The proud superintendent of the School District and this years chair of the forum. Today we are delighted to open our program to a number of members of Community Members outside of the forum for this very special event where we can hear from our own native, ed stack as he highlights the history of Dicks Sporting Goods in his new book, its how we play the game which i was able to get a little early and read and it is just a great book and great story and if you not got a chance i strongly encourage you to do that. We are thrilled to have you here today and welcome you home to share your story. I want to welcome our invited guest in particular i wanted to draw attention to the [inaudible] new Vision Business Academy students and students from the district of our region and we are thrilled to have them here today in particular. So for those of you who are not familiar with the forum it is a Membership Organization that brings people who share commitments for advancing universities and our Great Community here in the Southern Tier and strengthening the bond between the two. Our mission is to enterprise, engage and enrich the university and Community Leaders as we work to establish a premier university and a vibrant community we welcome any of you that are interested to join our membership. Its an Incredible Organization that brings great people together for outstanding events just like this. We do have people in the lobby from current members and the Staff Members that would be happy to tell you more information if you would like to join. As a courtesy before we get started i ask you to check to be sure your phones are silent. When we just another quick housekeeping piece. We have the opportunity after he speaks to be able to ask her questions and at that time we will have microphones that will be available and if you raise her hands are staff will come over to you and get you that microphone. As you finish your meal and dessert it is my pleasure to introduce our great president of beantown, university, president singer. [applause] thank you, jason. Welcome to all our members and our guests today. Its great to see so many people here. Its a great event to be out. To hear from one of our longtime supporters of the area in the Southern Tier, ed stack, what hes done for us over the course of his career in terms of open through his company but the new Distribution Center and the investments his corporation has made in this area in the belief this area deserved that center i want to thank you, edit, for all of that. [applause] of course, he wont talk about that but hell talk about his book today. It is how we play the game. I bet a lot of you have read through it and have you cant see it that my dog enjoyed mine. Right there on the corner. My puppy eating my books. But it has been an exciting semester. Last couple of weeks id like to give a quick update. I want to make sure we spend most of the time for edge. Did you hear that one of our faculty members won the nobel prize . [applause] in chemistry. Stanley winningham, then a faculty member for 31 years. He joined in 1988 after he left [inaudible] when they put him on a management track and took him out of the scientific track and he said i had to leave and find a place that would support me and he could have gone anywhere but support me in my he will be receiving the nobel prize in december and what a humble man. We had an event for him last friday and thousand people in the theater he gave his remarks and we have the chancellor and we had the chairman and his or her marks were but what was really wonderful was after words the hundreds of the students that came up to him and he did not leave that room until he had signed autographs and taking pictures with every single student. We had to tear him away from that room because he had to go to another event. It took him to the confucius institute, Chinese Opera performance at night where again he gave her marks and stayed on stage after some pictures and shook hands and took pictures with everybody there but he was the last one to leave. Not only is he a billion scientist and great man but will be a great ambassador for Arbor University in the future. Freshman class is all in and accounted for between 900 freshman, 1000 transfer students, 1600 new graduate students. That is a record for us. Weve been working hard to increase our graduate enrollments. We got 91 new students in our Pharmacy Program and our doctor of Pharmacy Program which was one student over our goal. They now have 231 students in that program and they will bring in the fourth cohort next year, right around 320, three and 30 students and will graduate the first class of doctor [inaudible] students in the spring 2021. A Long Time Coming but definitely something to celebrate a little under 13000 graduate students and thats the number we want to keep. High school gpa of 95. Its a great group of students we have here and they work hard and they support the region in so many ways with volunteer work and living here and bringing their money from long island and spending it here to. [laughter] we also celebrated a new name for our school of nursing. We change the name to the college of nursing and it is now will be known as the Decker College of nursing. I know Board Members from decker are here today and i know jerry is here today from the decker foundation. Thank you very much. [applause] with that we will be expanding that College Programs and adding physical therapy program, and speech and Language Pathology Program into that college but that is exciting. The construction is still ongoing in johnson city so we have plenty of time to go over there if youre a construction geek like me and watch the renovation of the old box factory quite a transformation that we are doing and when it is done it will be a stateoftheart facility inside one of these original buildings that was built here. We are constructing an r d building and between that building and the Pharmacy Building and we have also acquired 18 park street, the old yellow building and the state has given us funds to renovate Industry Partners and pharmaceutical scientists to be Co Working Spaces with the rest of the university. On 27 jenison avenue we will open up the eldercare clinic in partnership with the hospital but still an anchor supporter of all the uhs activities there but it is good to work with both obstacles. If you look at 4246 corliss that building is gone and its now a parking not but we are also holding that in case some universities or industry would like to partner with us. That is all i had to say but my marketing and communication folks have said all stand, all the time all nobel, all the time. We will talk a lot about it and youll hear more about it with his great achievements and different medications. Thank you for being here. I look forward to hearing from mr. Stack but to introduce him id like to introduce his sister, kim myers who will introduce ed. [applause] first of all, id like to thank all of you for coming here today. I am thrilled to be able to deduce my brother, ed stack, author of the book, how we play the game. In the words of ed that great new york yankee catcher yogi berra id like to say to ed thank you for making this event necessary. I can promise you we will not be disappointed why what ed has two say about the history of the little bait and tackle shop founded by our dad, mack stack a few blocks up the road from the straight location. Before he comes appear as someone who has known him longer than everybody else in this entire room i want to briefly tell you a few things that he wont. Like back when we only had two stores and our stepmoms sister tragically died of cancer eddie decided to do something. Dick sponsored a Fishing Contest with all the proceeds going to the american cancer society. He wont tell you that over 30 years ago when charities were trying to feed needy families at think saving heat donated over 100 turkeys and when the word went out there was not enough turkey, he donated more. Keep in mind this is when in the business as my father would say we were robbing peter to pay paul. He wont tell you about his laser focus and his Incredible Mission to expand the store to manifest destiny and the store being Dicks Sporting Goods because thats the weight referred to it growing up as the store because what other store was there to be concerned about . s focus was also on the betterment of youth in our communities recognizing the life lessons the being part of a team can instill in individuals. This followed our dads example. He decided to do something. He created Sports Matters Foundation and he will tell you more about later. He also wont tell you about the phone call he got from me in 2011 after our area had been hit with the most horrific flood. He said to me what do they need . I said eddie, they need anything, everything weve got. He said will how would you distribute them. And i said we will go through the schools because they know families in need. The next day truck after truck after truck came rolling into our area with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of sneakers, cults, backpacks and clothing to help those that had lost everything. He also will not tell you that when the company needed a new Fulfillment Center and Distribution Center to service our northeast corridor of the dicks stores this was his first choice for those 400 jobs created in the new stateoftheart dissertation center now open about 10 miles up the road. One of the many cliches my dad would always say to us is never forget where you came from. He never forgot where he came from. This is where we came from. And yet, another School Shooting happened in parkland, florida and what eddie wont tell you is when he called me to tell me of his commitment to do something what i will tell you is in his voice it was not that of ceo of a billiondollar corporation but he was just my brother, a kid born and raised on the east side of bennington, angry and resolute to do something. Fully aware of the consequences and telling me kim this will be bad and this will cost us a fortune. But, i dont care. I have to do something. Boy, did he ever. Ladies and gentlemen, lets welcome home my big brother, ceo of Dicks Sporting Goods, ed stack. [applause] in queue. Thank you. Thank you everyone for allowing me to be here thank you to my sister, president stenger, everyone else that is here and to transport university the nobel prize is like us so congratulations. That is a terrific. When my sister again, kim, thank you for that introduction so for all of us who had siblings, brothers or sisters, how many . If they said they would introduce you anything like this and you thought about all the things you did to them when you are a kid they would probably make you pretty nervous. Come all the things i did to my poor sister was just terrible. I remember one time she always told me she would get me back for it and she hasnt yet. I thought this would be it. [laughter] there are two things i did to her that were all of you brothers here if you would understand this so she made fun of me one day we had a cottage at the lake and she wanted to go water skiing but she had been busting me just like a little sister who can be a pain in the neck and i said yeah, ill take you waterskiing. Sure. We got waterskiing and we used to go around the leg twice a week go around the lake the second time and if she went around the lake there was this huge thing of lily pads. You dont want to go swimming in the lily pads so i took my sister right through these lily pads and as she got the middle of the lily pads i went [laughter] and drop that engine and dropped my poor sister in the lily pads. She was yelling and screaming and i had not heard the words she was screaming off back then i pulled her back out. I thought that was one thing she do and tell that story and get back at me. Another thing i thought she might say is that we were at a event and our kids were little and she looked at me and i was always playing tricks on my sister and she looked at me and said that woman over there, her son goes to school with timmy, whats her name . I said thats mary. She said okay, great. Goes running over and talk to her and she comes back and she punches me as hard as she could and said you are such an hole. Ive never seen a woman before in my life. [laughter] thank you for that. I thought you could have been you could have busted me and you wouldve had every right to do so. I thank you for allowing me to be here today to talk about basically three things. How that got started and how we grow our business and then around sports and whats happening and you sports day and how important that is and about our what we did for a firearms standpoint and why i wrote the book but first of all i like to talk about how this business originally started not far from where we are right now in binghamington but this was the original store my father started paid the he started this business he was a kid working at burgers not far from here and he was an avid fisherman. His dad was killed in a car accident when he was young so we spent time fishing in the rivers with his grandfather and so the army surplus was starting to dry up in 1948 or so and [inaudible] said my father and said i know youre a big fisherman so can you put together an order for us to get into the tackle business so my father went home and put this order together to get into the tackle business and as he told the story and i talked from the book every year he told this story he stayed up later. By the time he told the story to my kids he stayed up all night long and it was only like two yellow sheets of paper so i have no idea what he was doing all night long but he said he stayed up all night and went back in the next day and gave the order to [inaudible] and he was in a bad mood that day and told my father he was a dumb kid did not know what he was joined by my father grabbed a piece of paper, walked out the story and never went back it went to his grandmothers house and talked to his grandmother about it and he was upset and this was a depression written family bird they really had nothing but daddy script and scrape for every thing they had. His grandmother finally said what would it take for you to do this yourself and he said 300. She got up and walked to the back of his old kitchen into this cookie jar and reached into this cookie jar and took out 300 and gave it to him and said go start your own business. He went to start this business and it started really small and we always used to tease him about this about how small it was because if you look right here this business was so small the post office did not give it a full Mailing Address because it was 453 and a half court street. Thats a pretty small place. He ran his business and did well some years and knots while some other years and actually went out of business and opened up a second store and went out of business. Six weeks or eight weeks later or so got back in the business but when he went out of business he made sure nobody lost any money. He made sure he gave all the product he could back to the suppliers and sold his house and car and had to move back in with his mother, my mother was pregnant with kim and she had to move back in with her parents but he made sure nobody lost any money. Eight weeks later he got back into business and back on court street and always did okay but was never he was always in debt but had a great story that he would always look at me and say which i did not understand at the time but he always look and say if i had what i owed i truly would be a wealthy man. A lot of people feel that way. He had a great empathy for kids and was a tough guy but my father was a tough Old School Guy and he wasnt this warm and cuddly guy on the outside but he had a good heart on the inside and one of the things he did was he treated how Little League was played in binghamington. There used to be four teams that had Little League in binghamington, one on the northeast and south and west side and he thought that was not right that more kids should have an opportunity to play but he got together with his buddies and a junior high pharmacy and put together these league had four teams on each side of town. Now instead of 60 kids been able to play there were now two and a 40 kids who could play plus they put a farming together and they were playing orb organized baseball and they had a place to be coached and men toward and they could go and stay out of trouble. He did that with one prerequisite only. That prerequisite was you cannot buy the equipment to start the league from his business because he did not want to look like he was doing that to better his own nest, so to speak. He started Little League and he did not know how many thousands and thousands of kids came through that Little League right now and we are redoing the field up there and it is so great to go back there to that field today and see the place where we grow up and had so much fun with. My father loved binghamington and always thought you had to the community had to do wellin order to do well. He told me when i was 13 years old he would put me to work because he would teach me responsibility. When i was 13 years old i went to work in the store and when i was 15 i worked fulltime in summer vacations and christmas vacations and i had to do that all through high school and i can tell you right now honestly, i hated every minute of it. I wanted nothing to do with that business. I got ready to go off to college and thought id number going back to that business.