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For a special summer, host a Shelter Island Buck

REPORTER FILE PHOTO The Shelter Island Bucks during a game in 2014.
REPORTER FILE PHOTO
The Shelter Island Bucks during a game in 2014.

With the Shelter Island Bucks season fast approaching, the team still lacks enough housing for the summer of 2015.

Host families  provide a player with room, bed, a place to launder their uniforms and room in the refrigerator for some food. The hosts are not required to provide meals, although many hosts do. With several players arriving with their own vehicles, there’s no need for host families to provide transportation.

The players are well supervised and know that any misbehavior can result in their being dropped from the team.

What the Bucks give back to the community is free games, baseball clinics for Island youths and major improvements to Fiske Field that benefit the Shelter Island School District.

In a recent column, Joanne Sherman wrote:

“Every host family’s experience is different and fortunately ours was great. These are college kids, most of them too young to drink. The Hamptons Collegiate Baseball League has some very strict rules — no drinking, tobacco products and/or drugs and a rigid curfew. That made it easier for us to establish our own ground rules, …

In previous seasons I had never attended a Bucks game, but that changed once we had a couple of them living under our roof. I wanted to be at the games so I could root for them. These guys play ball all the time. When they aren’t playing, they’re practicing or participating in youth baseball clinics.

An advantage to having a Buck in residence is that they are willing help out with projects that require a  younger, taller, stronger, smarter (insert the most applicable word) partner.

The Bucks arrive just in time for summer, around Memorial Day weekend, and depart around the first week of August, when their season ends.

I guess if we have one regret about signing on as a host family, it’s that we didn’t decide to do it sooner. And we are already looking forward to being a part of the Bucks 2015 baseball season.
For more information on hosting a Buck this summer, call Dave Gurney at 433-1502, or email him at [email protected].”

 

[email protected]