Rick Cerrone’s high school guidance counselor once asked him about his career aspirations. Rick immediately replied, “I want to be the public relations director for the New York Yankees.”

Now that’s focus – even for a baseball nut who grew up just outside the Bronx.

Three decades later, there he is: Director of Media Relations, New York Yankees. Rick’s stadium office overlooks perhaps the most famous venue in sports. Since landing the job in 1996, he’s ridden in four ticker-tape parades down Broadway, celebrating World Series titles.

How NIU and the Northern Star played into this dream is similar to how Rick has built his career: with talent, of course, but also by positioning himself to know the right people at the right times.

In high school, Rick also worked as a sports stringer for a local newspaper in Westchester County, N.Y. In 1971, his editor and mentor, Stanley Shalett, accepted the sports editor job at the Daily Chronicle in, of all places, DeKalb, Ill.

Not long after that, Rick was shopping for a college. Shalett called and said, “You should come out here,” Rick remembers. “This was the start of Northern being a major college. Basketball was big. This wasn’t Slippery Rock. If you wanted to be a sports writer, there was a lot to cover. Stanley also told me to go where there was a great, daily student newspaper, because you need to write every day.”

So, Rick ventured to the cornfields of northern Illinois. He quickly found his way to the Star, where he first covered golf and tennis and now admits, “I had no clue. People would read my stories and then ask, ‘Have you ever covered a tennis match before?'”

But eventually, he got the football beat – which included a trip to California for NIU’s victory over Fresno State. “I remember being on the team plane coming home,” Rick says, “and I’m typing my story on a little, portable typewriter. I think they could hear me at the other end of the plane.”

After graduating, Rick edited and published Baseball magazine from his home in New York. He went on to work for the baseball commissioner’s office, do a radio talk show in New York City and direct public relations for the Pittsburgh Pirates, before the Yankees hired him.

He does make it back to NIU occasionally – though not usually for Homecoming. Octobers can get pretty busy in the Bronx.