Charlie Host: financial consultant maintains DU hockey ties with TV gig.

• Author: Bronikowski, Lynn
• Position: EXECUTIVE edge

As a kid growing up in St. Cloud, Minn., Charlie Host would ride next to his mom in the family car, riveted to broadcasts of the Minnesota North Stars hockey games on the radio. He strapped on ice skates at age 3 and by 5 was playing organized hockey.

Host would work his way through college on the graveyard shift unloading trucks at Nation's Way, all for the chance to play forward for the University of Denver Pioneers from 1993 to 1997. He experienced the thrill of playing in NCAA national championship games his sophomore and senior years. And he experienced the agony of losing in overtime by one goal to Boston University his senior year.

So when the Frozen Four NCAA Division I Men's Ice Hockey Championship comes to Colorado this month, the Fox Sports Rocky Mountain broadcast voice for DU Hockey will be riveted to the action, while ESPN does the broadcasting.

"I've always wanted to be a broadcaster," says Host, 35, who graduated from DU with a business management degree and today is an RBC Wealth Management financial consultant on 17th Street by day and DU hockey broadcaster by night. "My mom even bought me the book, "Call of the Came." I studied it over and over as a kid and thought it would be great just to say I had a chance to do broadcasting."

His passion for hockey was inspired by his brother, Paul Host, who became confined to a wheelchair at age 9 with muscular dystrophy and died in 1985 at age 17.

"He never skated, never played hockey and went to every one of my games through high school. He was baffled by those who had good health and didn't make the most of it," Host says. "I wore his initials on my helmet--he was my true inspiration."

As a teen, Paul Host had the fortitude to plan his funeral, design his cemetery stone with hockey sticks and establish a scholarship at his...