If you time the drive from Allegany, New York’s St. Bonaventure University just right, you can make your way into Canada and up to Toronto in a little over three hours.
And for the first time since taking over as the school’s men’s basketball general manager, former NBA insider Adrian Wojnarowski will be making the trek up north this weekend.
The man known often simply as “Woj” is making an appearance as a featured speaker at the University of Toronto at the Training Ground Summit, a free-to-attend event for up to 500 student-athletes.
Wojnarowski made waves when he stepped down from ESPN in September, opting to leave his role as basketball’s top newsbreaker to return to his alma mater for a new role.
But as soon as he stepped foot back on campus for an alumni weekend with his wife Amy — also an alumnus with a lengthy family connection to the school — he could tell he didn’t want to be anywhere but the college that currently has an enrollment of just under 2,500.
“We just laughed at how many classmates of ours whose kids go to Bonaventure,” Wojnarowski said in an interview with Daily Hive. “A kid will stop me on campus and say, ‘Hey, you know my mom! You know my dad! You went to school with them!’… it’s been a lot of fun to be back in that college environment. There’s electricity and energy that you kind of forget about around the college campus.”
Unsurprisingly, it was a set of Canadian St. Bonaventure former players who reached out to Wojnarowski to get him to come to Toronto.
Andrew Nicholson, a first-round pick in the 2012 NBA Draft who spent 285 games in the league with Orlando, Washington, and Brooklyn, partnered up with former Canadian Men’s National Team captain Vidal Massiah to offer Wojnarowski the opportunity to speak in Toronto this Sunday at the event hosted by the Athlete Tech Group.
With the introduction of payments for players’ names, images, and likenesses (commonly referred to as NIL) now a key fabric of the American collegiate experience, Wojnarowski will be speaking about how that reality can also affect Canadian athletes.
“We can do some more educating about the opportunities that are here, and opportunities not just for NIL coming into the States, but hopefully partnering with companies and partnering with entities in Canada,” Wojnarowski said of what he hopes attendees get out of the experience.
But beyond the one-day event that also features Toronto Raptors rookie Jamal Shead as a speaker, Wojnarowski wants his Bonnies basketball program to be able to draw talent from its neighbours up north.
What’s Woj looking for in talent from Canada?
A 1991 graduate of the university’s Jandoli School of Communication, Wojnarowski shouted out Canadian Bonnies players Rob Samuels, Cassell Cyrus, Rocky Llewellyn, and Barry Mungar that date all the way back to the early 1980s.
“I think for [St. Bonaventure], the relationship with Toronto and with Canada has always been important,” Wojnarowski said. “For me, it’s going to be a huge priority, both on and off the court, not just recruiting Toronto and trying to bring players down to Bonaventure, but investing in the basketball community there.”
Much of the core of his job still comes down to establishing and maintaining relationships with prospective and current athletes.
“I spent the last three-plus decades talking to players every day, coaches every day, agents every day. You’re still doing that. It’s just the conversations are a little bit different,” Wojnarowski added. “You’re trying to understand who might be a fit for you.”
Wojnarowski has also been perusing Canadian U Sports university talent, in addition to high school prospects, to see if there are any possible transfers worth a fit.
“That’s certainly a level of basketball you want to keep your eye on,” Wojnarowski said. “There’s so much great coaching in Canada, and so many great programs, and you’ve seen the sport grow there, and we need to be mining every level of it… there’s professional opportunities for some of our players as well in Canada.”
“I’m going to [check out the Canadian Elite Basketball League]. I haven’t [been to a game], but I’m going to.”
Though Toronto will be his first stop in Canada since his move to St. Bonaventure, he doesn’t plan for it to be the last.
“I want to get out to Edmonton. I want to get over to Montreal. There’s so many great programs sprouting up that have been established in Canada,” Wojnarowski added.
Changes in the college basketball landscape
“I love the simplicity of being in some of the smaller gyms,” Wojnarowski said.
Wojnarowski said it’s important to have a long-term vision for any collegiate program under modern transfer rules.
“You don’t want to be in essentially free agency every year. That is not a sustainable model. And so while it used to be, ‘Hey, we’re going to keep the team together for three years or four years,’ now, it might be two years that you work really hard to keep a team together.” Wojnarowski said. “Our most important recruiting in this day and age is keeping your own players, and so I certainly spend a lot of time on that.”
Wojnarowski added the incentives for players to pick a certain program should go beyond their immediate earning potential.
“If all we’re doing in this is just paying players, I think we’re failing… [St. Bonaventure is] not going to win bidding wars for players if money is the most important thing,” Wojnarowski said of his recruiting pitch to St. Bonaventure players. “But the experience, the access to professionals and maybe their chosen field or an area they’d like to get into while they’re still playing, or certainly beyond their career [as a player are things we can offer at St. Bonaventure].”
With 6.4 million followers on X — and a contact list in his phone that spans the basketball world — it’s hard to imagine someone in college basketball with a wider reach than Wojnarowski.
What does the future look like for Wojnarowski?
While the news of his ESPN retirement and new job were major announcements for Wojnarowski, he revealed two months later in an interview with Sports Illustrated’s Chris Mannix that he’d actually been diagnosed with prostate cancer last May, which was part of the reason why he decided it was time to go a different route.
Though he kept the news private for several months before and after his sports media departure, the 55-year-old decided to go public with his diagnosis to hopefully inspire others to get their health checked by a doctor regularly.
“I just wanted to encourage folks to get out and stay ahead of it the way I did. So I’m feeling great, and hopefully that’s going to continue.”
And though speaking to the public about cancer screenings and college basketball might be two totally different worlds, Wojnarowski’s really just hoping that he can find a way to make a difference in the world around him in his personal and professional lives.
“It might look different now than it looked just five years ago or 10 years ago or certainly 20 years ago, but we can still adhere, I think, to those values and bring value to young people’s lives,” he added.
With the Bonnies off to a 14-1 start in his first season with the team, Wojnarowski doesn’t appear to have any regrets about his move to Allegany.
“I don’t know what the next 15 years look like, but I’m enjoying this,” Wojnarowski said. “I loved my career, I’m proud of it. I don’t want to give the idea that what I did isn’t super valuable to a company, the insider role at a company is really important to a network. What Adam Schefter does, Pete Thamel, Jeff Passan… someone’s got to be doing it. And you better be doing it at a high level. It keeps the whole engine of a company going. I look at my peers in there, and I marvel, and I think about those days, and I don’t really want to live another one of them.”