Jay Barry “had his finger” in a number of Warren sports efforts, whether as organizer, manager, publicity director, coach, or sportswriter.

In the late 1940s Jay organized and managed the Standard Pharmacy championship amateur basketball team.  Among those he recruited to play were future Penn State football coach (and Brown University student) Joe Paterno and fellow Hall of Fame members Nick Cariglia, Roger Higgins, and Johnny Karcz.

In 1949 he helped organize the Bristol Colts semi-pro football team, an eleven that included many Warren players.  He managed and/or served as the publicity director for the team, winners of twenty-five games in a row from 1949 to 1951.  In this latter years they won the New England Professional Championship, a title that might have been a figment of Jay’s imagination.

Jay and a number of other Warren stalwarts, led by fellow Hall of Fame member Fred Jannitto, founded Warren Little League Baseball in 1952.  He served as the league’s initial publicity director.

From 1965 to 1973 he coached in Providence’s Cliff Stevenson Soccer League and Rhode Island Soccer Association leagues.  Making use of the talents of a number of Warren youngsters, he led his teams to five championships.

Along with Joe Jamiel and Father Nick Smith, he founded the Warren Indoor Schoolboy Soccer League in 1967.  It was believed to be the first such league in the country.

Jay chronicled the exploits of Warren athletes as a sportswriter for the Warren and Barrington Gazette and the Warren Times-Gazette from the 1940s to the 1970s.  Upon his discharge from military service in 1945, Jay obtained free admission to many Boston Braves, Boston Red Sox, and Boston Yanks contests by presenting himself as a representative of “a key Rhode Island suburban newspaper.”

An alumnus of Brown University, Jay was one of the founders of his alma mater’s Athletic Hall of Fame.  Reflecting all of his efforts for that school, including writing a football newsletter for many years, he was elected a member of that Hall of Fame in 1976.

In 1985 the Warren Town Council proudly named Jay this community’s Man of the Year.

Picture from Hall of Fame archives