Road to Duke
Dave Colonna grew up in High Point, North Carolina, the city in the Piedmont triad that has been a textile and furniture-making capital of the Carolinas for more than a century. He attended High Point Central High School, the public school whose football program in the 1980s was producing the kind of college-recruitable tight ends that ACC programs paid attention to, and by his senior year in the spring of 1985, he was one of them. He was 6'4". He could run and catch. He was, by the framing of the 2015 Greensboro News & Record article that documented his post-college path, a starring tight end at High Point Central who had drawn the attention of Steve Sloan's Duke staff. He signed with Duke for the fall of 1985 as a recruited tight end. He arrived in Durham in October 1985 a few weeks after his Duke classmates Quin Snyder and Phil Henderson and a year before the freshman basketball class that would include Jon Goodman and the eight-freshman 1986-87 roster.
His freshman year at Duke, 1985-86, was a redshirt year on the football side and an off year on the basketball side - he was not yet a sophomore-class member of the basketball roster. The Duke football program in 1985 under Steve Sloan was rebuilding. The Duke basketball program was preparing the Johnny Dawkins / Mark Alarie / Jay Bilas / David Henderson senior class for what would become the 1986 national-championship-game run. Dave Colonna was watching from the student section. The next year, he would be on both rosters in some form. By the end of his Duke career, he would be on one of them in a far bigger way than the stub box-score he produced in the other.
At Duke
The Duke basketball career of Dave Colonna is the second-shortest item on the line of any Duke athlete in the dynasty1 era. Per Sports-Reference, he played in two games as a sophomore in the 1986-87 season, totaled two minutes across both appearances, attempted zero field goals, attempted zero free throws, scored zero points, and grabbed zero rebounds. He was on the 1986-87 Duke roster as a walk-on - one of the eight freshmen and sophomores Coach K was carrying that year as the program rebuilt depth after losing five seniors at once. The 6'5" guard line on the basketball roster, in retrospect, was a hedge: Dave Colonna was a 6'4" recruited tight end whose body had already filled out for football. Two minutes, two games, end of the basketball box score. The 1986-87 team would go on to win 24 games, win the ACC regular season, and lose 88-82 to a Bob Knight Indiana team in the Sweet Sixteen. Tommy Amaker won the inaugural National Defensive Player of the Year. Dave Colonna was not on the basketball roster for a second season.
He was, however, becoming a star on the other field of his Duke athletic career. The Duke football program in 1987 had hired Steve Spurrier away from the USFL's Tampa Bay Bandits to be their new head coach. Spurrier had been a Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback at Florida and was about to begin the rebuild of the Duke football program that would, by his third year in 1989, produce the ACC co-championship. Dave Colonna was on Spurrier's earliest tight-end rotation. He grew into the role across his sophomore, junior, and senior seasons. By the 1988 season - Spurrier's second year, the season that produced Heisman finalist Anthony Dilweg at quarterback and All-American wide receiver Clarkston Hines and a 7-3-1 finish - Dave Colonna was Spurrier's primary tight end. He was named First-Team All-ACC at tight end by the Associated Press at the end of the 1988 season, alongside teammates Chris Port (tackle), Anthony Dilweg (quarterback), and Clarkston Hines (wide receiver). The 1988 first-team All-ACC offense was, effectively, a Duke offense.
The 1989 Duke football team won the ACC outright as co-champion with Virginia. Steve Spurrier coached the Blue Devils to an 8-4 regular season, a 6-1 mark in conference play, and the program's first bowl bid since the 1961 Cotton Bowl. Duke played Texas Tech in the All-American Bowl in Birmingham on December 28, 1989. Texas Tech won 49-21 behind James Gray's 280-yard rushing day, but Dave Colonna had what is, in the photographic record of the 1980s Duke football program, his finest single game. He caught a 25-yard touchdown pass from Dave Brown in the second quarter and a 16-yard touchdown pass from Brown in the fourth quarter. Both of Duke's offensive touchdowns in that bowl game came on Colonna receptions. Spurrier left for Florida after the game. The Blue Devils would not return to a bowl until 1995. Dave Colonna had just played his last Duke football game. His Duke degree, a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, was waiting for him to finish out the spring 1990 semester. He would walk across the Wallace Wade stage in May 1990 a Duke Class of 1990 graduate, two-sport athlete, First-Team All-ACC tight end, member of an ACC co-championship football team, and a guy whose name was on the Sports-Reference Duke basketball page for two minutes of garbage time in the 1986-87 season.
After Duke
The World League of American Football, the spring developmental league that NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue's office had launched in 1991 with franchises in cities like Birmingham and Orlando and London and Sacramento, held its inaugural draft on January 21, 1991. The WLAF was the precursor to NFL Europe, and its rosters in those early years were stocked with recent college standouts who had not been drafted by NFL teams. The Sacramento Surge, coached by Kay Stephenson, drafted Dave Colonna in the second round - the fourteenth tight end chosen overall, per the Greensboro News & Record's January 1991 piece on the WLAF area draft. Colonna joined the Surge for their 1991 inaugural season under quarterback David Archer. The Sacramento Surge would, in their second season in 1992, win the WLAF World Bowl title against the Orlando Thunder.
After his WLAF career, Dave Colonna pivoted out of football and into commercial real estate. He moved to South Florida in 1990 and began his real estate career in the Miami market. Per his official FIP Commercial bio: born and raised in North Carolina, Dave began his South Florida real estate career after graduating with a Bachelor in Political Science from Duke University. Since 1990, he has specialized in the commercial sectors with an emphasis on acquisitions, repositions for highest and best value, and dispositions. He has presided over multi-million dollar companies overseeing fifty-plus workers in the technology, distribution, and various other industries in addition to his real estate work. Per his TheOrg.com career timeline, the post-Duke career path runs from President at his own brokerage Dave Colonna Properties Inc., through United Resources Inc., through a National Sales Director role at Blue Dasher Technologies, through a Director of Retail Services role at Sime Realty Corporation, through a Head of Real Estate & Development role at AgroTrade America Inc. and its Okey Dokey Grocery subsidiary, through a Broker Associate role at FIP Realty Services LLC, and into his current role as Executive Vice President at FIP Commercial - a role he has held since 2016.
Where Is He Now
Dave Colonna is, today, Executive Vice President at FIP Commercial, the South Florida commercial real estate firm headquartered in Miami. Across his three and a half decades in the South Florida market, he has secured more than three hundred million dollars in sales, leases, acquisitions, and asset-management transactions. His focus has been on the Wynwood Arts District, Miami Beach, the Miami central business district, and the broader Miami-Dade and Broward commercial markets. He has represented major Miami developers including the Related Group, the developer that builds many of the residential and mixed-use towers that have transformed Wynwood from a warehouse-and-graffiti district into one of the most desirable real estate submarkets in the United States. He has been profiled by The Real Deal, the South Florida commercial real estate trade publication. He has been quoted in CRE-Sources, the South Florida industry newsletter. He has been the broker on multi-acre Wynwood and Miami Beach development sites trading for figures north of nineteen million dollars per transaction. He holds the CCIM (Certified Commercial Investment Member) designation, the most rigorous credential in commercial real estate, and he is a member of the National Association of Realtors and the International Council of Shopping Centers.
The line of his Duke career that the Brotherhood site records is the basketball line: two games, two minutes, zero of every category. The line of his Duke career that mattered, and that built the life he has built, is the football line: First-Team All-ACC tight end on the 1988 squad, both Duke touchdowns in the 1989 All-American Bowl against Texas Tech, member of the 1989 ACC co-champion team that ended Duke's twenty-eight-year bowl drought, a Steve Spurrier offense player whose receiver who would catch passes from quarterbacks Steve Slayden and Anthony Dilweg and Billy Ray and Dave Brown across his four years at Duke. The Brotherhood, when properly understood, includes the football tight ends who tried out for the basketball team and got two minutes and went on to build thirty-year commercial real estate careers in Miami. The Brotherhood does not require a long box score in basketball to belong - it requires a Duke degree, a sense of what playing for Mike Krzyzewski's program meant even in the briefest possible exposure to it, and a life on the other side of Cameron Indoor Stadium that demonstrates what Duke produces.
Dave Colonna's life on the other side of Cameron is a thirty-five-year South Florida commercial real estate career, three hundred million dollars in transactions, a Wynwood specialty practice that has watched the neighborhood transform from light-industrial to one of the most valuable submarkets in American real estate, and an EVP title at FIP Commercial. The All-American Bowl receiver who caught both Duke touchdowns on December 28, 1989, is, more than three and a half decades later, the EVP whose broker phone in Miami still rings when a developer needs a Wynwood site valued. The basketball box score is two minutes. The Brotherhood it produced is the rest of a life.