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Light Rain Taking pride in developing the kids
Lou D’Agostino runs Bucs football
Lou D’Agostino, who starred on the Lawrence High School varsity football team and won the 1990 Thorp Award as the best player in Nassau County, is now serving as the director of football operations for the Inwood Buccaneers Athletic Club, the organization that gave him his start in the sport.
D’Agostino, 41, was also named to the 1990 All-Long Island football squad, and won accolades for his gridiron prowess at the University of Rhode Island, including being named a All-Yankee Conference/All-American in 1996. He also won the university’s Albert LaBeouf Award for best athlete. The Atlantic Beach native spent two seasons with the Jets in the National Football League, and he played a couple of seasons in the Arena Football League and the short-lived XFL Football League.
“I played there myself in ’83-85, so it’s some loyalty to the organization,” D’Agostino said about his new role for the Inwood Buccaneers. “In 2005, I helped coach a team without my kids on it, and now that I have my kids in the program, it’s great.”
The director’s position for football as well as for basketball and cheerleading are new for the 59-year-old organization that serves children from 6 to 13. Volunteers run the club.
“Over the past few years, things have changed, demographics as well as numbers-wise,” said Frank DeCicco, the Buccaneers president. “We wanted to go out and get kids from other areas to come, so we wanted to make sure we are centralized by each sport individually. We usually have one director for all sports, but we’ve spread out and now have a director for every sport.”
More so than in the past, the Five Towns has become a heavily Orthodox Jewish community — as high as 75 percent in some of the communities — based on a 2011 United Jewish Appeal survey, which are not playing sports on Saturdays, and there is a growing Hispanic/Latino population and small but developing Asian populace that leans toward soccer.
