The Duke two-sport story whose basketball line is two minutes, two games, zero stats - and whose football line is First-Team All-ACC tight end in 1988, 1989 ACC co-champion, and both Duke touchdowns in the 1989 All-American Bowl against Texas Tech. WLAF 2nd-round draft pick by the Sacramento Surge in 1991. Now Executive Vice President at FIP Commercial in Miami, 35 years and $300M+ in South Florida commercial real estate transactions. The basketball stub buried the football star.
Guard6'5"1985–90
Born and raised in High Point, North Carolina • High Point Central High School (starring tight end, recruited to Duke for football) • Duke 1985-1990, two-sport athlete • Duke BASKETBALL (one season as a walk-on sophomore): 6'5" Guard listed on the 1986-87 roster, played 2 games, 1.0 MPG, 2 total minutes, 0 field goal attempts, 0 free throw attempts, 0 points, 0 rebounds - the second-shortest Sports-Reference career line of any Duke basketball athlete of the dynasty1 era • Duke FOOTBALL: 6'4" Tight End, jersey #81 in 1989 • Four-year football starter for Steve Sloan and then Steve Spurrier • 1988: FIRST-TEAM ALL-ACC tight end (AP-1), on a Duke offensive first-team All-ACC unit that also featured QB Anthony Dilweg, WR Clarkston Hines (future College Football Hall of Famer), and OT Chris Port • 1989: Member of the 8-4 ACC co-champion Duke team under third-year head coach Steve Spurrier, the program's first ACC title since 1962 and first bowl bid since the 1961 Cotton Bowl • 1989 All-American Bowl (December 28, 1989, Legion Field, Birmingham AL): Duke lost 49-21 to Texas Tech, but Colonna caught BOTH of Duke's offensive touchdowns - a 25-yard TD pass from Dave Brown in the second quarter and a 16-yard TD pass from Brown in the fourth quarter • 1991 WLAF (World League of American Football) inaugural draft: selected by the Sacramento Surge in the second round, the 14th tight end chosen overall • Duke Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, Class of 1990 • South Florida commercial real estate career began 1990 immediately upon graduation • Career path: President of Dave Colonna Properties Inc, United Resources Inc, National Sales Director at Blue Dasher Technologies, Director of Retail Services at Sime Realty Corporation, Head of Real Estate & Development at AgroTrade America Inc / Okey Dokey Grocery, Broker Associate at FIP Realty Services LLC, then Executive Vice President at FIP Commercial since 2016 • $300,000,000+ in real estate sales, leases, acquisitions, and asset management transactions across his career • Specializes in Wynwood (Miami's Arts District), Miami Beach, and South Florida commercial real estate • Notable transactions: represented The Related Group in a $19M Wynwood multi-acre development site acquisition; brokered the Miami Rescue Mission Wynwood property sale • CCIM (Certified Commercial Investment Member); National Association of Realtors; International Council of Shopping Centers • Twitter @DaveColonna1 • Email davecolonna@fipcommercial.com • Office: FIP Commercial, South Florida
Now: Executive Vice President at FIP Commercial in Miami since 2016. 35-year South Florida commercial real estate career with $300M+ in transactions, specializing in Wynwood, Miami Beach, and the broader Miami-Dade/Broward commercial markets. Has represented The Related Group in major Wynwood acquisitions. CCIM (Certified Commercial Investment Member). Two-sport Duke athlete 1985-1990: 6'4" tight end on Steve Spurrier's Duke football teams - First-Team All-ACC TE in 1988, ACC co-champion in 1989, caught both Duke touchdowns in the 1989 All-American Bowl against Texas Tech, drafted in the 2nd round (14th TE overall) by the Sacramento Surge in the 1991 WLAF inaugural draft. Also played one season as a 6'5" basketball walk-on under Mike Krzyzewski in 1986-87 - 2 games, 2 total minutes, the second-shortest box score line of any Duke basketball athlete of the dynasty1 era. The football line is the one that built the life.
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.
Dave Colonna has represented the Miami Rescue Mission, the Wynwood-based homelessness services nonprofit, in real estate transactions tied to its Wynwood properties; per CRE-Sources, the proceeds from those sales have been directed to expanding the Mission's services throughout Miami-Dade and Broward counties. The Miami Rescue Mission has operated for more than a century, providing emergency shelter, food, clothing, medical care, and addiction recovery programs to homeless men, women, and children in South Florida. For a Brotherhood member like Dave Colonna - whose three-decade-plus career has been built on the transformation of Wynwood from light-industrial neighborhood to one of the most desirable real estate submarkets in the country - supporting the Mission that has served Wynwood's most vulnerable through all of that transformation is the kind of Brotherhood gesture his own career has prepared him for.