Ed Beach will be in his 10th year working in Drury University's athletics department and will start his first year as Associate Athletic Director for External Affairs.
Beach will serve the department in securing corporate partnerships, selling season tickets, booster club packages, overseeing the O'Reilly Family Event Center box office, marketing and promoting the Panthers and Lady Panthers, and will be a site administrator for several events throughout the year. He will also serve as a play-by-play broadcaster for on Drury men's and women's basketball on radio as well as several other Drury teams on the Great Lakes Valley Conference Sports Network.
A Drury graduate, Beach joined the Drury Athletics department in June of 2016 as the assistant athletic director for media relations and served as the liaison to regional and national members of the media for Drury Athletics. He also authored team news releases and publications, and served as editor-and-chief of DruryPanthers.com, the department’s official website. He added broadcast duties as the play-by-play broadcaster for Drury men's and women's basketball on Springfield radio, hosted a weekly one-hour coaches show for both programs, and broadcast other Drury sports on the GLVCSN.
Beyond Drury sports, Beach serves as an executive board member of the Springfield Area Sports Hall of Fame and is a coordinator for the Springfield Quarterback and Tipoff Club luncheons.
Before his arrival at Drury Beach spent 14 years as a member of the athletics department at Evangel University where he was the Assistant Athletics Director for Communications. His role included developing business partnerships, negotiating broadcast agreements, coordinating promotional events, and he taught classes as an adjunct professor in the Communications Department. Beach also served as the play-by-play broadcaster for Evangel sports on a Springfield radio station as well as web-based broadcasts. In 2010, his duties expanded into sports information in addition to his marketing and broadcasting roles.
A Springfield native, Beach came back to Springfield after working for nearly a decade in professional sports.
After graduating from Drury, he provided media relations and broadcasting work for the Memphis Chicks, then a Double-A affiliate of the Kansas City Royals, and for the Harrisburg Hammerheads of the Continental Basketball Association in 1994-95. He became the youngest full-time broadcaster at the Double-A level of professional baseball in the spring of 1995 when he joined the Knoxville Smokies, an affiliate of the Toronto Blue Jays in the Southern League.
After three years in Knoxville, Beach served as director of broadcasting and media relations for the Peoria Chiefs, the St. Louis Cardinals affiliate in the Midwest League from 1998 to 2000. He took a similar position with the Quad City Mallards, the 2001 champions of the United Hockey League and perennial attendance leader among minor league hockey franchises.
Beach graduated from Drury in 1992 with degrees in Communication and English. He earned a Master’s degree from Drury in Integrated Marketing Communication in 2005.
A screenwriter in his spare time, Beach placed 3rd in The People’s Pilot screenwriting competition (the half-hour comedy division) in 2013, and was a semifinalist in the TV pilot division of the Nashville Film Festival in 2014.
Ed’s wife Cindy served as a elementary teacher in the Springfield Public Schools, and their daughter Emily graduated from Drury in 2021 with a degree in Music Therapy.
