Ernesto (“Ernie”) Cappello is a Brooklyn-born and Brooklyn-raised guy. He began playing basketball in the 7th grade, and he’ll tell you that the courts in his Kensington neighborhood are some of the finest in New York. Players come from all over the borough to compete there. Some people might think that at 5'7" Ernie was disadvantaged on the court. “It never bothered me,” he says of his height. “I was always fast. My speed made up for it.” Point guard for the Baruch Statesmen, Cappello loves setting up the plays for his heftier teammates. Basketball even straightened out his academics.
When Cappello first arrived at Baruch, he had a business going on the side. During his freshman and sophomore years, he sold insurance. “I was working six, seven hours a day selling auto insurance, liability insurance . . . everything but life insurance.” Cappello’s father is an immigrant from Sicily who came to the United States at age 12 and tried his hand at every job imaginable. And Cappello is his father’s son: working seemed both natural and inevitable. But his studies were suffering, and he felt isolated from his classmates. Solution: basketball. “As soon as I joined the team, my grades improved,” Cappello says happily.
Now, with graduation in sight, he’s looking forward to a career in finance. “I want to start trading,” he explains. The gamesmanship and strategy inherent in trading appeal to him on an intellectual level, as does the prospect of “turning $100 into $100,000.” Cappello, who likes to read about Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and other self-made American icons, is convinced he can do it too. “No matter how the market is doing, there’s always a way to make money,” he says. What the money represents to him is freedom. “I can get out and coach on the high school or college level,” he explains.
In the meantime, there is Baruch, with its glorious new gymnasium that seats 1,200 in the bleachers. Eligible to play for one more year, Cappello looks forward to passing and shooting before a packed house. As is so often the case with true love, he finds he can scarcely put his feelings about basketball into words. “It’s a whole art, it’s a struggle, it’s five guys who help each other,” he says of the game he adores.

—ZB