Two Columbus East High School alumni will be honored as the newest members of East’s Wall of Fame.
Doug Eckrote, a multi- brand technology solutions provider CDW executive, and Dave Pence, a University of Hawaii diving safety officer, will be inducted during a 6:30 p.m. reception Jan. 19 in the lobby at the high school, 230 S. Marr Road.
The two men will be recognized that evening by the Columbus East Alumni Association during halftime at the Columbus East boys basketball game against Jeffersonville. They will join 14 other Olympians who have been previously honored.
Eckrote, a 1982 East graduate, is CDW’s senior vice president of small business sales and eCommerce. The company works with business, government, education and healthcare organizations in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
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The Fortune 500 firm provides hardware, software, in addition to services such as security, cloud, data center and networking.
He has been employed by the company headquartered in Vernon Hills, Illinois, since 1989, beginning his career as an account manager.
Eckrote participated in band during his sophomore year at East and was also a 4-H member. He said his experience working with several East teachers ultimately helped prepare him for college.
“The academics were great,” he said.
Eckrote graduated from Purdue University with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture sales and marketing and earned an MBA degree from Northwestern University.
Deanna Glick, president of the Columbus East Alumni Association, said Eckrote and Pence are individuals who have followed their passions. Glick said Eckrote has taken CDW and built it into a multi-billion dollar company while serving in several leadership roles.
Now living in the Chicago suburbs, Eckrote said a strong work ethic instilled by his parents helped shape who he is today. His mom and two sisters still reside in Columbus, he said.
“(The) atmosphere (in Columbus) was definitely a positive,” Eckrote said. “God has blessed me very much.”
He offered some advice to current students at East, encouraging them to learn from their mistakes and to also give credit to other team members they work with.
Eckrote is still working on plans to attend the induction ceremony next month, he said. Pence did not know yet whether he would be attending the induction ceremony.
Pence, a 1975 East graduate, oversees one of the largest university research diving programs in the United States.
He has been employed at the university since 1993 and works with more than 200 divers who perform more than 3,500 dives annually in support of ocean science and research.
Pence said East math teacher Dan Dixon and world history teacher Bob Brown were among the educators who had a positive impact on him.
“They were really amazing individuals,” Pence said. “They gave us a fundamental grounding in how we fit into the larger scheme of things.”
Pence, a three-year MVP on the East swim team and member of the first sophomore class at the high school, was also named the most outstanding student in science when he graduated in 1975.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in zoology from Miami University in Ohio and a master’s degree in microbiology from North Carolina State University.
His time in the water during his younger years wasn’t limited to the swimming pool at East or at Miami University, where he also competed on the men’s swim team.
He completed scuba diver certification in Columbus’ Grandview Lake in the summer of 1976, an experience that Pence said prepared him to work as a teaching assistant at Seacamp in the Florida Keys the following two summers.
In that role, he taught scuba diving and marine biology classes and realized his love of the ocean and teaching.
“These experiences resulted in the decision to change from a pre-med focus for college study to one that emphasized aquatic science and ecology,” Pence said.
After earning his master’s degree, he returned to work at Seacamp in the Florida Keys, where he served as science program director and taught field marine biology for high school and college courses before moving to Hawaii.
Glick said Pence turned diving from a hobby into a passion, describing his research work as phenomenal.
She said she wants East students to realize what is possible in life when they look at the individuals such as Pence and Eckrote inducted into the East Wall of Fame.
“They’re both really great guys,” she said.
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Doug Eckrote is a 1982 graduate of Columbus East High School and started his career with Arrow Electronics in Schaumburg, Illinois, as an outside sales representative and then went to work for Cintas Uniform Company as an outside account executive.
In 1989, Eckrote began working for CDW, a technology solutions provider to business, government, education and healthcare organizations in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
Currently, he is senior vice president of small business sales and eCommerce at the company headquartered in Vernon Hills, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.
Eckrote earned a bachelor’s degree in agriculture sales and marketing from Purdue University and also graduated from Northwestern University with an MBA degree.
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Dave Pence is a 1975 graduate of Columbus East High School and is a diving safety officer at the University of Hawaii, where he started working in 1993 in the university’s Hawaii Ocean Time Series program as research staff.
In that role between 1993 and 1995, he participated in more than 20 oceanographic research cruises in Hawaii and Antarctica studying the ocean nutrient and chemical cycles which control ocean photosynthesis. He also taught scuba diving for marine biology students at the university, where he has served as diving safety officer since 1995.
After graduate school, Pence was the science program director for Seacamp in the Florida Keys, where he taught field marine biology for high school and college courses. In that role, he also trained other post-graduates in field marine biology natural history, marine and boating safety, teaching techniques and scuba research methods.
He also consults with government agencies, universities, civil authorities and equipment manufacturers on issues of diving safety, advanced diving equipment design, research operations and accident investigation.
Pence has a bachelor’s degree in zoology from Miami University in Ohio and a master’s degree in microbiology from North Carolina State University.
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