion track teams.
“Sports are very important to small schools,” he says, but notes that a small-school’s identity need not be rooted in athletics alone. “I put on a football clinic in Rolla, Kansas, one summer. When I walked in their gym it was lined with banners. They were Quiz Bowl banners. That was something important to them and they were very proud of it and deservedly so.”
Mahnaz Shabbir
Shabbir Advisors, Overland Park
Philadelphia-born Mahnaz Shabbir, whose parents immigrated from India in the ’50s, began to set down roots in Kansas City in 1980. Real roots. She’s not just the owner of the Shabbir Advisors management consulting firm, she’s a certified tree farmer.
She lives on a 30-acre spread in Stillwell, and started looking into that arboreal care in 2006. “I wanted to keep my acreage in its best condition that supports wildlife and the environment,” says Shabbir, the widowed mother of four sons. That, though, is a pleasant diversion for a business owner who earned undergraduate and MBA degrees at UMKC. Over an 18-year career with Carondelet Health, she rose to the level of vice president for strategic planning and business development, planning projects valued at tens of millions of dollars.
But after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, her Islamic faith and desire to address diversity issues led to a series of speaking engagements nationwide, so she decided to head out on her own in 2003. The years since 2001 have been challenging for Muslims, particularly for her two younger sons. They experienced considerably more animosity over their religion and ethnicity than did her older sons.
“One isn’t born with hate. It is a learned emotion. Where does this come from?” Shabbir says. “When our political leaders use my faith as a political football, what they don’t realize is that it affects children who are just being kids living their lives. It has me still speaking out because education is the only way to combat hate.”
Mary Beth Jarvis
Wichita Festivals, Wichita
Every year, Mary Beth Jarvis invites friends to spend a little time with her in Downtown Wichita for a couple of weekends in the spring. Last year, the headcount came to … oh, about 360,000. That’s a neat trick in a community of 380,000, but the seating is still pretty good at the Wichita River Festival, the biggest weekend bash you’ll find in the state.
A Pittsburgh native and Notre Dame graduate, Jarvis is executive director of the long-running event, which draws human waves to the banks of the Arkansas River on the first and second weekends of May. Most of them are on hand for the festival finale, the second Saturday, which concludes with the Wichita Symphony’s Twilight Pops Concert.
A ground-pounding tradition before the concluding fireworks is the symphony’s rendition of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture—complete with a real cannon-fire wrap-up from Fort Riley’s troops strung across the Douglas Avenue bridge.
Jarvis, who’s married to a pilot and has two children, was first exposed to the festival while working at McConnell Air Force Base in the early 1990s, then later at Koch Industries, where, she says, “I got a sense for the other side of the festival—as a sponsor and community partner.”
The fest saw a 30 percent bump in attendance last year, reflecting its enduring appeal. “It energizes downtown Wichita and unifies the community in a unique way each year,” Jarvis beams.
Doug Frost
Sommelier, Prairie Village
For the record, Doug Frost is not one in a million—he’s one in about 2.35 billion, considering that only two other people on this planet, like Frost, have simultaneously held the titles of Master of Wine and Master Sommelier. The others are from haughtier locales like San Francisco or Southhampton in England—but a global expert in wine? Here? How does this happen?
Well, for one, it’s home. Though born in Portland, Ore., Frost spent his childhood knocking around this region—Kansas City, Wichita, Hutchinson and Fort Worth. But well before he earned a degree in theater from K-State, Frost had his senses rocked with his first encounter with wine. “It was not what I expected and it seemed like it could respond to your mental inquiry with layers of aromas and flavors,” he says.
Later, working in the field for a distributor, Frost found that residents of central and western Kansas were, quite literally, thirsting for information on good wines. “People were open-minded and honest about what they thought. … It taught me a lot about the validity of each person’s palate.”In recent years, craft vineyards have popped up around the region, and “unquestionably, excellent wines have been made here,” Frost says of the local vintages. “Judges in competitions on the coasts have frequently and regularly given top awards to Kansas and Missouri wines.”
Paxson St. Clair
Cobalt Boats, Neodesha
On average, surface water covers 7 percent of each state in the U.S. Kansas? Less than one-10th of that—0.6 percent. Which made it more challenging for Paxson St. Clair, but he still managed to “grow up on the water,” he says, thanks in large part to nearby Grand Lake in Oklahoma.
And to his father’s decision to start building fiberglass boats in 1968. That’s what set him on a career with Cobalt Boats, where he’s CEO today. That path, though, “was more about the love affair I developed for boats and less about the family business,” said St. Clair, who earned a degree in economics at KU. “After college, I worked for a couple of outside boat companies—Dad told me work somewhere else for a year, so I sold Grumman pontoons, worked retail, and came back full-time in 1989.”
It wasn’t easy. “I wrestled with the decision. It was tough coming back as a single guy to southeast Kansas,” he says. But he’s made adjustments, as has his family, including splitting time between the Kansas City area and the work week in Neodesha, which has its advantages as a business site.
“One of the big advantages is, it’s centrally located,” St. Clair says, which lowers the costs of serving markets on the Pacific coast and overseas. “But I could not build Cobalt quality anywhere other than Neodesha,” he says, praising the craftsman ship of his 700 employees—in a town of 2000.
Dee Ann DeRoin
Physician, Lawrence
Dee Ann DeRoin is a physician, not a history teacher, but she imparts a powerful lesson when she notes that, until 1850, matters of public health among Indian tribes in the U.S. were administered by the Department of War. A lot has changed in American health-care since then, but Native Americans, she notes, have enjoyed far less than their share of those advances.“I could do a whole huge story—no, a book—on heath care for Indian people,” says the Lawrence-based DeRoin, who is also a member of the Ioway tribe.
A native of Nebraska who was the last of five children, she grew up in California, graduated from Cal and earned a medical degree from Stanford. When her mother decided to move back to Nebraska, DeRoin jumped on a chance to serve part of her medical residency at Haskell Indian Nations College in Lawrence. Again by chance, when the college’s physician moved on, she was invited to take the position. She’s been in Lawrence since, working as a family physician, treating Haskell students, and caring for residents of the state’s tribal populations.
Despite multiple challenges facing health-care providers serving those patients, DeRoin finds deep meaning in her work. “Working with Indian people is a joy and privilege of itself,” she said. “Second, it’s the relationships you create. Third, I can tell patients, ‘I’m the coach, you’re the athlete; I have information that can help you take better care of yourself, but we have to work as a team.’”
