The general manager of a college basketball team is a relatively new position, not merely at St. Bonaventure but around the country. Duke hired the first one in 2022. At the start of the current season, there were only about a dozen, mostly at perennial basketball powers like Villanova and Syracuse. St. Bonaventure is not such a power. But when Bob Beretta became the school’s athletic director last summer, he realized that someone who could coordinate N.I.L. payments to players, while helping with recruiting and perhaps even finding ways for the program to generate more revenue, would be a valuable addition to his basketball staff.
Wojnarowski met his future wife, Amy, when they were students at St. Bonaventure, and he remains intensely loyal to the school. Throughout his professional career, he has been a visible and vocal supporter of its basketball program. Once N.I.L. became permitted by the N.C.A.A., he made annual donations of $100,000 to $200,000 to a fund set up to pay players. Last July, Beretta asked him to use his extensive network of contacts to help find a worthy general manager. At 55, Wojnarowski was tired of contorting his life to ensure that he never missed a text. He suggested himself.
Wojnarowski earns $75,000 at St. Bonaventure, about 1 percent of his former income. He rents an apartment above a bar near the bucolic campus, which is just outside Olean, N.Y., and does little each day beyond looking for ways to keep the Bonnies competitive. “If Woj had put his name into the transfer portal, it’d be Kansas, Duke and Carolina,” says Schmidt, referring to three top programs that might have gone after him. “That’s how big a deal this is. He’s like a five-star recruit, with his connections and the trust that people have in him and what he can sell these kids.”
At Bucknell, the Bonnies coasted to victory. Afterward, Wojnarowski stood in the stands and chatted with alumni. Then he set out on a four-hour drive through a snowstorm to Buffalo, where he planned to get some sleep before continuing to Toronto. In the car, his response to the game was muted. The Atlantic 10 is a conference with national aspirations, strong enough that its teams occasionally go deep into the N.C.A.A. tournament. Beating a Patriot League team was hardly cause for celebration.
Yet as the league’s smallest school, St. Bonaventure is hardly a typical Atlantic 10 team. It has fewer living alumni in the world, for example, than the nearly 40,000 students currently enrolled at George Mason, a conference rival. Historically, the N.C.A.A.’s restrictions helped the Bonnies overcome some of that disparity. But in today’s open marketplace for recruits, heft matters.
