When senior leadership invited Dev Ostrowski, C 26, to entertain Saint Vincent College’s Board of Directors at their most recent meeting by playing piano, he accepted with enthusiasm. Ostrowski has been playing piano for the last eight years, teaching himself with YouTube videos and the knowledge he’d gained learning violin in middle school. When asked if he’d like to do more with that skill in the future, Ostrowski said, “Honestly, I’m open to anything.”
Piano isn’t the only thing Ostrowski is good at. With the talent to play professional basketball and the drive to be an athletic logistics coordinator, he’s got plans, but nothing set in stone. As he prepares to finish his senior year, he admits, “life can go in many different directions.” And for Ostrowski, it already has.
Born in a small village in Haiti and placed in an orphanage when he was 3 years old, Ostrowski discovered how to “stay strong, learn and grow regardless of the situation”—a situation that kept him in poverty and survival mode. But then his life took a different direction.
When Ostrowski turned 6, Steven and Susan Ostrowski adopted him and brought him home to Niantic, Connecticut, to give him the life his biological parents dreamed of for him. As he got older, he thrived academically and athletically at East Lyme High School, and by his senior year, Ivy League schools like Cornell and Brown were scouting him. In 2019, he was recruited to play ball for Miami Dade, a JUCO Division 1 school. But then COVID-19 hit, and his life rerouted again.
He left college and stopped playing basketball in favor of a gap year, during which Saint Vincent athletic director DP Harris gave him a call. Harris had seen Ostrowski score big for Miami Dade when he was coaching for the St. Thomas University Bobcats a year earlier and reached out to ask if he’d like to play ball for the Bearcats. “You know what, alright,” he told Harris. “It’s a good opportunity to finish school and play basketball.”
Ostrowski has been a key player for the Bearcats since he arrived. Averaging over 16 points per game and scoring 39 points in a single game last season against Franciscan, Ostrowski was named to the Presidents’ Athletic Conference All-Conference team. “Dev will be a 1,000-point scorer this year,” says Harris, who now coaches Ostrowski. “He is one of the hardest working student-athletes that I have ever been around. Most importantly, his love for our institution and his positive outlook on life are admirable.”
Playing basketball isn’t the only reason he came to Saint Vincent. A sports management major, Ostrowski has become interested in load management, recognizing that professional athletics is a business, but that the athletes shouldn’t be treated as commodities. His Saint Vincent education is connecting his degree and athletic life for a bigger purpose.
His smile widens when he talks about his professors like Dr. Thomas Cline, a professor of business administration in the Alex G. McKenna School of Business, Economics and Government, who has a “great way of implementing life lessons with humor,” or Mark Kachmar, executive in residence for the McKenna School, who “does a good job explaining complex ideas and making them simple.” He loves the small class sizes and the faces he sees daily on campus, unable to identify a best friend because he doesn’t want to leave anybody out.
All of this support may have inspired his lead-by-example philosophy. As a varsity senior, he is far less likely to tell a freshman what to do than to show him who to be. It’s the way he’d like to lead in the future as well.
“I think life itself is a big mental game,” he says. “It’s about how well you play the game and how you can take in all it has to offer.” He understands the pressures of being an athlete and dreams of working behind the scenes of professional basketball, helping athletes like him juggle life on and off the court.
If anyone is a good example of life-juggling, it’s Ostrowski. Along with piano performances and basketball practices, he also works as a hospitality ambassador for the Fred M. Rogers Center, and last year was recognized for his academic achievements when he was named to the National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC) Honors Court.
While Ostrowski acknowledges there are things he’ll want to remember about Saint Vincent, like the view of the sun rising as he walks from his dorm to his classes, ultimately, he admits, “I don’t like to miss things. It’s not who I am. I just move on. It’s just how life is.”
Open to anything, Ostrowski is ready for whatever direction his life takes next.
