Along with office towers, airport terminals, hospitals, college buildings, entertainment complexes and other large construction efforts, it is the No. 1 builder of sports stadiums and arenas in America. according to the Engineering News Record.
Since 1980 – much of it under the auspices of Hunt Construction before its merger with AECOM in 2014 – the list of those accomplishments includes more than 90 Major League Baseball, NBA, NFL and NHL stadiums and arenas and it has built a multitude of college and minor league sporting venues, as well.
The list includes everything from SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles (home of the Rams and Chargers); T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas (NHL Golden Knights); Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta (Falcons); Citi Field (NY Mets); The Barclays Center (Nets), Comerica Park(Detroit Tigers); Intuit Dome (LA Clippers); Busch Stadium (St. Louis Cardinals); Tropicana Field (Tampa Bay Rays); Rupp Arena (Kentucky Wildcats), Lucas Oil Stadium (Indianapolis Colts); Cleveland Browns Stadium; Great American Ballpark, and before the Riverfront Stadium (both Cincinnati Reds); and scores more.
When you see a photo of Ross on a construction site in a hard hat, you are reminded of other helmeted images of him from long ago.
Wearing a batting helmet in those, he’s the standout first baseman of the Belmont High baseball team, which was a repeat winner in the City League when he played for the Bison in the early 1990s.
Ross grew up in Dayton. He attended Corinthian Baptist on James H. McGee Boulevard, just as his parents and grandparents did before him.
He’s a product of Dayton Public Schools, where he also was a member of Belmont’s City League champion golf team.
But it was his baseball that got him a scholarship to Savannah State University, where he said the motto was “You can get anywhere from here.”
Sunday he may borrow that thought and make it a theme for growing up in Dayton, as well.
He is one of a few, but growing number of African Americans with such lofty status in the upper echelons of America’s top builders.
He’s reached that position, he said, “not because I had any secret recipe.”
He’s had a roll-up-your-sleeves, nose-to-the-grindstone, do-your-job-to-the-best-of-your-ability approach that has helped him rise up the corporate ladder at Hunt and now AECOM Hunt, where, in total, he’s worked nearly 23 years.
“My foundation and support system started in Dayton,” he said.“ A lot of it goes back not just to my mom and dad, but both of their families.
“In our family there were high expectations for you and there was a lot of support to help you succeed at something. At the start you didn’t necessarily know what it was, but you were taught to believe that you can do something and do it well.”
Impressive family ties
On Aug. 2, Wright Patterson Air Force Base will name its fire station after his grandfather, Elmer “Bill” Ross – once a Tuskeegee Airman, a gunner of a B-26, serving in the Pacific Theater during World War II – who in 1956 was hired as the first African American fireman at WPAFB.
He retired 26 years later as the first black fire chief at the base.
Stephen’s parents – Stephen (Steve) Sr. and Karen – have impressive resumes of their own.
A standout football player at Chaminade High, Steve went on play at Bethune Cookman University before transferring to Ball State and finally Central State. He worked as a site manager for the Dayton Metropolitan Housing Authority and was then a longtime teacher of special needs children in the Dayton Public Schools system. He’s also been a local coach, a mentor of inner-city youth, a stock car driver and now is the executive director of the Greater Edgemont Community Coalition.
Karen, his wife of nearly 50 years, retired a while back after a long career with the JAG Office at WPAFB.
Stephen’s two younger sisters are accomplished, as well. Naya is a registered nurse at the University of California San Francisco and Karma (Webb) is the business manager of Jeff Scmidt Mazda.
“The lessons of sports helped me big time,” Stephen said. “They taught me to be responsible for something bigger than myself. And with the success we had in baseball and golf at Belmont, I became accustomed to being a winner.
“For me to be able to get a college scholarship was important. But it wasn’t because it could be a step on the way to playing Major League Baseball or being a professional sports player. That would have been extra.
“What was important was to get a scholarship to try to help my parents who didn’t have all the money necessary to pay my way through college. I wanted to help because there wasn’t just me, but there were my two younger sisters, too.”
After college he had a short stint with a construction company in Washington, D.C. that soon went bankrupt . At the same time, Indianapolis-based Hunt Construction was looking for a project engineer and he got the job.
As he said: “And the rest is history.”
He’s worked on several big projects along the way, beginning with Lucas Oil Stadium and then serving the project director of the Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
One of his proudest achievements was being the construction executive of the $60 million reconfiguration of the old Memphis Commercial Appeal newspaper building into a full-blown COVID hospital in just 28 days.
For the past year he’s been working on what will end up as a $3 billion revamp of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas and he’s also overseeing the construction of the new and quite extensive Dallas ISD (Independent School District) campus in downtown Dallas.
Proof of Dayton success
We spoke the other day by phone as he was leaving a Lafayette, La. meeting to return home to Dallas, where he lives with his wife, Robyn. They have a blended family with three children: daughters Stevey (age 25) and Savanah (12) and son Stephen III (aka Trey, age 19).
Ross was still mulling over just what he’d say Sunday, especially in the remarks he would direct to the youth.
There likely would be a mix of encouragement, tough love, and an underscoring of the fact, he said, “that I’m living proof that success can come from a product of Dayton City Schools.
“Like I said, I have no secret recipe. I just stuck to the script and worked hard. I wasn’t always correct. I didn’t have it all together, but I never shied away from doing something that was hard. I never shied away from the work.“
He has plenty of thoughts about young people and their ever-present phones, which, he believes, divides or sometimes fully eclipses any possibility of their face-to-face engagement.
“You have to have something to believe that’s outside your cell phone,” he said. “It has to be something that’s inside you and not just suggested to you on social media.
“I tell young people to start using your phone to benefit you as opposed to it only being something that entertains you and makes you feel good.”
He has a lot more thoughts along those lines which he may get into Sunday.
He said the bottom line is believing in yourself: “There is more in you than you know. You’re smarter than you know. You just have to bring it out. Some of the best advice is just to work hard at something and not take the easy way out. In the end it can take you a lot of places.
One place he’s headed is back home to assist his dad and the City of Dayton in an eventual $2.5 million restoration of the Edgemont Solar Garden, the first community garden in the city.
Ross has his own budding company, Elite Construction Management, and this will be his first project back Dayton.
“I’m hoping this is the first of several more projects in the Dayton area,” he said.
And in doing so, he’d be taking that old motto and giving it another twist.
He’d be proving you can be anywhere and come back here.
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