OLEAN, N.Y. — The phone rang about 10 minutes into the drive through the Enchanted Mountains on the way home from St. Bonaventure. Adrian Wojnarowski had more to say.
The former NBA insider for ESPN is the general manager of St. Bonaventure basketball, a position he’s held since 2024. The day before he called, he sat in his office, which is not much bigger than a broom closet, and answered questions about a dramatic makeover of the Bonnies that has divided fans in the small town of Olean.
Mark Schmidt, who coached the Bonnies for 19 seasons, retired in March amid friction with Wojnarowski. The school replaced him with Mike MacDonald, a Division II coach from nearby Daemen University, as part of a plan to slash coaching salaries and put more money toward player compensation.
In his previous job, Wojnarowski dealt with NBA stars, owners and super agents. The controversy at St. Bonaventure landed him in a public relations battle with a local news outlet called the Olean Star and a poster on X known as “Colonel Nicholson,” a self-identified St. Bonaventure alum who’s been posting leaks from the athletic department.
None of this is quite what Wojnarowski had in mind when he walked away from a $7.3 million salary at ESPN to make $75,000 a year as the GM at his alma mater. It seemed like an act of benevolence, a big-name sports reporter giving his time and money to help the Bonnies stay afloat in the new era of player compensation.
Not everyone in Olean sees it that way. Wojnarowski, a man as influential as many of the NBA power brokers he covered at ESPN, hasn’t been able to win over a segment of the local fan base to his side of the story.
“In one world, Woj is the mega celebrity and super important to everybody in the NBA,” said Eric Firkel, a lawyer in Olean and the owner of the Olean Star. “But like I said, when he got hired, I had no idea who he was.”
At ESPN, Wojnarowski was known for having sources everywhere. That hasn’t changed. His call to a reporter on the way out of town showed he still seemed to know who was talking and what was being said about him.
That’s not so surprising: In a place like Olean, it’s hard to snoop around unnoticed. Wojnarowski, aware The Athletic had spoken to some of his critics, wanted to set the record straight. People are entitled to their own opinions, he said many times, but they’re not entitled to their own facts.
“It just comes with the territory,” Wojnarowski said during the interview in his office. “I’m OK with it. I really am. I had a public job before at ESPN. Sometimes in that position, things become …”
His voice trailed off.
“If you don’t like it, then go sit on a beach chair somewhere and no one will bother you,” he continued. “I might do that here at some point.”
St. Bonaventure, a Franciscan school with an undergraduate enrollment of roughly 2,100 students, occupies a unique place in college basketball, both geographically and metaphorically. Olean and the adjoining town of Allegany are in a remote part of Western New York, an hour and a half from Buffalo.
Playing for the Bonnies is a bit like joining a basketball monastery. The Reilly Center, a 6,000-seat arena that displays a Final Four banner from 1970 and the jerseys of program greats like Bob Lanier, is an enclave for players who want to lock themselves in the gym with no distractions.
“This is a place to work,” said Joe Grahovac, a center for the Bonnies. “If you come here, it’s almost like playing overseas. There’s not much going on if you go play in Bulgaria or whatever. If you like going out to lots of clubs and stuff, this isn’t really the place for you.”
Grahovac, a 6-foot-10 center with a bushy Bill Walton beard and a laid-back hippie vibe, stands out in Olean like a palm tree in a pine forest. He put up modest numbers this season, averaging 4.5 points in about 18 minutes per game, but he’s still a fan favorite. At a news conference to introduce St. Bonaventure’s new coach, an older gentleman in a camouflage jacket approached Grahovac and struck up a conversation about the local wildlife, an interaction that ended with Grahovac putting his number into the man’s phone.
Juco transfer Joseph Grahovac averaged 4.5 points for the Bonnies this season. (Nick Cammett / Getty Images)
Grahovac has one of the most unusual backstories in college basketball. He appeared in one basketball game at Foothill High in Southern California and didn’t have much of a plan after graduation. He worked a few odd jobs, including one delivering hay in Orange County, and was playing pickup basketball at a local 24 Hour Fitness when a junior college coach discovered him. At the time, he was sleeping in his truck because his mom had kicked him out of the house.
“He just kind of was floating,” said Perry Webster, Grahovac’s coach at Fullerton College.
Division I coaches saw Grahovac’s junior college film and started calling Webster about his 23-year-old freshman big man. Here was Wojnarowski, a GM who easily could have coasted on his famous last name, recruiting Grahovac with the relentless drive of a reporter chasing a big scoop.
“Woj worked his ass off and just kind of outworked everyone else who was trying to recruit Joe,” Webster said.
Grahovac signed with the Bonnies on a six-figure NIL deal funded in part through outside endorsements. Wojnarowski was able to parlay Grahovac’s unique story into marketing opportunities and media exposure, including a story in Slam magazine and a video posted by the YouTube channel BallerTV in which Wojnarowski called Grahovac “as important a recruit as we’ve had in years.”
Though Grahovac’s production was limited, St. Bonaventure’s portal work had its bright spots, including Minnesota transfer Frank Mitchell, who averaged 16.3 points and 10.2 rebounds and significantly outperformed his contract. Cayden Charles, a transfer from Division II North Georgia, averaged 12.9 points while earning less than $10,000.
Grahovac’s recruitment in particular showed the broad scope of Wojnarowski’s role at St. Bonaventure. Wojnarowski insists he was working at Schmidt’s direction, but his hands-on involvement in recruiting raised eyebrows and added to tensions with the coach.
Schmidt, who declined to comment for this story, took over a proud program still reeling from an eligibility scandal and helped St. Bonaventure punch above its weight in the Atlantic 10. In 19 years at the school, he won 341 games, posted 13 winning seasons and led the Bonnies to the NCAA Tournament three times, most recently in 2021.
Recruiting players to Olean, never an easy task, became more complicated with the arrival of NIL and revenue-sharing. That’s where Wojnarowski came in. Given his connections, his clout and his 6.4 million followers on X, he was viewed as a game-changer who could help the Bonnies close the gap with wealthier schools in the Atlantic 10.
Schmidt initially welcomed Wojnarowski, as did most people at St. Bonaventure. The relationship between the two men, once collaborative, grew “frayed” in the final months of Schmidt’s tenure, athletic director Bob Beretta said.
“You know, I think there was a misalignment there,” Beretta added. “As an athletic director, I’m responsible for all of it. In retrospect, maybe I could have done more to make sure there was better alignment.”
Beretta declined to specify the source of the friction, but it was widely discussed in Olean that Wojnarowski and Schmidt clashed on several subjects, including the length of Schmidt’s practices, his connection with players and his approach to recruiting and player retention. Looming over everything was the question of how a small school like St. Bonaventure planned to stay relevant in the era of NIL, revenue-sharing and the transfer portal.
Schmidt earned $1.6 million this season, about the same as St. Bonaventure’s entire roster. Wojnarowski and others at the school believed that ratio needed to change, with less money going to the head coach and more going to players.
With Schmidt, 63, approaching the final year of his contract, Beretta said he met with the coach in February and laid out options to restructure the program’s financial model.
“We talked about several scenarios, and I encouraged him to come back with other options if he wanted to consider,” Beretta said. “He notified us two weeks later that he had chosen to retire.”
At 9:34 a.m. on March 7, the day of St. Bonaventure’s final regular-season game, the Olean Star reported that Wojnarowski and Beretta informed Schmidt he would be relieved of his duties following the season, an assertion Beretta termed “misinformation” in an interview with The Athletic. Within 20 minutes, national outlets reported Schmidt would announce his retirement after that day’s game against Davidson.
Several players learned of their coach’s departure through an ESPN notification on their phones, Charles said. In the world of St. Bonaventure basketball, the news landed with the force of a “Woj Bomb,” the term used to describe Wojnarowski’s signature scoops.
“To hear it from an outside source was weird,” Charles said. “I wish I had heard it from (Schmidt) directly. I’m sure the team would have as well.”
Schmidt’s departure exposed a fissure in the tight-knit St. Bonaventure community. Many of the people involved in this story, including Wojnarowski, Beretta and MacDonald, are St. Bonaventure alums. (Schmidt is one of the exceptions; he played at Boston College from 1981 to 1985.)
The Olean community is divided over St. Bonaventure’s future with coach Mark Schmidt stepping down. (Austin Meek / The Athletic)
Some fans see a distinction between people who love St. Bonaventure and those who also embrace the communities of Olean and Allegany, who view the school’s small-town setting as a source of pride and not a hindrance. Schmidt alluded to the difference when he was asked in a news conference what the Bonnies needed in their next coach.
“That community in Olean or Allegany, it’s prideful,” Schmidt said. “Those people think that Olean is the best place in the world. You can’t talk negative about it. You’ve got to be one of them. I take pride in telling people that I’m an Olean guy. I’m a Bartlett guy. That’s what you’ve got to be.”
Bartlett Country Club sits on the outskirts of Olean, roughly three miles from the St. Bonaventure campus. It’s a place where the locals, many of them friends of the former coach, gather to play golf, drink beer and swap stories about the Bonnies.
The clubhouse sits atop a hill at the end of a bumpy brick road, with large windows overlooking the fairway. The interior conveys privilege from a slightly older era, with chandeliers glittering above the dance floor and well-trod carpet lining the hallways.
The Bartlett regulars include local business owners, season ticket holders, guys you might find on a boat in nearby Cuba Lake. In a county that voted for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by a 2-to-1 margin in 2024, the Bartlett crowd is politically mixed but leans to the center-right. Some of the club’s regulars said Wojnarowski gave them the cold shoulder, perhaps because of differing political views.
That perception stems in part from a 2020 incident, when Wojnarowski apologized and served a two-week suspension at ESPN for sending Republican Sen. Josh Hawley a two-word email that read, “F— you.”
“All the locals get the sense that he doesn’t want to be associated with them if he doesn’t have the same political bent as them,” said Firkel, one of the Bartlett regulars. “Fair or not, that is a general feeling through the community, that maybe you look down on people for being a bunch of MAGA Republicans.”
Wojnarowski didn’t answer directly when asked about the political tensions, but he said he believes a successful basketball team will unite the community. And he’s confident that MacDonald, who was 61-3 the past two seasons at Daemen, is the right coach to lead the program.
MacDonald overlapped one year at St. Bonaventure with Wojnarowski and coached at Olean High early in his career. He became a Division I head coach in his early 30s when he was promoted to replace John Beilein at Canisius and was fired nine seasons later with a 108-153 record.
MacDonald, 59, rebooted his career at Medaille, a Division III school in Buffalo, and won nearly 75 percent of his games in 12 seasons at Daemen. He compared himself to a baseball prospect who rockets to the Major Leagues, then gets demoted to the lowest level of the minors.
“If people say I don’t deserve this job, I’ll say, ‘You know what, I went down to A-ball. I went all the way down,’” MacDonald said. “I think I worked my way back up.”
When MacDonald interviewed at St. Bonaventure, some of his first questions were about Wojnarowski’s role. He wanted to clarify the chain of command, which has Wojnarowski reporting to MacDonald and MacDonald reporting to Beretta. He also wanted to establish that Wojnarowski would focus on fundraising and dealing with agents while leaving the on-the-ground recruiting to the coaching staff.
“From the outside looking in, I thought Woj was doing too much recruiting,” MacDonald said. “That shouldn’t be his job. We have assistant coaches for that.”
Wojnarowski said he wants the same thing. St. Bonaventure is MacDonald’s program, he said, not Woj’s program. His role is to present options, let the coaches decide which players they want, then work on making the dollars add up. Though MacDonald’s contract hasn’t been made public, he will earn significantly less than Schmidt’s $1.6 million salary.
“It has to be the head coach’s vision,” Wojnarowski said. “It was before, and it is now.”
Some in Olean are skeptical. Wojnarowski, a man whose reporting shaped NBA legacies, recognizes he can’t control what people think. If MacDonald succeeds, Wojnarowski will be seen as the GM who steered St. Bonaventure through a difficult transition. If the experiment fails, some fans will see him as the villain of the story. Ultimately, he said, he’ll be judged on the results.
From numerous conversations for this story, it was clear the fire that made Wojnarowski a relentless reporter still burns hot. He’s obsessed with being first, beating the competition, seeing where things are going before anyone else. The story he wants — the story of St. Bonaventure’s successful transition to a new era of college basketball — is one that can’t be written, at least not yet.
The story he’s chasing is his own.