This coming spring marks 25 years since James Walker, KLN ’01, left Temple University with a degree in broadcast and mass media communications—ready to live out the dream he’d had since he was 13 years old: to cover sports.

Today, Walker—who spent 10 years at ESPN and has covered four Super Bowls, two Pro Bowls, and one NBA Finals—knows firsthand that the path to success is rarely a straight line, and never achieved alone.

“My career has been built on a series of leaps of faith,” says Walker, who now serves as director of Business Management for Sports and Entertainment at Adeptus Partners, a leading provider of tax services, business consulting, and financial management across the sports and entertainment industries.

“At Temple, I had the ability to grow and develop a fearless spirit to chase new and exciting opportunities. I had that go-getter mentality,” he adds.

For Walker, a Maryland native, Temple’s proximity to the D.C. region—and its stellar journalism program—made it an obvious choice. As a student, he stayed busy interning at The Philadelphia Inquirer and writing for The Temple News, covering everything from women’s basketball to lacrosse and volleyball, and eventually Temple’s football and men’s basketball programs.

Upon graduation, Walker joined the Atlanta Journal-Constitution—the largest newspaper in the Southeast—first as an intern, then as a part-time reporter, before moving to Ames, Iowa, to work for the Ames Tribune.

“I didn’t know anything about Iowa—it was certainly much different than Philadelphia or Washington, D.C.—but I knew that coming out of college was the best time to explore these kinds of opportunities, and I felt empowered to do it.”

Following his time in Iowa, Walker moved on to West Virginia to cover sports at Marshall University. After authoring a viral story about a local high school student with mental disabilities who scored a touchdown for his team—a piece picked up by Yahoo! and the Los Angeles Times, among others—Walker joined The Columbus Dispatch to cover minor league baseball.

As luck would have it, he found himself in Ohio in 2003—the year the Cleveland Cavaliers famously drafted LeBron James.

“We needed someone to travel the two to three hours to Cleveland to cover LeBron, and I raised my hand,” Walker recalls. “I covered his first five years, which kicked a door open for me—because we all know who LeBron turned out to be. That’s how I landed at ESPN.”

After a decade at ESPN, Walker’s professional journey took him to Adeptus Partners in South Florida, where he now resides with his wife, Mery, and their two children, Blaze and Skylar. There, as part of Temple’s West Palm Beach alumni chapter, he reconnected with his alma mater—and saw an opportunity to leverage Temple’s greatest resource to address an urgent need in his field.

“Now that I’m on the business side of sports, I’m seeing firsthand this exodus from accounting—the baby boomers are exiting faster than new talent is coming in to replace them,” he says. “As someone who understands the power of a Temple education, I saw a way to help a new generation of students while also solving a challenge in my industry.”

And so, Walker did just that. In 2024, he established the James E. Walker Scholarship Term Fund at the Fox School of Business—a four-year, $20,000 scholarship program designed to support outstanding seniors in the Department of Accounting.

“There aren’t enough scholarships for the students who deserve them,” Walker says. “To be able to contribute to that problem in a meaningful way—and to have this gateway to young talent, to communicate and connect with these bright young leaders—now is the time.”

As Walker approaches his milestone reunion, he’s grateful to be in a position to give back in this way—something he couldn’t do as a young alumnus. But as he reflects on his own career and the vital role Temple played in empowering him to pursue opportunity and advance in his field, he emphasizes that financial support is just one form of giving.

“You can always give your time, your expertise, your knowledge, your mentorship—those don’t cost you anything,” Walker encourages.

He shares a lesson that’s stuck with him since his early days in crowded locker rooms filled with reporters all chasing the same quote or soundbite:

“What’s the difference between Reporter A and Reporter B? The one with the stronger network gets better information—faster—and has a better season,” he says. “Connectivity and network—that’s where it all starts. The more you give, the more you get.”