Tri-Town Leagues 'Opened More Doors' for Local Athlete

For Joel Diaz, the sports leagues at Tri-Town Community Center have been more than a way to just participate in athletics – they gave him experience and skills that he turned into a spot on the football team and a 3.5 grade point average at Bryant University.

As a young child, “I moved around a lot,” Diaz explained, before his family moved to North Providence after he finished third grade.

Once he got into middle school, Diaz started looking into sports leagues – and that’s when he found the Tri-Town programs, located at 33 Maple Ave. in North Providence.

“It was either 2009 or 2010,” Diaz recalled. “A bunch of my friends found out about the league, and there hadn’t been a league in North Providence for a while for the older kids, so I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll play.’”

That’s also where Diaz met Justin Waranis, Tri-Town’s YouthLinks Coordinator, who encouraged him to play and, later, to get involved with some of the agency’s other programs located at Maple Avenue.

Waranis recalled that Diaz participated in Tri-Town’s Summer Youth Job Program, where he completed 120 hours of work experience helping to run the agency’s basketball league.

“He shadowed me, and soup to nuts, learned to do everything from marketing to volunteer recruitment to sponsorship resource development to assessment of players, managing the draft, and designing the logo for the tee-shirts – he was the de facto program coordinator for the basketball league, which has never happened before,” Waranis recalled. “With his experience, He could go out and run an athletic department for a Boys & Girls Club, a YMCA, or some type of nonprofit.”

“It keeps me in one place instead of jumping around from job to job,” Diaz added, “or trying to go to one program that I don’t finish. I was able to complete everything here and stick with it, with the help of Justin and the staff, so they all assisted me when I needed it.”

After graduating from North Providence High School in 2013, Diaz went on to attend Wilbraham & Monson Academy, a boarding school in Massachusetts known for preparing high school athletes for college.

“I wound up going there for one year,” Diaz said. “I played football, basketball, and baseball, finished with a 3.8 GPA overall, and made Honor Roll every trimester.”

Based on his achievements, Diaz – who had already been accepted to Bryant prior to attending Wilbraham & Monson – improved his chances of completing a degree at the Smithfield University after “Bryant gave me more money the second time around,” in the form of a four-year scholarship.

That extra year of study – particularly at a boarding and college preparatory school out of state – really helped him prepare for the rigors of Bryant, Diaz explained.

“Once I got to Bryant, I realized that W&M really prepared me. I don’t think I could have been any more prepared,” he said. “I’m all about hard work. If you work hard, good things will come.”

Diaz, 21, earned a spot as a defensive back on the Bulldogs football roster this past fall, and was recently named to the Northeast Conference Commissioner’s Honor Roll and the NEC Academic Honor Roll.

“It would be nice to play pro sports, of course, but you have to be realistic. First and foremost, I want to get a great degree,” Diaz explained. “If I can go for my Master’s I would like to try that and get a great job, something that I will be satisfied with doing.”

Asked about the influence that Tri-Town has had for him, Diaz said he’s learned how to evaluate his work and improve, and how to strive to meet his goals.

“I like that they appreciate the work that I do; it makes me want to keep doing good work for them,” he explained. “They recognize when you do something good, and they never put you down. If anything, they tell you how you can make something better, and I think that’s always good.”

Waranis explained that Diaz “sets the bar high, he really wants to do a good job in anything he gets involved with, and he has a lot of integrity. I probably don’t tell him enough, that he’s a tremendous role model, and he’s a mentor. I don’t know if he realizes it, but everyone in the Tri-Town community looks to him as a leader.”

For Diaz, the opportunity to coordinate and play in Tri-Town’s sports leagues gave him the confidence to pursue educational and athletic opportunities he might not have had otherwise, and he hopes his story serves as an example for other young people.

“It’s really been in my head the last couple of months that, when I was in high school, these things never even popped into my head. And then in my final years at North Providence High School and my postgraduate year at the prep school, I was all over the place looking for schools with good education,” Diaz recalled. “Before that, I can’t remember even thinking ‘Where am I going to go to school?’ Now that I’ve opened more doors and done more things, I can see that there are more options.”