Mike Popovec President, Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Mike Popovec has nine years of professional experience in sports broadcasting, digital media, and technology sales. A former athlete himself, Mike struggled to get the attention of baseball college coaches his junior and senior year in high school. After traveling to nine different campuses across six states, and making a VHS tape of some game film, he mailed a targeted direct mail package hoping he would get noticed. Immediately he realized how inefficient the college sports recruiting process is and how all athletes struggle with the same limited contact and ability to attract college coaches. Thus, Recruit U, LLC is the culmination of years of interest in sports, sports marketing, and amateur and professional sports.
Mike’s passion is fixing this battle and creating an equal playing field for men and women across the country that are continually overlooked and forced into desperate last second strategies, or worse, never being able to achieve their sports dream.
Mike is a graduate of Texas Christian University with a Bachelor of Science in Radio-TV-Film earned in 1997.
Jennifer Duell Treasurer & Chief Operating Officer
Jennifer Duell will be responsible for leading the marketing and public relations efforts for Recruit U. The marketing and analytical background Jennifer Duell brings to Recruit U is second to none. With her financial, journalism, marketing, and web branding experience, Jennifer will certainly be a huge asset to the short-term and long-term plans and execution of this business plan. Her peers have called her "The Chief Reality Officer" for her canny ability to visualize and exceed performance, yet not believe what everyone else is saying without knowing the facts and developing her own conclusions. Jennifer has been published in some of the leading financial publications including Registered Rep, National Real Estate Investor, and The Wall Street Journal.
Jennifer is a graduate of Texas Christian University with a Bachelor of Science in Journalism earned in 1997 and a graduate of Northwestern University with a Master’s of Marketing Communications earned in 1999.
Mancel Herring Chief Technology Officer
There is nothing more exciting about working for yourself than starting a company in your own backyard. After nine years of fighting the bugs and the Texas heat, Mancel, along with Todd Hoeft, co-founded Echoes Media, Inc. in 1994.
As a freelancer for many years and working on projects for companies like Ernst & Yound and grocer Winn Dixie, Mancel had a love and knack for graphic design and multimedia. He earned a Master of Fine Arts from the University of North Texas and also has applied his craft in front of high school students as an art teacher. He has worked locally in Fort Worth for many companies including University of North Texas Health Sciences Center.
Eventually, with Echoes Media, he quickly discovered he could apply his craft and pass on his knowledge to local businesses that needed quality web design and technical expertise.
Todd Hoeft Vice President of Information Technology
Todd has been instrumental with the overall architecture and design implementation of Recruit U. Although admittingly not a major sports buff, his biggest contributions have been to the overall workflow pattern on the site and integrating technology to help achieve project goals and deliverables.
As co-Executive Directors and Project Leads for Echoes Media, Todd has been co-author and developer of successful web applications that provide a number of services worldwide, including event management and online registration, easy-to-use self-managed website systems, project management and collaboration tools, online procurement and corporate product ordering systems, project and employee time tracking systems and online publication with article archiving systems. In addition he has successfully designed and delivered a large range of websites for small to medium sized companies.
The success of can be traced back to his work with Mancel Herring when Echoes Media began as a multimedia and graphic design shop and quickly added web development to their list of services.
You may catch Todd riding his bike to and from work everyday. He says he is a Hybrid of sorts.
