ALLEGANY – Bob Beretta can still recite all the newspapers he read as he grew up in the Hudson Valley.
The Evening News of Newburgh. The Times Herald-Record of Middletown. The New York Post, the New York Times, the Daily News.
He picked up copies of the Boston Globe and the Cape Cod Times when he and his family traveled to Cape Cod each summer. Wherever he went, he bought a local paper.
Beretta, 58, kept notes on the baseball games he played in and the baseball games he watched as a youth and high school baseball player in Newburgh, including a few red-letter dates in history.
“I still have the notebooks, like Hank Aaron, the night he hit his 715th home run, and Al Downing was pitching,” Beretta recalled last week to The Buffalo News. “I loved to write, and I loved sports, so I was like, ‘All right, I’m going to be a sportswriter.’”
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Bob Beretta joins St. Bonaventure as its new athletic director after three years at Le Moyne.
Beretta was organized. Meticulous. Detail-driven. A stickler for accuracy. Qualities that would make a good journalist. Qualities he took into a career in athletic administration that began in 1987 and will continue when he becomes St. Bonaventure’s athletic director this summer.
He enrolled at St. Bonaventure in the fall of 1983, a baseball player who was intent on becoming a sports reporter. He was a right-handed relief pitcher who majored in mass communication, and he spent hours in the sports information offices, keeping statistics for Bona’s teams and assisting longtime Bonnies administrator Jim Engelhardt.
“That’s a skill set that’s highly valued, not just the writing but the communication piece, and thinking strategically,” said Beretta, a 1987 Bona graduate. “The (Jandoli School of Communication at St. Bonaventure) cultivated such a broad skill set in my tool kit. When I was able to leave, I felt really prepared for that next step. The communications aspect is really important, because it’s a relationships industry.”
He enjoyed promoting athletes and the Bonnies athletic program. He found a segue into athletic administration that took him back to the Hudson Valley, where he began a 34-year tenure in Army’s athletic department in 1987. Then he became athletic director at Le Moyne in Syracuse from 2021-24, overseeing the athletic program’s transition from Division II to Division I.
Now, he returns to St. Bonaventure.
“Bob could have been anything he wanted to,” Engelhardt said June 7, when Bona introduced Beretta at the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts. “What you saw today, that’s the way he was on campus. He’s just approachable, and he was a professional, even at a very young age.”
Beretta the baseball player
Larry Sudbrook, the longtime St. Bonaventure baseball coach, can still picture Beretta on the mound for the Bonnies, wearing black-rimmed glasses, a la Ricky Vaughn in the 1989 movie “Major League,” and letting out a grunt each time he released a pitch.
Beretta underwent surgery on his right shoulder after the 1985 season. Sudbrook saw that Beretta had lost some throwing velocity but didn’t see the reliever abandon the sport. Beretta became more resourceful and kept his competitive edge. He tinkered with the location of his pitches and changed the speed of his pitches, rather than just relying on brute force to deliver one.
“That didn’t stop him from grunting on every pitch,” said Sudbrook, who retired after the 2021 season.
Beretta told Engelhardt stories about his teammates, including a snake-bitten pitcher who had a bloated earned-run average and couldn’t get a win.
Still, that pitcher – and Engelhardt couldn’t remember who it was – maintained some swagger.
“‘He wants to be known as ‘Señor Smoke,’” Beretta told Engelhardt, referring to Detroit Tigers pitcher Aurelio Lopez. The two looked at each other and burst into laughter.
At the same time, Beretta had an audacity and candor that allowed him to approach Sudbrook. Baseball historically hasn’t been one of Bona’s revenue sports, and the school’s athletic program isn’t flush with cash. In the spring of 1986, the Bonnies played in North Carolina, and lodged in a football locker room.
“It was a lot cheaper than motel rooms,” Sudbrook said. “It was not a great experience. Bob came back, talked to the team and said to me ‘We can’t do that again.’ You have to feel strong and have to have the backbone to talk to me about things like that, and Bob felt that was something he should talk to us about, and he was right.”
Beretta, Sudbrook said, wasn’t just thinking about his team. He was thinking about what would help future Bona baseball teams.
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Bob Beretta, left, takes part in an interview of College Football Hall of Fame inductee Bill Carpenter, a 1960 West Point graduate. Beretta worked in athletic administration at Army from 1987 to 2021 and became St. Bonaventure's athletic director in June.
The qualities that allowed Beretta to pivot and to take charge helped him when he became an athletic administrator at Army in the fall of 1987 when he was an intern in Army’s sports information department.
Sudbrook coached at Bona for 36 years, and had eight athletic directors as his supervisor, so he had an idea of what constituted a leader for the school’s athletic program.
“When Bob was a co-captain, he was a co-captain because the players saw a leader and a good person,” Sudbrook said. “If you’re going to be the athletic director at St. Bonaventure, those are the two most important qualities.
“If you look at Bob, you’re getting, to me, as a coach, someone who understood sports, understood athletics and was a hard worker and a straight shooter. When you have to deliver bad news to somebody, at whatever job you have, being honest and straightforward is so important, and Bob has that. He can be empathetic but honest. That’s huge at a small place – you can’t hide at St. Bonaventure.”
Back with the Bonnies
Beretta left campus in 1987 and rarely, if ever, returned to the Southern Tier. Not because he didn’t want to, but because his priorities were with Army and then Le Moyne.
He held various athletic administration roles at West Point, including athletic communications, senior associate athletic director for external operations and most recently was Army’s senior associate athletic director for strategic initiatives. He was Army’s game coordinator for the annual Army-Navy football game, handled football scheduling initiatives for Army and was part of Army’s coaching searches.
The Bonnies’ baseball program hosts its annual reunion weekends in the fall – those weekends fell on the same weekends as Army football games.
He returned for his five-year reunion in 1992, and again in 2022 and in 2023, when Bona presented Engelhardt, Beretta’s former supervisor, with the John Domino Award, which recognizes a graduate who has excelled in sports journalism or sports communications.
Beretta threw his hat into consideration for the athletic director opening at Bona in 2014, when Steve Watson took the same role at Loyola Chicago. Beretta didn’t apply for the athletic director opening in May 2021, as he had just started at Le Moyne.
“I did not give that a second thought,” Beretta said. “As much as the pull was still there, I would have never considered leaving Le Moyne under those circumstances, so short into my tenure there.”
Engelhardt was overjoyed when he found out Beretta was going to return to lead the athletic department.
“Whether it took two minutes, which is what I wanted it to be, or two months, I knew he was the right person for the show,” Engelhardt said. “I didn’t know if it was going to happen, because he had a great opportunity at Le Moyne, that’s a good job and he’s done great things, and I didn’t know if we could attract him, and if the feeling would be mutual.”
Beretta takes over a Bonnies athletic program with one of the smallest budgets in the Atlantic 10 Conference, and a school with one of the smaller enrollments in the 15-school league.
He’ll reach out to community members to cultivate trust and relationships. It’s a populace that wants transparency in the athletic department’s decision-making processes, particularly after a lack of clarity regarding the decision to withdraw from consideration for the National Invitation Tournament in March.
He aims to help Bona gain clarity on where it fits into the changing and sometimes uncertain landscape of college athletics, one that’s been impacted by the transfer portal, Name, Image and Likeness policies, and revenue sharing in college sports.
“Bob could be transformational for this university, at the executive level,” Engelhardt said. “He’s going to come into meetings with that attitude and that structure he has and be an incredible asset to the community.”
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