Fred Kroner’s foray into sports writing began with a seventh-grade school project profiling the job. That project sprouted an ongoing 54-year career that has combined Fred’s two great passions, writing and sports.  

He began writing soon thereafter, still as a junior high school student working for the local weekly paper, the Mahomet Sucker State, and thereafter for the high school newspaper, The Bulldog Journal. While attending the University of Illinois, Fred worked four years for the Champaign-Urbana Morning Courier. After graduating from the UI in 1978, Fred made a stop at the Bloomington Daily Pantagraph for almost three years and then joined the News-Gazette staff in Champaign, where he remained for 34 1/2 years.  

A few teams that stand out from his time there include the great Mahomet-Seymour wrestling teams from the 1980s, which won five state titles in a seven-year period from 1983-89 under Marty Williams; the 1984 Centennial boys’ basketball team led by Roger McClendon; the Sullivan girls’ basketball team that Scott Thomas coached to an undefeated record and a national ranking (No. 13 by USA Today) in 1991; and Randy Wolken’s St. Joseph-Ogden softball team that won a state title in 2006.  

Fred cites the variety of prep sports he covers for making the job fun year after year, saying, “I love not having to cover the same sport every day. The job never gets old.”  

Fred’s accolade comes after he announced that he will retire at the conclusion of the 2014-15 school year. In the years that have followed, however, he continued his sportswriting, now working for the online Mahomet Daily, where he has continued to closely follow and monitor high school wrestling in the state. 

Fred was inducted into the IWCOA Hall of Fame in 2020 and the Mahomet-Seymour HS Hall of Fame in 2021. He was the IWCOA Newsman of the Year in 1984, 1988, 2000 and 2009. In 2015, he received the IHSA Distinguished Media Award and in 2011, the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Association Newsman of the Year Award.