Nicky Cassano, who is 24 and looks no older, stuffs an off-white blanket (always the same one due to its “aerodynamical soundness”) under his white T-shirt, clips on a small microphone, moves his eyeglasses to the end of his nose, and miraculously transforms himself into a middle-aged, pot-bellied, overcaffeinated recreation-league basketball coach.
Many have endured/enjoyed some version of this guy that Cassano frequently calls “Coach Al”—old-school to the breadth and depth of his substantial gut, never met a coaching cliché he hasn’t adopted as gospel—and Cassano has given him viral life in hundreds of videos that have turned the Nyack (N.Y.) High product into a social media phenomenon known to his millions of followers as Nicky Cass.
“There’s not really one Coach Al,” Cassano says during a recent interview at a CYO gym, a perfect spot to watch Cassano’s creation rant and rave about the fundamental deficiencies of his invisible charges. “The closest is this old-school guy from the Bronx named Al Ortiz, who used to be my baseball hitting coach. His instructions about batting were always accompanied by life lessons.”
Cassano’s characters offer life lessons, too, most of them centered around some iteration of you’re lollygagging. Which cannot be said of Cassano. He works hard and endlessly (his video cache numbers more than 400) and has the results to prove it—a combined 3.4 million followers on Instagram and TikTok and approaching 200,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel. He has thrown a ceremonial first pitch at a Mets game; been playfully dissed by Derek Jeter as part of a Coach Al video filmed at Yankee Stadium; advised Diamondbacks pitchers to “imagine you’re covered in pink feathers like a flamingo” during an invited visit to spring training; gotten his own Topps baseball card (“surreal”); and hugged Lord Stanley’s cup in his backyard.
Not bad for a kid who started what has become a career with a 15-second I’m-bored-so-I’ll-make-a-video clip about the differences between an Italian father and a non-Italian father reacting to a son who plans to go out. “It was a Wednesday in January of 2020, 7:52 p.m., when the video went out,” says Cassano, whose life-changing moment is certified by a TikTok date stamp, “and when I woke up in the morning it had, like, two million views. I freaked out. I deleted the app.” But eventually he undeleted it—the pandemic came along, and he had nothing better to do—and started to take content creation seriously.
Cassano isn’t the only one creating in what might be called the sports-goof space. “Hilarious,” he proclaims the work of Scott Bergin, who specializes in insulting Little Leaguers with comments like Have you ever thought you might actually be left-handed? when he takes a righty pitcher out of the game. “But I don’t see myself in competition with anybody.”
Cassano’s root character is not always a coach. He’s more an archetypal male authority figure, invariably Italian with touches of New Yawk and Joisy (he attended Montclair State, where he played second base for a year before transferring to SUNY New Paltz) burned in. Yes, that guy can manifest as Coach Al, who hits earth-scorching ground balls to terrified young infielders we don’t see, or as Coach Martarelli, who announces that the first night of youth-league hoops practice will be spent entirely on assuming the “triple-threat position.” But he can also be the bagel shop owner who’s incredulous that a customer orders an egg-white omelet and avocado on a whole wheat (“Ya want me to throw it in da juicer, too? Hey, just kiddin’ ”); the deli shop proprietor whose specialties include a sandwich known as “Mikey B’s Anus”; or the Italian restaurant owner whose secret to his “OMG roast chicken” is to leave it out in the rain “so all da beautiful particles from this planet Earth go inta da chicken skin and it soak it up.”
inside
The key to the essential Cass character, this in-your-face dispenser of mostly useless stratagems, is that he’s not entirely buffoon or bully. True, he’s not the guy you necessarily want to play for, but he might be the guy you’d call at 3 a.m. when you have a flat … even knowing you’d never hear the end of it.
Nothing done well is as easy as it looks, of course, but Cassano lives what seems to be the Platonic ideal of a 24-year-old male’s working life. He makes his own schedule, generally filming on Mondays and filling up the other days with post-production, promotion and marketing. He works in jeans and T-shirt most of the time. Many of his videos are filmed at his parents’ Rockland County home. They support him wholeheartedly. “My mom [Rosalie] laughs at everything I do and thinks I look like Brad Pitt,” he says. His coworkers are friends; with him on this day at the CYO gym are Perry Quartuccio (aka the Flash, a former Montclair State teammate) and Pat Peterson, who helped him secure the gym. He’s his own boss. He works quickly and spontaneously, and he enjoys his own stuff. A lot. “I’m not trying to be cocky,” he says, “but I just think it’s freakin’ funny.”
Watching Cassano at work is not to witness the Stanislavski method; he’s scriptless, like Robin Williams, grabbing ideas out of the ether. True, he’s not being asked to deliver soliloquies from Beckett, but keeping up the energy is mandatory, and that’s not a problem for Cass.
On this day the challenge is to get two or three social-media-quality videos in an hour’s time, all with the familiar old-school coach character. (He will end up with five.)
“O.K., what kinds of things would this guy say?” says the 5' 7" Cassano, pacing around the gym, blanket and glasses in place, looking every bit the fired-up coach ready to impart knowledge. Quartuccio and Peterson are free to answer, as are two visitors to the “set”, but it’s not a question as much as it is Cass lighting the fuse for his inspired improv.
“Defense wins championships!” he suddenly yells in his coach voice.
“I see anyone jackin’ up threes they’re going to be in trouble!”
“I don’t want none-a-yiz doggin’ it!”
He will eventually work those lines into finished takes, along with old reliable players names such as Spadini, Cinquecento, Bellofonte and especially Gagliano, the most recurring.
He signals to Quartuccio—his cell-phone cameraman whose own surname sounds like it could be a Cassano creation—that he’s ready to go. He’s decided to riff on what a rec coach would say when he hears criticism from the crowd. He gathers an imaginary team around him on the bench, starts drawing up plays and suddenly looks into an empty set of bleachers. “John, John, let me do da coaching, O.K.?”
Most of his “performances” require only one take, although he does repeat a falling-down-while-taking-a-charge maneuver. “Hey, I’m 57 years old and I can do it!” he shouts to his unseen team. At which point he does seem 57 years old.
Never is his unerring sense of the precise line better illustrated than when he asks for help on what play a coach might holler from the sideline. “Triangle” and “Four Out” are some of the ideas, but Cass instantly conjures up something better. “Seton Hall! Seton Hall!” he screams, the Hall coming out like Hawl. It’s perfect.
After each take, he goes to Quartuccio’s side, takes a quick glance at the playback and laughs heartily. “That’s so good,” he says after one. “Perfect,” he says after another. Which are comments Coach Al would never make. “If we don’t laugh at it,” says Cassano, “we don’t post it.”
Cassano was not the kid who participated in the school drama club or went to theater camp. He’s had no formal training in front of a camera and has no plans to get any. Predictably, he was “the class-clown type,” trying to make the girls laugh (“I did it so well that most of the time I became their friend instead of their boyfriend”) and entertaining his baseball teammates on bus trips by making fun of the coaches. He was working as a personal trainer when he posted that fateful first video and was able to become a full-time creator in May 2022. He makes a comfortable living (he won’t specify how comfortable) on personal appearances, merchandise sales, sponsorship collaborations with among others, Major League Baseball and the NHL, and a consulting business.
Cassano doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about demographics and target audiences. The quintessential in-your-face rec-league coach is probably more familiar to an older demo (hand raised) that doesn’t much plug into social media. “But funny is funny,” says Cassano. True that. Even if you don’t understand pump faking or boxing out or protecting your dribble, you can see the humor in a man so intent on selling those techniques that he looks like he’s in the throes of a neurological disease when he demonstrates them. It’s better seen than described, of course, but his videos come most alive when he suddenly explodes into a spasm of energy, as when his football coach, muttering to himself as he paces the “sideline” (Eric and Rosalie’s backyard), suddenly sprints toward an imaginary referee like a man escaping a fire. “TIMEOUT! TIMEOUT!” he yells frantically, slamming his right palm against his left index finger.
The DIY nature of his videos adds to their charm. Cass’s football players sometimes wear Birkenstocks. “I wanted the audience to say, ‘Wait a minute, he’s doing this crap in sandals and socks?’ ” says Cass. “That’s the feel I wanted.” The coach delivers an inspired halftime speech to his team with flowerpots and a TV dish in the background like a family barbecue is about to break out. The Premier League player walks out holding an actual doll instead of a child’s hand. Lawn and leaf bags play a primary role in several videos, including the one about Frankie Lip, who was destined for greatness, the sober-voiced documentarian says, because “he pushed a football across the living room floor with his head before he could walk.” When a shortstop demonstrates the correct way to get off a throw quickly, he does so with a glove made for a Little Leaguer. In a video about an NFL challenge play, the camera focuses in on a football that is clearly deflated. The same formula applies to the nonsports content. The pizza shop owner twirling dough? He’s clearly using a towel, which happens to be a monogrammed anniversary gift given to his parents.
Sitcoms have been launched on thinner material than the characters Cass has sent out so far, but at this point he has no plans to move away from his self-made videos, find a partner to expand content possibilities or hunt down a TV agent. If he does transition from content creation, it will be toward self-help, he says, “taking the stuff I’ve learned about how to create, grow on social media and helping people monetize and capitalize on their talents.”
So, don’t look for any new characters to drift onto the Cass baseball diamond or into the pizza shop. “I get ideas DMed to me all the time,” Cassano says. “but, selfishly, I’m just not that open to it right now. I want to be the one leading the creative. I like my own cocoon. And at this point I’m not worrying about ideas. I have a saying that I’ll never force a vibe because it’s an easy way to kill it, and, so far, getting ideas hasn’t been a problem.”
So, at least for the immediate future, Coach Al will be around, and he absolutely does not want to see you doggin’ it.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as How Nicky Cass Turned Funny into a Full-Time Job.
