Dan Donato
Dan got his first taste of boarding school life as a postgraduate student at Loomis Chaffee School. He grew up in the Boston area and attended Catholic Memorial High School. He decided he needed another year of secondary school before pursuing college and had “a tremendously successful experience at Loomis and enjoyed the close relationship fostered between teachers and students.”
Dan graduated from Boston University where he majored in education and played both hockey and baseball for the Terriers. During his college summers, Dan played baseball in the prestigious Cape Cod Baseball League for both the Hyannis Mets and Falmouth Commodores. Dan played a season of minor league baseball for the Mason City Bats of the Great Central Independent League after graduation. After the season, Dan decided he’d try coaching and was hired as an assistant baseball coach at Harvard University. He enjoyed the work immensely and was intent on staying at Harvard, but in the middle of his first year, the New York Yankees invited him to attend a free-agent camp. Dan wound up playing four years in both the New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Devil Rays organizations. A real highlight was going to spring training with the Devil Rays in 1997. “Getting to meet and play with big league players was a great experience and a dream come true for me.”
During the winter months, Dan worked as a substitute teacher in different inner-city Boston public schools. He also coached at baseball clinics with Major League stars like Mo Vaughan and Nomar Garciaparra. Tampa asked him to play for another year, but Dan realized he was ready to move on to another dream: teaching and coaching kids. He will do much of both in his position here at Salisbury. Danny is head hockey coach and head baseball coach at Salisbury and lives on campus with his wife Renee, daughter Emily, and son Dan in Carr Dormitory.
April 30th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
[…] Michael played baseball at Princeton, Chris played hockey, baseball and football at Williams, and Dan played hockey and baseball at Boston University. He also has a sister, Paula, who is a plastics […]