Four hours before first pitch on Opening Day, Cotuit Kettleers manager Mike Roberts called a meeting with his assistants. In need of a first base coach, he looked around his supporting cast full of rookies to the coaching ranks on the Cape that included Kodie Kolden, Matty Flaherty, and Elliot Wolf.

“Who has a stopwatch?” asked Roberts.

Only one person could say, “Yes,” and it was the same former intern that has answered every challenge, going above and beyond the bare minimum throughout his four summers in Cotuit.

Having just finished his first spring as an associate scout for the Toronto Blue Jays, of course Will Thompson had a stopwatch. And just like the device he holds in his left hand as he crouches down ready to alert baserunners of any pickoff attempt or overthrow, his internal clock is always moving and he never hits the stop button.

“I like to think when I put my mind to something when I get into it, there’s no stopping me from doing it if it's something I really enjoy,” said Thompson.

But to get to this point in his young career, Thompson doesn’t quite have the same baseball background like other members of the coaching staff such as Roberts, Kolden, or even Danny Crossen. When Thompson put on his pinstriped pants for the team’s first scrimmage on Martha’s Vineyard on June 8, it was his first time in a baseball uniform since the eighth grade.

Although he hadn’t stepped between the white lines in a long time, baseball has always been apart of Thompson’s life. The love of the sport came from his father, Jim, who always had the Red Sox on in their Edison, New Jersey home. The Thompson’s passion for Boston couldn’t be leashed from 250 miles away, as the family was in the building at Fenway Park for Game One of the 2013 World Series.

The Thompsons entered two and a half hours before first pitch and were able to catch the Red Sox take batting practice. And in the eyes of Will before being crowned World Series MVP, David Ortiz was putting on a spectacle before batting .688 in that year’s Fall Classic.

But it wasn’t the type of show someone with the power of “Big Papi” was capable of. Rather than hold his own home run derby, Ortiz was methodical with every round he took. Repeating every swing over and over again, at one point the left-handed slugger peppered the ball off the Green Monster in left field for three consecutive rounds. Watching that, Will had a newfound appreciation of how much goes into being a great baseball player.

“I think once I saw that, I think I started to more fall in love with not just the game itself, but more like the details of it, and try and work with that,” said Thompson. “So I think just kind of looking at the game at a lot deeper level was probably– that point was really cool. That was the first time I had ever seen anything like that.”

Thompson maintained his passion for the sport at a high level even after he put his glove in his bat bag for the final time and began high school. His education in baseball took on a new evolution once he passed his driving test and received his license, giving him the freedom to do as he pleased.

“Teenagers will do whatever they want to do– I wanted to go baseball games,” said Thompson.

Thompson took his red Honda Odyssey on a 15-minute drive to TD Bank Ballpark just about any time he could for Somerset Patriots home games. Only knowing how to attack a task with 100% effort, he showed up when the gates opened and watched whatever he could to study the sport.

Soaking in hundreds of Atlantic League games in his lifetime, Thompson talked to as many players and coaches as possible and even began to cover the league with an Instagram account shortly before he enrolled at Hofstra University as a journalism major.

Thompson’s first gig as a beat reporter covering ALPB gave him a taste for scouting as he received an unexpected direct message from halfway across the world in late 2019.

Nate Davison, the general manager of the Adelaide Giants of Australian Professional Baseball reached out to schedule a phone call. In their talks, Davison explained that their team relied on indy ball pitchers to fill out their roster for the season that fell during the winter months stateside since they had softer limits on innings pitched.

The role was the first of its kind for the Giants, but the original plan for Thompson didn’t materialize completely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He was still able to find talent in the American Association, the only major independent league that played that season.

“I'd put together video and certain things and do a little write-up of certain guys in that league that I liked, and I'd send it along to him,” said Thompson. “And at that point, I thought, ‘Hey, this is pretty cool.’”

When it was time to figure out what he would do for his 2021 summer, a perfect storm of his passion for scouting mixed with a disdain of the media landscape in which he was studying in college formed. Thompson was heavily involved with the robust Lawrence Herbert School of Communication of Hofstra, hosting a podcast and broadcasting nearly every Pride team, but it just didn’t feel right to him.

“People have asked me in a show, ‘Hey, make sure you disagree.’ I said, ‘No,’ straight up,” said Thompson. “I'm gonna say what I think and I think once I realized what I brought to the table in a general media sense was not being rewarded on the long term, I said I'm gonna try and kind of take a leap of faith and try and do something else.”

Thompson’s best friend at Hofstra, Tim Crowley, had just been hired as a writer with Cotuit in the fall of 2020, who noticed the MLB Scout Liasion/GM intern position was listed as available on the Kettleers internship website. Crowley passed the information along to Thompson, who also planted the seed in the head of his new boss Leah Ridpath that he would be the type of person the organization was looking for.

The Thompsons also enlisted the help of Peter Flaherty, as Jim reached out to the then-holder of the position as another reference. Flaherty and Will Thompson talked over the phone, picking Will's brain to gage his baseball knowledge and more importantly, see if he was both a nice human being and hard working.

Thompson checked all the boxes for Flaherty and Ridpath, but the board needed to find space for him as Flaherty ultimately returned for another season as the scout liaison.

“We loved Will so much, and thought he had such good skill sets and we thought he’d be a good fit, and so we kind of created the position for him where he was sort of like a senior gameday [intern],” said Ridpath. “He would do things like open up the office for us and get things going, and make sure tables were out, and make sure everybody's where they needed to be because you know him, he’s way more mature than most kids his age.”

Thompson did everything he was asked around Lowell Park in his first summer, making the drive from his house off Cape and consistently showing up early and often around the field.

“The description of the liaison position in of itself is not a whole lot, and you could do the bare minimum and print out rosters, and you can tweet once a day, and you can talk to your coach twice a week and have your probable starters lined up. You don't have to do anything else,” said Thompson. “But I thought that'd be wasting what a golden opportunity I have here, and to also be around a team.”

Thompson always found time to shag batting practice, using the opportunity for himself to become familiar with the players and coaching staff while he was low on the totem pole as a first-year intern. He tried his best out in the field but had to rely on his dad’s old beat-up glove to shake off the rust from his playing days as a teenager.

But Thompson’s hard work all around Cotuit did not go unnoticed, especially by the coaches. At an extra hitting session toward the end of the season, assistants Andrew Shreiner, Tyle Hankins, and Ken Jarrett approached him with a brand new Rawlings glove that he still uses today.

“It was probably one of the coolest moments in my life, when they gave me that glove and said, ‘We appreciate the work that you put in, and you kind of being here,’” said Thompson. “And I knew that at that point, I knew that I was on the right side.”

Thompson also knew that he wanted to be in Cotuit for years to come, and with some more convincing, the senior gameday intern achieved his goal of becoming the Kettleers GM/Scout Liasion.

Thompson immediately joined manager Mike Roberts and Flaherty on the team tasked with building the roster. It’s a year-round process, starting essentially at season’s end and having to adjust to a revolving door of players throughout the summer months.

The Kettleers have maintained success with Thompson’s fingerprints on the last three rosters, winning 20+ games every season, including the President’s Trophy and West Division crown in 2023.

“He took the opportunity and ran with it. It's been like watching a rocket ship since,” said Flaherty.

Additionally, Thompson was able to turn his relationships formed with major league scouts from the wooden benches behind home plate at Lowell Park into a major league gig with the Blue Jays as an associate scout in his first full year out of college. In the spring, he helped out long-time area scout Tom Burns to cover college games across New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Thompson made drives on weekends and even some midweek contests, leaving directly from his more full-time job as an elementary school substitute teacher. But when the college season ended and school year wrapped up by June, there was only one place he knew to go.

“I was like, ‘Hey, during the summer, amateur baseball is here. This is where you want to be.’ And so I'm like, You know what? I'm going to text Coach Roberts, I'm going to see if there would be a way to come back,” said Thompson. “And it literally got solved in like 10 minutes. He was like, ‘Do you want to come on the coaching staff?’ ‘Yes.’ He's like, ‘Great, I’m going to talk to Bruce.’"

Thompson’s experience gritting his teeth with the odd jobs needed to get where he really wanted prepared him for the 16-hour days at the field that Roberts tasks all of his assistants with, beginning with early mornings making Lowell Park look like a field of dreams and running youth clinics. And to Thompson’s surprise, spending months in a third-grade classroom helped him lead those camps.

As for the bread and butter of being a coach, Thompson has excelled on his inside-the-fence game, learning as he goes in his first-ever coaching gig on the diamond. He’s become more comfortable communicating with Roberts from coaching box to coaching box and with baserunners-- and as a leadership figure.

“I think my responsibility is to open doors for anybody, and I felt there was a door open, and I think he's done a marvelous job on the field,” said Roberts.

The players are receptive to Thompson, who serves as the first point of contact when they reach first base or on home runs, usually in the form of high fives. He’s been instrumental on teaching baserunners like Jarren Advincula how to take leads, time up a pitcher, and overall be ready to play on a daily basis.

“He brings a lot of baseball IQ to the game as well. Just from experience in watching the game, I feel like he knows so much about every single player on the team. He knows strengths and weaknesses. He knows when we're feeling high and we're feeling low,” said Tanner Thach, a frequent visitor at Thompson’s post. “He just has a really good idea of what the game is, and he understands that there are struggles, that there are high times too, and he knows it's just it's great to get over there and just feel like you know you're going to see someone who's always happy, even if we're down, even if we're getting shut out. And he's going to encourage you to just keep pressing on, keep trying hard, and that's just great.”

As the Kettleers prepare for another postseason, Thompson can claim he’s gotten an entirely different type of degree from the education in baseball and every other aspect that surrounds being part of a team from the university of Cotuit.

“It's been really fun. I love this place. I love this place a lot," said Thompson. "I couldn't thank the people and all the great people and fans and Coach Roberts and everyone else enough. It’s been incredible.”

Thompson is unapologetically himself-- and always has been. What that entails is someone who is a unicorn—more mature than his peers, but can bounce between serious and playful conversations with ease no matter if it’s with someone who’s 70 or seven years old. He is an anomaly who radiates kindness and selflessness even after being exhausted from the hard work takes up most of his time.

And by all accounts, he’s only recently clicked start on the stopwatch that will measure his time around baseball.

Thumbnail Image by Holden McBerty (Memphis).