Notre Dame Athletics Director Recounts 'Indianapolis Story'
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Jordan Fouts-
WINONA LAKE – Indianapolis wasn’t always synonymous with sports, featured speaker Jack Swarbrick Jr. said during the 103rd Chamber Membership Banquet Wednesday. Swarbrick, athletics director at Notre Dame University, spoke about his role in the city’s reinvention in the past 30 years into the “amateur sports capital of the world.” There were no Colts, no Hoosier Dome and the NCAA hadn’t moved in yet when Swarbrick came to Indianapolis to practice law. You couldn’t even find a meal downtown after 8 p.m., he said. That began to change after the sports initiative took shape, he said, a shared public and private vision to rebrand the city. It was an audacious vision that they took pride in, he said. “The initiative responded to a need – the city was flat on its back,” Swarbrick said. The Baltimore Colts were brought to the city in 1984, and in 1987 the city hosted the 10th Pan American Games. Swarbrick was later vice president of the team that successfully bid to bring in Superbowl XLVI in 2012. It wasn’t done for love of sports, he noted, but to seize new opportunities. The first was opened by the Amateur Sports Act of 1978 and the creation of the U.S. Olympic Committee. The city now hosts the headquarters for several individual events, including diving, gymnastics and track and field. He added that if he moved to Indianapolis today, he’d get involved in a field that offers modern opportunities like life sciences. Swarbrick also reflected on South Bend’s own “Indianapolis story,” when Notre Dame was considering closing its football program in 1912. Instead, coach and Athletics Director Jesse Harper followed up on his own “big hairy audacious goal,” quickly turning Notre Dame football into “America’s team.” Both Indiana cities were impacted by leaders in the community who saw an opportunity, he observed. “Now Indianapolis is a vibrant community. Like this one, it’s a community that contributes much to the people who grew up in it,” he said.
