Dave Mona

If you don’t recognize Dave Mona’s face, you’re likely to recognize his voice—he’s been Sid Hartman’s foil on WCCO Radio’s The Sports Huddle for twenty-five years and the station’s Gopher football analyst for almost ten. If you don’t recognize his voice, you might recognize some of the fruits of his labors—Super Bowl XXVI in the Metrodome, for example, or the NCAA 1992 Final Four tournament in Minneapolis. Or—coming soon—the new Gopher football stadium.

Mona quickly admonishes that he’s just one among many talented people who helped drive these projects. Which is, of course, true. But you can’t argue with his win-loss column, and the record shows that when Mona’s involved with a project, things tend to get done. Take the University of Minnesota’s McNamara Alumni Center, a project decades in the making, completed on Mona’s watch as alumni association president. Or his current term as board chair of the former Greater Minneapolis Convention and Visitors Association, now the rebranded and re-energized Meet Minneapolis.

Mona’s a doer, and while he gravitates toward projects that engage his passions—sports, marketing, his alma mater—a look at his volunteer scorecard reveals he’s decidedly well rounded. Sure, he chairs the grass-root effort for the U of M stadium and co-chairs the 2008 USGA Women’s Open Golf Championship, but he also sits on boards and committees for VocalEssence, the Minnesota Medical Foundation, and Achieve Minneapolis. Plus, he continues to log in forty hours a week at the marketing communications firm he founded in the early 1980s. “They all come together,” Mona explains, “Hey, I do a sports radio show for twenty-five years, some people think that’s what I do. But that’s just what I do for fun!”

For Mona, the collegiate notion of boosterism extends beyond just schools or teams, encompassing the whole of civic engagement. “I was fortunate enough to be born into and have the chance to work in a really marvelous community,” he says. “But it needs constant care and feeding—and you can’t look to somebody else to do that.”