Staten Island Sports Hall of Fame

Relive It All Again

Karen Lynch

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Karen Lynch, the 1984 CUNY Conference Basketball Coach of the Year at the College of Staten Island, won four city championships, three Metro Bowls, and 77 percent of her games – including a 26-0 season in 1996 – in 12 seasons as the softball coach at Port Richmond High School, where she also coached wide receivers and running backs for the football team.

A two-sport athlete, Lynch still holds the single-season record for assists at Wagner College, and was a softball star for the Seahawks and the fast-pitch Staten Island Saints, and a modified-pitch All-American and three-time national champion with Alibi Inn.

Basketball, Softball
Class of 2020

Jack Hurley

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Jack Hurley, a three-time all-city pitcher, threw three high school no-hitters and struck out 46 batters in one three-game city playoff run, and was captain of Port Richmond’s PSAL borough basketball champions.

Drafted four times in high school and the University of Michigan before signing as a first-round pick of the Minnesota Twins, Hurley won his first nine minor-league starts in 1970 before suffering a rotator cuff injury, and was out of the game a year later, despite an 11-5 record and a 2.42 earned-run average.

Baseball
Class of 2020

Frankie Genaro

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Frankie Genaro, born Frank DiGennara, the 1920 Olympic flyweight champion and two-time world flyweight champion as a professional, is the only Staten Islander to win an individual Olympic gold medal.

He won his first professional title in 1928, lost a unification bout for the NBA and WBU titles, won them back, and fought title defenses in New York, Toronto, London, Paris and Barcelona. Ranked No. 3 all-time among flyweights by Ring Magazine, he’s in the Ring Hall of Fame (1973) and the International Boxing Hall of Fame (1998).

Boxing
Class of 2020

Larry Cubas

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Larry Cubas was a basketball and baseball star at Curtis High School, where he scored 1,142 points and won the 1972 Warren Jaques Award as the Island’s best high school player; and at Dartmouth, where he was an All-Ivy guard, team MVP and two-time captain.

Cubas led Dartmouth in scoring three straight years to finish his college career with 1,298 points, fourth best in school history. His game-winning shots against Cornell and Columbia helped lift the Big Green to a 16-10 record in 1976, its best in 18 seasons.

Basketball
Class of 2020

Nick Bilotti

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Nick Bilotti was still a teenager when he guided the Tompkinsville Violets – a sandlot baseball team of 14, 15 and 16-year olds – to the first of six Kiwanis state championships. In the decades that followed, he coached high school baseball, basketball and soccer, before engineering the rebirth of football at Port Richmond High School.

Named to lead a struggling new school, he turned Staten Island Tech into one of the city’s academic jewels, partly by brokering a sports partnership with McKee High School that made Tech attractive to student-athletes left out of the original blueprint.

Baseball
Class of 2020