Butch Lombardi has been involved in Warren athletics for almost a half-century.  A member of Little League and Firemen’s League baseball champions, he was named to those leagues’ All Stars teams in every year from 1958 to 1962.

He returned to those leagues as both a coach and official, winning the Major championship with the Braves in 1987 and leading the 1988 Little League Major All Stars to the District Two finals before losing to Darlington.  More specifically, he coached in the Little League from 1984 to 1989, while also serving as the league’s vice president in five of those seasons. 

He moved over to the Senior League (the successor to the Firemen’s League) and coached the Rotary nine for four seasons, coaching All Star teams in every one of those years and winning the 1991 league championship.

In the Warren School Indoor Soccer League, he coached the Crusaders in the mid-1980s and led his team to a 1984 title.

Butch played in slow-pitch softball leagues throughout Rhode Island, starting with the Ferrazzano Florists team that won the Warren title in 1967 and finally retiring after the 1991 season. 

In Warren his Hellew’s/Old Ironsides/Mr. T’s nines won eight championships in the 1970s; he was named to that league’s All Star teams seven times.  Perhaps his most impressive performance came in the 1984 season when he hit .507.

Outside of Warren Butch was a member of the Murph’s Lounge championship team in the Capitol City AA League, starred on teams that won the Barrington League six years in a row, and helped lead his Rhode Island Glass nine to the East Providence League B Division title.

He eventually took up golf, where he has won championships throughout New England.  The East Bay League Champion five times between 1979 and 1997, he was that league’s President Cup Medal Champion in 2001 and 2002.  Butch has been one of Middlebrook Country Club’s leading golfers, winning that club’s Scotch Tournament, President’s Cup, and Middlebrook Team Cup.

Other individual titles that Butch has won include the Telephone Company League, the Sebago Lake, Maine Fall Tourney, the Montaup Nevosh Tourney, and the Swansea Executive Course Tourney.  He and fellow Hall of Fame member Mert Caton qualified for the Massachusetts Net Team Championship in 2002.

Butch is a charter member of the Warren Athletic Hall of Fame Committee, spending much of his time researching Warren athletes in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

Pictures from Hall of Fame Archives