Chris has spent most of the past two decades living throughout the Upper Midwest, enjoying the balance of opportunity and quality of life. He now works as a news anchor at KCRG-TV in Cedar Rapids after many years (and many stops) as a news and sports anchor. Yet it is his colorful path to this point that provides inspiration for his fiction.

Growing up between Kansas City and St. Louis, Chris had the chance to leave the sticky summers and bumpy highways behind at the age of 17 to go to college in Madison, Wisconsin. The number five turned out to be a major part of his college experience. Five years, five majors, five attempts to walk onto the UW basketball team. Eventually, he collected his share of the fives before graduating from UW and setting out to become a sportscaster. He started with a short stint as a news and sports reporter at KSNT-TV in Topeka, Kansas before returning to Wisconsin as a sports anchor at WEAU-TV (NBC) in Eau Claire.

The week Chris turned 25, he was offered the opportunity to be the main sports anchor in frigid Duluth, Minnesota. While in Duluth at KDLH-TV (CBS), Chris developed a reputation as a sports anchor that actually brought out the emotions and the stories from people all throughout. Scandals and struggles of all levels. High school hockey in Duluth was like "Friday Night Lights" in Texas. The minor-league baseball team was leaving town, after denying they would and spending all summer calling Chris a "beacon of yellow journalism".

And that's how Gotcha Down came to be. Drawing back on his experiences at Wisconsin in the mid-1990's, from the eyes of a regular student to what he covered in later years as a member of the press. The Interim follows those experiences to a different sport, this time through the eyes of corruption and big-money basketball.

In 2005, Chris made the shift from sports anchor to news anchor with a three-year return to WEAU-TV and Eau Claire before moving to Cedar Rapids in the spring of 2008. Now Chris looks into his Kansas City roots with The Last Out, where he keeps one foot forward and the other planted in the past as he looks at Kansas City, back when it was a baseball town.

Chris and his wife Erica now live in Cedar Rapids, Iowa with their two children.

The Last Out

Royal Cutter has spent the past eleven years riding the minor-league baseball circuit. After finally cracking The Show, Royal finds himself traded to Kansas City, where his infamous father had become a budding star before drugs and wrong turns landed him in jail. Now Royal has to avoid the same troubles in the city he grew up in.

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The Interim

After switching careers, Robb Markstran finally settled into working with a men's college basketball program at Wisconsin State. Yet, five games into the season, a plane crash kills the coaching staff and some players. The administration makes Robb the head coach of, what he eventually discovers, the most corrupt and investigated basketball program in America.

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Gotcha Down

His debut novel, a hard-hitting look at how two people, one on the outside and one very much on the inside, profit from the wins and losses of a Big Ten football team. All with a young and naive placekicker from a tiny town in Wisconsin just trying to prove that he belongs. Gotcha Down earned reviewer praise upon its release in 2004 and was published by Jones Books of Madison.

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