by Vukasin Petrovic, St. Francis Brooklyn Athletic Communications Student-Assistant
BROOKLYN, N.Y. — Frank Sinatra’s mantra for New York has the same value today as it once did in his golden days. If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere.
The allure of this city still draws people from all around the world to come and try their best in order to achieve the American Dream. Yet, such a dream isn’t achieved overnight. It’s a long rocky road until one can reach the nirvana of a careless stroll through Central Park. Sleepless nights and “meals of spaghetti topped with mustard”, as Will Ferrell once said, are a necessary requirement on your “to do” list, and a first bullet point on your resume. For those willing to try, willing to play the high stakes game of life, leave their coziness behind and start biting through the pain and challenges, St. Francis College provides the opportunity not many colleges do. One prime examples of this is former Terriers’ water polo player Bosko Stankovic.
Seen today, Stankovic looks like a well-dressed, suave gentleman conquering the real estate world of New York. But much like myself, he used to be a sleep deprived student – athlete who had to learn the difficulty of living on your own before many of his peers. So, while I looked like an extra from “The Walking Dead”, overwhelmed by practices, school work, a job and New York in general, Bosko sat across the table in a café just two blocks away from his former and my current school. He took his sunglasses off and began his story, almost as if reading my mind.
“When I first got here, it was extremely hard,” he admitted. “Our rent ate away everything we had in the first two months. The first semester we worked in the offices in school. After that, we started working wherever we could.
Naturally, I had my doubts looking at him now. But he continued his story when I asked him to describe his years in Brooklyn Heights.
“My years at SFC? Hungry. That’s the best way to describe them. The rent was expensive, the food was expensive, and we were getting a mere $175 from the college a month. We were eight people living in an apartment in Crown Heights, and we had to work, go to school, train, and do homework. It was painful at best.”
Then, I asked him the question that I have pondered myself at times. Why come here? Why leave the coziness of our hometown, Belgrade?
My fellow players in Belgrade and I were searching for a club to go and play for in countries such as Greece, Hungary, Netherlands, whoever had the means of paying us. But around that time, and that’s 2008, 2009, the stock market crashed and life got pretty hard. Especially back home.”
“So, the point was to acquire a better life elsewhere?” I asked him.
He gave it some thought before he added, “I think it was about leaving Serbia.”
Tackling the same questions myself, I sat in awe. Leaving certain comforts to fly across the ocean pursuing a hypothetical better tomorrow. It required courage.
“Well, then, how did SFC come about?”
“At the time, Igor Mladenovic, the goalie, and I were playing in Belgrade together. Marko Gencic (a fellow student at SFC) was a friend of ours, and his brother was at SFC along with some other players whom we knew. He talked us into coming to New York and explained that we would have an amazing team. No teams had the means of paying us so we went for it. We made videos to send, took the SAT and got accepted.”
What became of it, then? How was he sure that attending SFC would pay off? I ultimately found out that he wasn’t. In fact, it was a far cry from easy.
You experience high points, but more often you experience low points, and you have to learn from both. It gives you a perspective on things. It teaches you to fight. Neither lasts forever. So you just have to be ready for that defining moment which, for Bosko, came at the pool in which he swam thousands and thousands of yards.
“I met my current boss at the pool. At the time I was playing with Filip Sasic, a player from Croatia. After I had a job interview with a real estate company one day, I came to the pool to tell Filip how it went. It turned out that Filip was coaching a guy who had a real estate company not far from school. I talked to him and he liked me, told me to come to his office for an interview. I did. Turns out, they wanted to hire me. I liked him and his company and I started interning there. Long story short, they helped me get a license and I’ve been with them for the past five years. None of it could have happened without SFC. And here I mean the education part. Sure, SFC provided a facility in which one can meet a business owner, but if I didn’t have the knowledge to present myself then meeting him wouldn’t count for anything. I majored in economics with a minor in accounting and a concentration in finance. It ended up being a really good combination since I am using a bit of everything in my job right now.”
Turning the page to some of his athletic memories, I asked him about his favorite highlight from when he was playing.
“The time when I broke my wrist,” he said confusing as to how that might be his favorite athletic moment. “We were playing against Mercyhurst in the semifinals of the Easterns, I don’t remember the year. We entered the pool thinking it was going to be an easy game… It wasn’t. They kept the two goal advantage throughout the entire game and we barely managed to catch up to them in the fourth quarter. One minute before the end, I held the position as a set, got the ball and scored a back shot. The thing is, the guy set his arm vertically against mine. I scored a goal which gave us our first lead and eventually the win. I also broke my wrist. It wasn’t going to stop me from playing Bucknell in the finals. I played that game with a bandaged wrist.”
Defining the term perseverance in and out of the pool, Bosko remained there for a little bit longer in order to send a message to all the newbies at SFC.
“This is a great city. But you have to work hard. So do it, work hard and look for opportunities. If you sit down and wait, nothing is going to happen. Get up and seize the day.”
I did ask him if he would do it again and go through everything to get where he is today.
“I would. Regardless of the experiences I’ve had, I’ve grown more than I would be able to grow anywhere else. You come here as a kid who doesn’t know a single thing about life, then reality slaps you into submission. You suddenly have to work. You have to figure out things for yourself. You sit down and eat your daily bowl of rice and, unless you get up on your feet, it’s only going to go downhill from there. Just get off your butt. Go out there and chase those opportunities.”
I thanked him for his time and said goodbye, now convinced in the existence of reciprocity. I put my headphones in and played the old Sinatra’s tune as I walked those two blocks to get back to school. My practice was about to start.
