After more than three decades, Zaf Bludevich remains at the heart of Purple Knights athletics
By Caroline Crawford
Photos by Andy Duback

Walls can’t literally talk. But the walls of Zaf Bludevich’s office say plenty. Framed photographs line the walls and shelves, ranging from black-and-white track team photos from the 1970s to color photos of his daughters playing soccer and of his wife, Jacki Murphy ’74, and of Zaf with former athletic director Ed Markey ’51. Cartoons, hockey pucks, kids’ art awards and even a plastic reindeer that doubles as a jelly bean dispenser are all on display. The collection together with Zaf himself, tell the story of a career compassionately and enthusiastically played out on playing fields, rinks and training rooms in service to Saint Michael’s.

Zaf and the athletics department at Saint Michael’s have in a large sense grown and matured together. When Zaf first began to work at Saint Michael’s in 1975, a week after earning his master’s degree in physical education from Norwich University (a school with a long and storied athletic tradition), he arrived in a department with three employees and one key to the equipment room, which Ed Markey carried. The Ross Sports Center was only a year old and the Tarrant Center wasn’t even a consideration. The college offered club football, basketball, soccer, skiing and baseball for men. Women, and the need for women’s sports, had just arrived at Saint Michael’s. Thirty-four years and almost as many different duties later, Zaf is the senior associate athletic director in a department of 16 employees, more than 50 coaches and and 21 men’s and women’s varsity teams.

Name a position in the athletics department and chances are good Zaf has had a hand in it at some point. “The first year I was here, there were three sports for women,” he recalls, “field hockey, basketball and softball, and one coach to handle it all.” They needed a field hockey coach, and “it was a sport I’d never played, or even seen, but I said I’d try coaching it. Our first season we tied our previous record for wins, which was zero. The next year, Sue Duprat came along to coach the team and they scored two goals.”

In addition to the on-the-job training as field hockey coach, Zaf was the department’s first full-time athletic trainer; the assistant to long-time athletic director Ed Markey; a coach for men’s and women’s track, men’s and women’s cross-country, football, men’s and women’s diving, and field hockey and men’s lacrosse. He served on the ECAC Cross-country and Track Committee and as secretary and treasurer of the Vermont Association of Athletic Trainers. He also headed up intramural athletics at the college for many years, including a memorable “never-again” football match-up between faculty and students. (“We were destroyed,” he says, frankly.) During his time at the college he also earned a master’s in physical therapy at UVM and became a certified athletic trainer. In 1993, in recognition of his dedication to athletics and students, Zaf was inducted into the Athletic Hall of Fame, one of only five members who are not alumni of the college. The others are similar legends, women’s basketball coach Sue Duprat, athletic director Doc Jacobs and men’s lacrosse coach Jeff Culkin and Professor John Carvellas.

Zaf was the youngest son of a Macedonian mother and a Macedonian-American father; he was born in Macedonia and moved to the United States in 1955. His family had a shoe repair business where his father, who died when he was 10, and older brothers worked.

A career in physical education wasn’t always in his plans. “I also thought I might want to be an aeronautical engineer,” he said. “I loved planes, and Sikorsky Aeronautical is based in my hometown. When I became an Eagle Scout, I chose an engineer from there to be the speaker at my dinner.”

He played football and ran track as a student at Bunnell High School in Stratford, Connecticut, where he grew up.“I was a typical boy who couldn’t sit still. I played Little League, Pop Warner football, pickup baseball, rode my bike everywhere, joined the Boy Scouts.” As he grew older, he began to wonder what to do as a career. “I wanted to emulate my football coaches and my high school P.E. teacher. When I was having issues, moping around about something, they showed interest, asked me what was the matter. They made me want to be a teacher and a coach—so I could do that for someone else.”

After he graduated high school, Zaf attended Norwich University. “Because I loved airplanes, I thought I might want to be a pilot in the military, and I had a fantasy about the military. I wanted ROTC, and I thought going to college in Vermont seemed like a good idea because I could ski. My choices for ROTC were UVM and Norwich, and since I wanted to study physical education, that meant my choice was Norwich. After two years in ROTC I opted out.”

Instead, when he graduated from Norwich, Zaf decided for lack of a better plan to immediately earn a master’s assuming he would then return to Connecticut to be a teacher and a coach. Instead, the Wednesday before graduation, Saint Michael’s intramural director called Norwich looking for a recommendation for an assistant in the athletic department at Saint Michael’s. “I graduated that weekend, interviewed for the job on Monday, and was offered the job on Wednesday. It turned out that Ed [Markey] didn’t interview anyone else. And I’ve never worked anyplace else.” (A few years after his arrival, fellow Norwich alumnus Lou DiMasi came to Saint Michael’s, where he’s served as hockey coach and assistant dean of students. They’ve been friends and colleagues for 30 years.)
Zaf’s career-long commitment to Saint Michael’s is mirrored in his wife, Jacki Murphy ’74, who has worked in admissions at Saint Michael’s for more than 30 years. Now director of admission, Murphy says readily, “In many ways, it feels like Saint Michael’s is our life.”

Their lives are also their children, Zoe, 21, and Bryce, 19, both college students who spent their early years learning at the Saint Michael’s Child Care Center, then the college’s summer day camps and sports camps as they grew older. “Zaf has been fortunate that his job at Saint Michael’s has allowed him to be so active and present in the girls’ lives,” says Murphy. He’s also been active in the community outside the college, serving on the Colchester Town Recreation Committee, chairing the zoning board and coaching girls Far Post Soccer.

While his primary duty at Saint Michael’s has been to student-athletes, Zaf has always been eager to help anyone in the community. He recalls with fondness working as a trainer with Larry Harvey ’91, a student with cerebral palsy, so that he could walk across the stage to collect his diploma at graduation. “We talk about community at Saint Michael’s, and helping, and doing the right thing, but we not only talk the talk, we walk the walk,” he says. “I was one part of the big picture with Larry. For most people who work here, it’s a way of life, not a job. You take care of the people who take care of you.”

In addition to his athletic knowledge, compassion and dedication to Saint Michael’s, Zaf is renowned for his (for lack of a better word), humor, based mostly on groan-inducing puns delivered with deadpan seriousness. “It’s a sickness. It’s imbedded,” he says.

But it’s not without purpose. Zaf gestures to a photocopied Far Side cartoon hanging on his office wall. Surgeons joke around while surrounding a grumpy man in a hospital bed. The caption reads, “Testing whether laughter is the best medicine.”

“There’s some truth in that,” he says. “I found when I was in graduate school that telling jokes is a good way to break the ice. As a trainer, I was dealing with people who were in pain. To get them comfortable so I could work with them, I would tell a few jokes and get them thinking about something else. And it’s a good way for us both to get to know each other and relax.”

Murphy has her own take on Zaf’s humor: “It’s awful,” she says bluntly. “I know all of his jokes.”

After 30 years of marriage, that’s not surprising. Murphy and Bludevich met at Saint Michael’s while she was working as a residential director on campus while studying for her master’s at UVM. “There weren’t a lot of young, single people on campus when I arrived,” says Zaf. “So those of us who fit that category spent a lot of time together.”

They married in 1979, and have devoted their careers to Saint Michael’s although, Murphy says, many students, and even some faculty and staff don’t know that they’re married. “We have different last names, but also, we never see each other here,” she says. Murphy spends much of her time in the Hoehl Welcome Center and Zaf is across campus in Tarrant. “Try as we might, we don’t commute together,” she says. “He has to stay later, our schedules don’t match. We rarely see each other during the day, but we do bring it all home.”

Zaf beams when he speaks of Murphy and their daughters. “Life is different phases, different seasons,” he says. “When I first came to Saint Michael’s, I was spending 12, 14 hours a day at work, because I could. And then you have kids, and your time becomes more focused on them. Now my kids are older, and I’m at a point where I can be philosophical. I’ve been very, very blessed. I know how much I’ve received in my life, how much people have helped me and how much they’ve done for me. I enjoy the opportunities to give back some of what I’ve received.”