{{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Dale Tepas was as startled as anyone when he got the news that Adrian Wojnarowski was leaving ESPN to come back to St. Bonaventure as general manager of the men's basketball team.
"I must have gotten 40 messages about the news when it came out," Tepas said by phone from his home in Canandaigua late Wednesday afternoon. "I'm thrilled for him and thrilled for the university." Adrian Wojnarowski It so happens that Tepas, who played with Bob Lanier on the Bonnies' 1970 Final Four team, is the reason Woj ended up going to school at Bona in the first place.
“I think about how different my life would have been if I didn’t meet Dale Tepas,” Wojnarowski told me in 2020. “I met my wife at St. Bonaventure.
I got my journalism degree there. Almost everything good that has come in my life, whether personally or professionally, has been because of St. Bonaventure.
And none of it happens if my sister didn’t work for Dale.” Wojnarowski was born in Bristol, Conn., which also happens to be the birthplace of ESPN, where for the past seven years he broke nearly every piece of news, large and small, from the NBA beat, which he all but owned.
When he dropped NBA news on Twitter (now X), the Twitterati delighted in calling his dispatches "Woj Bombs." "He dropped the biggest bomb on himself" Wednesday, Tepas said. "To be honest, I was surprised.
Woj was at the pinnacle of his career." The Washington Post reported that Wojnarowski signed a contract with ESPN in 2022 that paid him about $7.5 million per year for five years.
He walks away with three years left on that deal. But in a university news release, Wojnarowski said he was "no longer driven" to break NBA news and wanted to spend his time "in ways that are more personally meaningful." Dale Tepas was a multi-sport athlete in high school.
Tepas finds that personally meaningful himself. Ater all, a link to 1970's Forever Team is what led Woj to the Bonnies. It's storybook stuff.
Tepas grew up in Tonawanda and emerged as a multisport star at St. Joseph's Collegiate Institute, where in 1966 he was named one of the top 100 high school basketball players in the country by Parade magazine. He went on to Bona, where as a junior he was a key reserve on that Final Four team, and as a senior was a starter on a team that made the NIT's Final Four.
After college, he got into the insurance business. By the mid-1980s, he was an executive at the Hartford Insurance Group in Hartford, Connecticut, where his administrative assistant, Brenda, was Wojnarowski's older sister. When Woj was a junior at Bristol Central High School, he knew he wanted to be the first in his family to go to college.
He knew, too, that he wanted to be a sportswriter. “I didn’t even know how to look for a college," Woj told me in 2020. "I wanted to major in journalism, and I think Brenda mentioned it to Dale, and he said, ‘Hey, I went to St.
Bonaventure, and they have this great journalism and communications program.’ And I remember one day she brought home the brochure. I’d never seen one before.
And I remember thinking, ‘This looks pretty nice.’ ” That summer, Woj went to see a great-aunt in Rochester and, while in the neighborhood, visited St. John Fisher College and Syracuse University.
Tepas told him if he was up that way anyway, he really should stop by St. Bonaventure, too. Syracuse felt too big to young Woj.
But St. Bonaventure? Just right. "You could go to the campus paper and get a beat as a freshman," he told me.
"I don't know if you could do that at Syracuse." His first day at Bona, Woj knocked on the dormitory door of the editor of the Bona Venture, who happened to be Mike Vaccaro, a future sports columnist of the New York Post. Vaccaro told that story in the Post on Wednesday, noting that Wojnarowski had introduced himself by name that day and said he wanted to write for the school paper.
"I asked him his name again," Vaccaro wrote. “ ‘My friends call me Woj,’ ” he said." That was the start of a beautiful friendship.
"It's all come remarkably full-circle," Vaccaro wrote. It has come full-circle for Tepas, too. He's 75, while the kid brother of his former administrative assistant is 55.
Now Woj is the freshly minted general manager of their alma mater. "I'm not sure what a general manger does" in the collegiate context, Tepas said. "But it is a critical time in college sports, particularly for the mid-major schools.
" Bona said that Wojnarowski, Class of 1991, would have "a wide range of responsibilities, including NIL opportunities," as well as transfer-portal management and program fundraising, among other duties. Duke was among the first schools to have a general manager for basketball. Syracuse has one, too.
The role is even more widespread in college football. And now the man who broke so much news over so many years about general managers is one himself. Dale Tepas could not be prouder.
"They're going to introduce him at a news conference on campus next week," Tepas said. "I'm going to drive down from Canandaigua for that." He wouldn't miss it for the world.
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