PHOTO GALLERYA three-year captain for New Haven men’s soccer, Bruce Bednarski earned All-America honors for the Chargers and was an integral piece of two teams that advanced to the NCAA postseason. Bednarski was selected to participate in the 1978 National Sports Festival, where the country’s top 60 players prepared for the 1980 Olympics, a 1981 draft pick of the Hartford Hellions of the Major Indoor Soccer League and was named a Bartels Fellow in the spring of 2011.
Bednarski came to the University in the fall of 1977 and was an immediate contributor for Head Coach Joe Machnik. The Chargers made their second consecutive trip to the Final Four that season, finishing a 16-2-2 campaign with a shootout win over Wisconsin-Green Bay in the national Third Place game.
Only a sophomore, Bednarski entered his first of three seasons as captain of the Chargers in 1978, leading the team to another NCAA postseason berth. A 3-1 victory over Hartford on the national stage highlighted a 13-2-4 season as New Haven reached the New England Regional Championship Match as one of the final eight teams standing in all of NCAA Division II. He also attended the National Sports Festival during the 1978 season, beginning preparations for the 1980 U.S. Olympic Team.
With Bednarski again at the helm as team captain, 1979 produced another winning campaign at 8-6-3 that included a five-match winning streak during which the Chargers outscored their opponents, 20-0.
In 1980, Bednarski earned All-America honors, registering six goals and seven assists in 17 matches. New Haven ended that fall with a record of 11-2-4 fueled by a nine-match unbeaten streak.
Following graduation, Bednarski was drafted by the Hartford Hellions of the MISL in 1981, but opted to remain at the University of New Haven to earn his M.B.A. while serving as an assistant coach for the men’s soccer team.
He joined Nortel Communications as a systems engineer, later became a member of the systems design team for the U.S. Senate and eventually signed on with Verizon. In 1993 he founded Net2000 Communications with three partners. Net2000 grew to more than 1,000 employees and achieved a market capitalization of over $1.6 billion when it successfully executed an IPO in 2000. Following that achievement, Bednarski was part of an executive team that transformed iDirect Technologies into a market leader in the satellite router industry. iDirect’s turnaround led to a successful exit when the company was purchased by Singapore Technologies in 2005.
Today, as senior vice president of business development with XipLink, Bednarski cultivates strategic global relationships for a company that produces software and hardware solutions that improve the performance of wireless communication networks.
Bednarski currently lives in San Diego with his wife Debra, and his daughter Darby.
