Catfish players finding comfort in summer (and then some) at home of Jackson family

The Cape Catfish offer families throughout the Cape Girardeau area an opportunity to serve as “host families” for the players during the summer months in which the team is playing.

“We have had a really good experience,” Jackson resident Cory Daniel said of serving the Catfish as a host family. “We have been doing the host family thing every year. This is our fourth year and third kid.”

How much of a “good experience” has it been?

The relationships that the Daniel family (which includes Cory’s wife, Kristen, and eight-year-old son Caden) have built with former Catfish players Dalton Doyle, Grayson Taylor, and now, Dante Zamudio, have been ones that have carried on long past the end of baseball season.

“We have loved every minute of it,” Cory said. “We get to be in pretty good contact with their families and build good relationships.”

Zamudio, who is from Sylmar, California, is spending his second summer with the Daniel family.

“It just feels like home here,” Zamudio said. “I’m very comfortable (with) the coaches, the people, my host family, they just make you feel like home.”

Zamudio has spent an extended period of time at the Daniels’ home in Jackson, but that is nothing compared to Doyle, who just spent the past school year living with the family.

Doyle finished his playing career in the spring of 2022 at Eastern Illinois and was spending this past school year finishing up the work on his master’s degree. He could do that online, and he needed a job, so he reached out to Daniels, who is a senior lender at Alliance Bank, and ended up getting more than just employment, he got a place to live, as well.

“We have just developed really good relationships with these kids,” Cory said. “We love it.”

That affinity is a two-way street.

Taylor, who played at Belmont, and his girlfriend recently came back to Cape Girardeau to catch a couple of Catfish games, and they had no problem finding a place to stay while they were in town, the Daniels’ front door is always open for these guys.

“The biggest takeaway at this point,” Cory said, “has been that all of these kids are such good kids. They have a great work ethic. They are doing all of the right things.”

Doyle recently took a position with Boeing in St. Louis, so that opened up one of the bedrooms in the Daniels’ basement, for Zamudio, who is in the midst of his second summer with the Catfish.

Zamudio will leave town next month, but who knows? Perhaps he’ll be back again at some point.

“Dante is a great kid,” Cory said. “He is a phenomenal young man.”