Building Ideas

Jeff Berding is President of FC Cincinnati and led the club's meteoric rise from the United Soccer League into Major League Soccer. He started his career in politics, worked for members of Congress, ran a successful political campaign to fund the renewal of Cincinnati's central riverfront that maintained the City's MLB and NFL teams, served on Cincinnati City Council, and spent nearly 2 decades working as a sports executive for the Cincinnati Bengals.

Dawn Stewart is the Director of Athletics for Otterbein University. She is a former student-athlete with a 20+ year career in collegiate athletics having served at the University of Dayton, Captial University, and now at her alma mater - Otterbein. In 2016 she was named as one of four Division 3 "Under Armour Athletic Directors of the Year." She has been active with the National Association of the Collegiate Directors of Athletics, and been instrumental in expanding the size and influence of Athletics at Otterbein. www.otterbeincardinals.com

Mike Penner has been a member of The Ohio State University’s athletic department’s leadership team for the last 14 years providing strategic direction and oversight for the 36-sport athletic department with more than 1,000 student-athletes and 1,700 full and part-time employees. He was promoted to Executive Associate Athletic Director in June 2018 and currently serves as the lead administrator for the department’s facility operations, capital projects and athletic district development; event management and championships; technology, and audio services; and, the sport athletic director for men’s and women’s tennis teams. In his time at Ohio State, Penner has provided oversight of fan experience and promotions, creative services, the OSU Golf Club, and camps staffs; and provided leadership for more than $200 million of capital projects; has hosted more than 100 NCAA championships and more than 40 Conference championships; and has managed more than 125 events in the 100,000-seat Ohio Stadium. Penner is a former President of the Collegiate Event and Facility Management Association (CEFMA) and was selected as the inaugural CEFMA/GameDay Consulting Event & Facility Manager of the Year award recipient. He has taught classes in Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business in the Sport Management program and has given dozens of presentations on various event topics at national and regional conferences and local universities. He has worked at the NCAA Hoop City, OHSAA Tournaments for track, tennis, basketball, softball and wrestling, the Special Olympics State Summer Games and the Major League Baseball All-Star Fan Fest. A 1997 sport management graduate of the University of Dayton, Penner earned his master’s degree from The Ohio State University in 1999. He then began his career at Ohio State in July 1999 with the Department of Recreational Sports where he served as the intramural coordinator. He moved to the Department of Athletics in 2001 as the assistant director of event management and then was promoted to event management director in 2003, assistant athletics director in 2006, associate athletics director in 2009 and is now the Executive Associate Athletics Director for Internal Operations. The Cleveland native now resides in Upper Arlington, Ohio with his wife Stephanie, daughter Kaylie (7) and son Zachary (5).

Jerry Dendinger is the Chief Operating Officer of Athletes In Action, a worldwide sports ministry headquartered near Dayton. In addition to the retreats, camps, and team building opportunities at their HQ campus (the former Ohio Soldiers' and Sailors' Children's Home in Xenia, Ohio) AIA provides athletic teams and mission opportunities throughout amateur, collegiate, and professional sports organizations across the globe. Jerry is a native of Bush, Louisiana and was a successful long-distance running athlete at the University of Southern Mississippi. After a post-collegiate running career and brief stint as a chemist, he and his wife came on staff with Athletes in Action. Over his 30+ years at AIA, Jerry has served as a Chaplain, mentor, leader, and now senior executive. He and Mallory have been married for 31 years and have four adult children. www.athletesinaction.org www.woodenfamilyfieldhouse.com

Tony Costello has been an educator / practitioner for his entire 54+ year career as an architect. He holds the title, Irving Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Architecture at Ball State University, retiring as a full-time faculty member in 2005 after 38 years. He has continued for the last 16 years in an adjunct capacity and teaches one elective course a year and is involved in the Department of Architecture Professional Advisory Board. He is also the founding principal of C+A, COSTELLO + ASSOCIATES, a limited-practice, award-winning, firm he founded in 1976 in Muncie, Indiana. The focus of his practice since 2010 has been on pro bono projects in Haiti that include a completed library and an orphanage campus consisting of 5 buildings to date. Tony is a native New Yorker (Life-long METS fan) having been born in Corona, Queens, until 9 years of age when his family moved north of Peekskill, New York, on the Hudson River which he considers his “hometown.” He attended Pratt Institute from 1961 to 1964 when he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Turkey. As a Fulbright Scholar he attended the Middle East Teknik University (METU), Ankara, for the ’64-’65 academic year and was awarded a B. ARCH degree in 1965, thus being one of the first three Americans to earn this honor. He returned to Pratt and graduated in 1966 with a B. ARCH degree with Honors and was awarded the school’s Dean’s Medal. He attended Columbia University and received an M.S. Degree in Urban Design in June 1967, and was awarded a William Kinne Fellows Traveling Fellowship for the summer of 1967. After teaching for ten years, he was awarded a Lilly Endowment Open Faculty Fellowship and did a year of post-graduate work in Planning Law and Public Policy at Harvard and MIT. Tony has built an international-recognized career as one of the “pioneers” of the community-based, urban design movement founded in the late 1960’s. His founding of the Urban Design Studio at Ball State (1969) which became the Community-Based Projects (CBP) Program (1979) as well as the Muncie Urban Design Studio and Small Town Assistance Program (both in 1980). Largely due to his pioneering efforts, Ball State’s Community Based Projects (CBP) Program was honored in 2000 with the ACSA-Fannie Mae Community Design Award as one of the three, oldest, continuous community design programs in North America. Combined, these programs have won over 40 national and state awards from the AIA, APA, ACSA and U.S. Dept. of HUD in urban planning design, neighborhood revitalization, historic preservation, and affordable housing. Tony has been a corporate member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) since 1971. He served a three-year term (2005-2008) on a board of directors of the national AIA as a regional representative from the AIA Ohio Valley (IN, KY and OH) and served on the institute’s Community Committee. He also served as the national chairman of the AIA 150 - Blueprint for America subgroup, which was one of three components of the institute’s sesquicentennial celebration. For his leadership of this program, he was awarded a Presidential Citation in 2006. He was the major author of the AIA Guidelines on Pro Bono Services (2009); Tony was inducted into the AIA’s prestigious College of Fellows in 2001 and was named an AIA Richard Upjohn Fellow in 2008. He currently serves (2021-2023) as the Ohio Valley Regional Representative of the College of Fellows.