ORISKANY — The Oriskany Central School girls holiday hoops basketball tournament has been renamed to honor longtime coach and physical education teacher Bob Graziadei. The event held on the last week of December 2021 was the first with the coach’s name on it.

Graziadei was a gradaute of Oriskany, where he played football, baseball, track and field and was a basketball all-star. He attended SUNY Cortland where he earned bacherlors and masters degrees in physical education. There he played soccer, lacrosse, skiing and badminton.

His first teaching job was at Remsen, where in three years his teams won two basketball championships. He went to Oriskany to become athletic director and coach. He won over 300 games coaching basketball there. The last team he coached, the freshman basketball team, he ended with a career mark of 64-7. He also taught summer camps with New York and Pennsylvania.

He also ran the Biddy-Basketball program for 25 years and is teaching at Accelerate Sports in Whitestown. He was a member of the International Association of Approved Basketball Officials at high school and collegiate levels for 25 years.

Graziadei said he walked into the tournament this past month unaware of the change. It took getting a shirt with the new name on it to convince him it was really happening. “I’m not that type of guy. I’ve had some great teams in my lifetime. I never liked to be interviewed. I had some really good football and basketball teams and the less my opponents knew about them the better it would be,” he said. He never wanted to give teams any help preparing to play against him, he noted.