Welcome to "Catching Up With..." an occasional feature here at AnnArbor.com where we chat with someone who used to be involved with Michigan athletics. If there's someone you'd like to see AnnArbor.com catch up with, e-mail us at michaelrothstein@annarbor.com.

Our latest guest is C.J. Kupec, who played both football and basketball at Michigan. Kupec is better known as a Michigan basketball player and was an All-American. After leaving Michigan, Kupec was drafted and played in both the NBA and Europe. Check out what he's up to now.

Michael Rothstein: What have you been up to lately?

C.J. Kupec: “What haven’t I been up to. Let’s see, when I left here in ’75, I had a three-year NBA career and then I went over and played in Europe, nine years in Italy and one year in Switzerland. Wound that up in ’88, was fortunate enough to win a European title, which is their version of an NBA title which propelled my career for a few more years to play over there. Then I got into athletic fundraising for four different universities and now I’m at the United States Naval Academy doing major gift fundraising.”

MR: What’s that like at Navy? Has it been easy to fundraise? Difficult?

CK: “This past year has been difficult for any fundraiser because of the economic times we find ourselves, but I jumped at the opportunity to go there because I never served in the military or the Navy because I went here and then played pro sports and my children who played college sports were just getting out of college. So I didn’t want to miss their games when they were playing. So I said to my wife, here’s an opportunity. I always wanted to serve my country. I think it’s a good mission, to raise money for the Midshipmen of the Naval Academy. It’s been a great move, a great experience and it’s been a beautiful setting. As nice as Ann Arbor is and the University, there is nothing like Annapolis and the Naval Academy being at the point where the Severn River meets the Chesapeake Bay."

MR: So you live in Annapolis now?

CK: “We live in Columbia, which is a 40-minute commute.”

MR: It sounds like you’re pretty happy. Did you always think you’d get into fundraising?

CK: “Nah. My plan was to stay involved in athletics, but because of the way I am I didn’t want to be a coach necessarily because I didn’t want to have to be on the road. I wanted to be around to raise my kids, coach my kids. It kind of just evolved into fundraising. Back when I first got into it, about ’88 or ’90, somewhere around there, that’s when state funding at most universities for college athletic departments was drying up. So people were scrambling to hire people for fundraising. So Ron Wellman, who is the dean of athletics directors in the ACC, at Wake Forest for 18 years, he was at Illinois State University and that’s where I grew up and had a pretty good name. He took a flier on me. He said ‘I know you haven’t raised money but you have a good name.’ So I was at Illinois State for five years and that’s where I got my foot in the door. I really did aspire to be an athletics director at one point but that didn’t work out and I kind of just went on and did all the fundraising.”

MR: Do you still think you’d want to be an AD somewhere at some point?

CK: “I think I’m on the down side of my career at 56 years of age. It’s a tough position and unless you know it in-and-out like a Ron Wellman would at this age or Bill Martin, now that they’ve been in it for a while, for somebody like myself to be in that position at this age it would be a little bit overwhelming, quite honestly. But one of the things that I do on the side as a volunteer is that I’m on the Board of Directors, actually Executive Committee, of the National Basketball Retired Players Association. I’m scheduled to be the President, believe it or not, in another year.”

MR: How’d you get involved in that?

CK: “It’s an association for the players that have been retired. It’s a fraternal organization, obviously, and we have a couple meetings a year so people can exaggerate their statistics and compliment one another. But we also provide a lot of benefits and we help those players that really, for whatever reasons, find themselves down-and-out. We try to help them. ... We do a lot in the areas where there’s going to be an All-Star Game and we were very instrumental when they had the All-Star Game after the hurricane down in New Orleans. We helped out in the community down there. So it’s a combination of letting us get together twice a year, we have an annual meeting but also do something around the All-Star Game for guys to get together, which is a lot of fun.”

Previous "Catching up with...:" David Brandt.

Michael Rothstein covers University of Michigan sports for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at (734) 623-2558, by e-mail at michaelrothstein@annarbor.com or follow along on Twitter @mikerothstein.