Island Profile: Cori Cass, his new baseball job is not about a salary

Cori Cass, a legendary basketball star at Shelter Island High School, where he wasn’t a bad baseball player either, has just been appointed the general manager of the new Shelter Island college-level baseball team, the Shelter Island Bucks, the newest member of the Hamptons Collegiate Baseball League. He couldn’t be happier. He has played sports his whole life.

“For a while there, sports were my life, I lived for it!” he said. So when organizers asked him to be a part of this coming summer’s excitement, “I said, ‘Absolutely!’ and then when they asked me if I’d be the general manager, I said, ‘Yeah! Definitely!’

“It’s an unpaid position,” he went on. “The whole thing is all volunteer. I don’t get paid anything.”

When friends first heard about it, they kept telling him how great it was for him. When they found out it was unpaid, “They were kind of shocked by that. But it’s something that I love. I love baseball. Who wouldn’t want to run a baseball team for a summer? I think it’s great and it’ll be a great look on my resume. So it’s a win/win across the board.”

His duties are extensive and diverse. The first and most important of his assignments is finding housing for each of the 25 players who will be arriving May 31, the Thursday after the Memorial Day weekend. According to other team general managers with whom he’s been in touch, it’s the hardest part of the job. But Cori is not sure that will be the case here on the Island.

“Already some people have been asking” about serving as hosts, he said last week, so he was hoping it might prove easier on the Island than perhaps it has been in some other places. “Then there’s making sure they’re behaving,” he said. “Every player has a curfew every night and I have to make sure they don’t miss it, even by a minute. If they do, they don’t play the next game. And we don’t want them messing up for anyone else.”

Following the players’ arrival on May 31, the team will have its first game on Sunday, June 3. Whether that game will be at home or away remains to be seen — the rosters and schedules are being worked on now and should be ready by March 15. But regardless, the Game Day list will be followed carefully by the general manager. At least a hundred small details must be checked, including such things as making sure the players have a supply of water at the Fiske Field high school diamond, the public address system is up and running, the computer system for posting statistics is online, the ads are on the fence, and seeing if the Jitney is on schedule, no matter which team it’s carrying — ours or theirs.

Representatives of the league, along with involved Islanders, including Town Recreation Director Garth Griffin among others, hosted a community-wide meeting at the school on Tuesday evening (see story below). Although the team’s name, the Bucks, and its colors, grey and orange, have been settled, just what the mascot’s costume will be and who will wear it have yet to be determined.

It should be noted, Cori added, that it is not the field to the east of the school and the entrance to the FIT Center that will be used, but rather the one reached through the children’s playground on School Street.

Information about future events will also be available. A league all-star game is scheduled for July 18 at Cyclone Park in Brooklyn, where the Mets Single A team plays. The Hampton Jitney will be chartering a bus that will leave from the Island for fans who wish to attend. And then, just suppose — yes, there could be playoffs!

What Cori will be doing come the end of the season is unclear. Caught in the current poor economy, with few jobs available in the field he studied in college and would like to pursue — investment banking — he said he had no choice but to bide his time and work both for his dad’s construction business and at the FIT center at the school.

Cori’s number 51 on the Shelter Island basketball team was retired when he played his last game in 1995, after leading the team to an undefeated season. He scored 1,375 points over his four-year varsity career, the second highest in the school’s history.

He went straight to Manhattan College in Riverdale but when his basketball coach there left after two years, so did he. He moved on to play at Becker College in Worcester, Massachusetts for a year after they offered him a scholarship. He went on to St. John’s in Queens for another two years but did not play there.

During his last year as a student at St. John’s, while playing softball on the Island, Cori fell and broke his leg. He spent a hellish five years enduring casts, surgeries, complications and staph infections.

“It was a mess, the whole thing, so that didn’t allow me to go back to school until I enrolled in Berkeley [College in New York City] in 2007. I actually had moved to the city in 2007, started working for a friend who owned a retail clothing company, just to make money while going to school and Berkeley was only three blocks from where I worked, so I took night classes and finished my degree that way.”

He graduated from Berkeley in 2010.

Having lived on the Island since he was seven, after having moved here with his family from New Hampshire, he now shares a house on School Street with a “significant other” of more than four years: “She’s very private and doesn’t want her name in the paper,” he said. But asked if the relationship were “serious,” he replied, “Pretty substantial.”

His sister and his parents, now divorced, are also here ‘on the Island; his mom, Linda, works in Town Hall and his dad, Brian, has his own construction business, as mentioned. His sister Cara works in the FIT Center too.

Regardless of what the job market may or may not have to offer, this coming summer, with its bright shining days, is already lighting up Cori’s horizon and making him smile.T