Growing up in New York, Stephen Panus knew he wanted to go to college in the South.
“I wanted to go down where college football was taken seriously and also get a good education,” he says. “I chose South Carolina because I visited and fell in love with the campus and everything about it.”
Panus, a government and international studies major, wanted to stay involved in sports, so he knocked on doors and found sports information director Kerry Tharp. He also found a job, one he would hold from his sophomore year through graduation.
“Working there was like getting a second degree. I worked every sport I could, went to every game I could make and wrote the media guides for men’s soccer and track and field,” he says.
After graduation, Panus worked in New York City for a sports publicist, started his own sports agency, got a law degree and went into private practice in New Orleans, then Colorado, then Las Vegas. After he and his wife, Kellie, had two sons — Jake in 2004, Liam in 2009 — they moved to Connecticut to be closer to family.
Panus returned to Columbia whenever he could, especially for Gamecock football. So it made sense that Jake set his sights on USC. Jake even planned to walk on to the football team if he didn’t get offered a scholarship.
But everything changed with a phone call in 2020. Jake had been injured as a passenger in a car accident while on vacation with his girlfriend’s family. Before Stephen and Kellie reached the hospital, a second call: This time, a doctor was apologizing. He had just pronounced Jake dead. Panus pulled over. He and Kellie got out of the car, sobbing, and collapsed in an embrace.
A part of Panus died, too. Jake lit up a room, he says. He was a natural leader with a big heart and infectious personality. People gravitated to him. Now that light was gone. Panus had no idea how to navigate this new life, but he had to honor his son.
Within weeks, he took the first step. Jake had traveled to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota on a church mission trip the previous summer, and the experience affected him greatly: It was the first time Jake saw the disparities that exist in the United States, and he came home with a strong desire to do something about it.
So to honor Jake, Panus established the Jake Panus Memorial Scholarship to help send Lakota youths to college. But it was just one small step for Panus. He kept reflecting on the loss and how his family could move forward. And he began to write.
“I started out just writing a goodbye letter to Jake, and one day, I looked at Liam,” says Stephen. “This was several months after the accident, and I realized, I’m 52 years old and struggling. How is an 11-year-old boy supposed to process this?”
Then he stumbled upon some old notes his wife had kept: When Jake was younger, Panus wrote inspirational morning messages to his sons.
“I thought, ‘I need to rediscover whether there’s truth in these notes,’” he says. “And in so doing, it changed the goodbye letter into something much different.” He started rehashing old stories and rediscovered the traits in Jake that he thought were most important in life. “And when I’d finished writing something that I thought could help Liam, I thought, wow, maybe this could help more people.”
Panus sent what would become Walk On to publishing houses and literary agents and found four that were interested, “which blew me away,” he says.
The scholarship and the book were positive steps, but Panus was compelled to do more. “I felt a responsibility to make sure Jake got to South Carolina, somehow, some way,” he says. “But I wasn’t sure how to do that.”
Then, in December 2020, he got an unexpected call from Gamecocks head football coach Shane Beamer, who was just weeks into his new job. As Beamer writes in his preface for Walk On, “I was told that a phone call from me . . . could hopefully lift his spirits during an extremely dark time.” The two connected quickly.
“We hung up,” Panus says, “and I just turned to my wife and said, ‘I think I’ve got a way to get Jake to USC.’”
After the holidays, he reached out to Beamer with the idea to create a scholarship for walk-ons at USC. Beamer loved it.
The scholarship got attention on NBC Sports when a Kentucky Derby horse wore a blanket featuring Jake’s initials and the Carolina logo. More national attention followed, and soon the Jake Panus Walk-On Football Endowed Scholarship was a reality. The family has since created a third scholarship program in partnership with a Boys & Girls Club in Connecticut.
In September 2021, Panus shared Jake’s story with USC’s football team and announced the first winner, long snapper Matthew Bailey. Jake had made it to Carolina, at least in spirit. It was another step forward.
The following May, he and Liam returned to South Dakota to award the first two memorial scholarships there, to two Lakota girls.
“While I was there, some of the administrators and elders asked me how I came up with the name ‘Walk On’ for the USC scholarship,” Panus says. “I explained to them what a walk-on student-athlete is. And they said, ‘Wow. We have a different meaning. We believe that when someone dies, they walk on in their journey. Death isn’t the end point of a linear timeline.’”
The hairs on Panus’ arms stood up. “That really brought it all together,” he says. “It was like the universe just tied a knot.”
