If you had asked me what players on the two Wichita State basketball teams I covered from 1985-87 would become successful businessmen, I’m not sure Tom Kosich would have been part of the conversation. He was an easy-going, life-of-the-party kind of guy (probably still is) who seemed to have no plan for his life, other than to enjoy it. And now? He’s president of Noodle Inc., a telecom service company with headquarters in the San Francisco area. He is also on the Board of Directors for the WSU Alumni Association and was in town last year to as part of the Distinguished Alumni Speaker Breakfast Series. On Tuesday, his company sent out a news release saying it had bought naming rights to the bullpen at Eck Stadium and would name it in honor of Shocker pitching coach Brent Kemnitz, a close friend of Kosich’s.
Not bad for a guy whose sole job the first year I covered the team (he was red-shirting because of a bad back) was to carry Gene Smithson’s dry erase board on road trips. He was a role player the next season, where his main job was trying to get new coach Eddie Fogler — a Dean Smith disciple — to lighten up a bit. The famous story that season was when Fogler was telling the team before it departed for a trip to Hawaii that “Honolulu in December is not that great.” Kosich’s reported response: “Coach, I’ve been to Terre Haute in February and it’s not that great either.”