Theodore S. O'Konski
Theodore S. O'Konski '34 '80 Basketball, Baseball
"We were a struggling group of people dedicated to our cause."
The speaker is Ted O'Konski. He is 71 years of age now and recovering from open heart surgery. But the voice is strong, the memory remarkably clear, and the pride in the accomplishments of a half-century past very much in evidence.
Cited by Homer E. Woodling, Fenn College's first - and only - director of athletics as "the student whose activities provided the largest contribution toward getting varsity sports started at Fenn," O'Konski was in not only on the birth of intercollegiate athletics at Fenn College but on the birth of Fenn College itself.
Fenn was still Y Tech when Ted wandered down from East Technical High School to the corner of E. 24th St. and Prospect Avenue to begin his collegiate career in 1928.
There was no intercollegiate sports program then, but as is usually the case in a college atmosphere of any kind, there was a group of young men at the school eager to put together a team and compete for the love of sport. Ted joined that group along with his older brother Walter and somehow the kids from Y Tech wangled a game with Hiram College in December of 1928. They lost - by a score which appears in no record books - but from that game sprouted the seeds of a fledging athletic program.
The following year Homer E. Woodling was hired as the director of athletics, Y Tech became Fenn College and the school sallied forth with a full-fledged varsity basketball team. Well, sort of full-fledged. Only one member of that team had played varsity basketball in high school and he had been a lowly sub.
Again Fenn traveled to Hiram for a game in December, but this time it was an official contest, the first ever engaged in by Fenn College. Ted O'Konski started for his college in that game as he had for Y Tech the year before. The results were basically the same - Fenn lost, 27-18 - but an era had begun.
It wasn't a bad beginning either. Fenn finished that first season with a 5-5 record against college competition, and in the next two years, with big, strong Ted O'Konski providing rebound strength as well as a consistent scoring punch, the Foxes turned in records of 8-6 and 7-7.
The 8-6 record turned in by the Foxes in 1930-31 when Ted served as the second Fenn basketball captain, succeeding brother Walter, would be the only winning basketball season that Fenn students could boast about for 16 years.
Baseball was added to the Fenn program in 1932 and the sparkplug catcher for the first two Fenn teams was the same sturdy Ted O'Konski who had been helping to make a name for the Foxes in basketball. And when Coach Spike Sperry needed help for his second-year wrestling team in the 1932-33 season, who turned up as the Fenn 175-pounder? Ted O'Konski, of course.
When O'Konski wasn't occupied on the court, the mat or the diamond, he was working on a variety of student committees seeking to uncover better playing sites for Fenn teams, organizing "field days" to promote sports, organizing a letterman's club (and becoming the club's first president) and directing the night school athletic program.
When his eligibility ran out he took over for a season as coach of the varsity baseball team, and also coached the basketball teams of a junior college and high school associated with the ambitious Fenn program.
The games ended for O'Konski in the mid-30's when he began to put his engineering degree to use. After several years with the Industrial Rayon Corporation in Painesville, he was offered a position as special engineer for the president of the Wheeling Corrugating Co., a division of Wheeling Steel Corp.
That began a career which lasted over 35 years before ending in retirement in 1974 at which time he was Director of Product Development for all six plants of Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel.
Since that time, he and his wife of 46 years, the former Robina Campbell, have spent much of their time visiting their four children, Robert, Dorothy, Douglas and Brian who have scattered to various parts of the United States, or simply traveling for the sheer fun of seeing the world.
Back home in Wheeling he has served as a deacon of his church, chairman of the church building committee which raised over 1 1/2-million dollars, president of the Wheeling Country Club and as an officer of several other organizations.
Ted O'Konski is still a very dedicated man.
