Hall of Fame bio: From athletic department to commissioner’s chair

By the Mon Valley Independent

Ron Bertovich

Ron Bertovich was aware he wasn’t going to be the best athlete. But he yearned to have a career in sports.
A 1972 graduate of Mon Valley Catholic, Bertovich was raised on a farm in Bentleyville.
He was the manager for the Spartans basketball and football teams in high school. He assisted the school’s traiiner and helped keep score for head coaches Phil Pergola (basketball) and Tom Donahoe (football), who went on to a prominent career as an NFL general manager with the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Buffalo Bills.
Bertovich went on to St. Francis University were he was the club director of the football team and the manager of the basketball team.
He was also a director in the department of intramurals and an equipment manager.
He did a lot of fundraising for the club football team and helped work out transportation and public relations for the group.
During his time there, he grasped a lot of knowledge in the athletic department, especially under athletic director IV Davis.
Bertovich worked on, and earned, his bachelor’s degree in business management and went on to get a master’s degree in industrial relations.
He became the sports information director at Iona College in 1980. Two years later, he became the director of communications and assistant commissioner for the Atlantic 10 Conference. Four years later, he became the conference’s commissioner at the age of 31.
At the time, Penn State, West Virginia, Temple and Rutgers, were members of the conference.
He left the Atlantic 10 to become the vice president and general manager of Buffalo’s Empire Sports Network for five years.
In 1998, the Buffalo Sabres hired him as executive vice president of administration and HSBC Arena. Five years later, it was back to collegiate sports as commissioner of the Mid-Continent Conference (Summit League).
From 2006 to 2017, Bertovich was the deputy commissioner of basketball for the Colonial Athletic Association. During his tenure, George Mason (2006) and Virginia Commonwealth (2011) reached the final four in the NCAA Tournament.
He’s a founding member of the Greater Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame and was named as a distinguished alumnus of St. Francis University.
Bertovich and his wife Cindy have two daughters, Meghan and Kim. They reside in Getzville, N.Y.