Mark Ghafari ’14

Not one, but two! 

That’s the number of Athletic Hall of Fames inducting Mark Ghafari into their ranks in October 2026: University Liggett School (Grosse Pointe Woods, Mich.) and Kalamazoo College. 

For K, his Hall of Fame credentials are impeccable. He was a three-time captain of the Hornet men’s basketball team, and a two-time Academic All-American, earning first-team honors as a senior! He was a versatile athlete as well, playing intramural volleyball and softball at K. 

After he graduated, he played professional basketball overseas. His team was based in Beirut, Lebanon, (Mark is the son of Lebanese immigrants) and competed in Greece, Morocco, Abu Dhabi and Dubai.  

He even coached a year—as an assistant for the high school wheelchair basketball team of Mary Free Bed Hospital’s adaptive sports program. That team won the national championship, surely suggesting that the assistant coach and former Hornet guard’s hoop prowess is as cerebral as it is physical, and giving new meaning to the description of a player (usually a guard) as a “coach on the floor.” 

Like all Hornet Hall of Fame inductees, Mark is far more than a fine athlete.  

At K he majored in economics, completed two business internships (Raymond James in Birmingham, Michigan, and the Eaton Corporation in Galesburg, Michigan) and studied abroad in Strasbourg, France. For his Senior Integrated Project, he researched the economic impacts of the Summer Olympic Games on the cities that hosted them. 

Following his professional basketball career, Marked worked for Merrill Lynch in Grand Rapids for five years, during which he also earned his MBA from the University of Michigan. 

In 2020, he and four partners opened their own financial consulting and investment business, a firm that has grown from 10 to 35 people in the last six years. Last year, Mark opened the company’s third office, and the firm today operates in Grand Rapids, Chicago and Birmingham. 

Says Mark: “K was a place that taught me how to communicate effectively and how to work collaboratively in teams and to do both in the fast pace of an 11-week term. Time management was critical.” 

His fondest K memory has nothing to do with athletics: “Meeting my wife, Caitlin [McCarthy ’14], and our first date at the campus’s annual Monte Carlo event.” 

Mark continues to play basketball a couple of days a week, in part to keep pace with his two-and-a-half-year-old son. Mark and Caitlin expect their second child soon, so perhaps Mark had better run some extra wind sprints while he can.