Jack Bogaczyk spent 28 years in the sports media business in Roanoke, nearly 27 of those in the newspaper business, first at The World-News and then The Roanoke Times after the merger of the two daily papers. At the Roanoke newspaper, Bogaczyk was a beat reporter, general assignment reporter, senior writer and lead columnist. He also wrote the newspaper’s Sports TV/Radio column for 19 years- one of the first in the nation to do that on a weekly basis. Bogaczyk won 13 national writing awards and 35 state honors in his daily newspaper career that started in 1966 while he was in high school.
While in Roanoke, Bogaczyk’s work focused mostly on major college athletics, and he was the beat reporter covering Virginia Military Institute and then Virginia Tech in a period from 1979-88. His award-winning, 35-part series on Hokies athletics in 1985 contributed to administrative and cultural changes in the Tech program. That same year, he won the Virginia Horse Council’s media award for a series on the equine business in the Commonwealth. In his career, Bogaczyk covered the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, the Super Bowl, the World Series, multiple Daytona 500s, 11 NCAA Final Fours, 28 NCAA basketball tournaments and 15 different college bowl games (31 total). The conference basketball tournaments he has covered include the ACC, Big East, Metro, Colonial, Southern, Atlantic 10, Big South, ODAC and WVIAC.