Steph Welch and Joey Santaniello: New Kids on the Block

Written by Michael Trecker
Photos by Sendra Productions

Sponsored by East Village Place

Published in Longmeadow Neighbors (December 2021)

Stephanie (Steph) Welch (25) and Joey Santaniello (24) are currently engaged and have been together for about three years and live with one another and their dog Whisky. They only moved to Longmeadow a little over a year ago, so as a couple they are new to the community. However, as an individual Joey has lived here for his whole life. He grew up in town, attending Longmeadow High School where he played Lacrosse and Football. You may have seen him playing street hockey as a kid and going to the swap shop to get new hockey sticks to replace those he and his friends had broken. Steph, on the other hand, grew up in Wilbraham and went to Minnechaug Regional High School. They lived a town away from one another for their entire lives, knew the same families, and went to sporting events at one another’s schools. Steph and Joey had probably passed by each other dozens of times growing up, but they only actually met when they were already 22 and 21 respectively, when they were introduced through mutual friends.

Despite their novelty to the neighborhood, Steph and Joey already know all their neighbors. They actually found the house initially because Joey’s sister was walking her dog down the street one day and noticed that it was for sale. “There were definitely other houses we were looking at, but this was the first one where we put an offer in and they accepted, so here we are,” Joey said. “We really just lucked out. The house is great. It has good land, and it has this huge porch that we use when we have friends over,” Steph added. “We know everybody around us too. It’s a nice neighborhood. Everyone is just so nice and so kind.” Aside from their house and neighbors, Steph also loves living in Longmeadow because they’re so close to everything. Growing up in Wilbraham, it was up to a 20-minute drive to get anywhere. Now she lives a half-mile walk from the nearest grocery store.

One of Steph’s favorite features about the town is the ‘Swap Shop.’ Growing up in Wilbraham, she had never seen anything like it. Her excitement about the swap shop speaks volumes to how even just this small aspect of the town really helps to bring the community together. “Longmeadow has this really cool thing called the Swap Shop!” Steph said excitedly as Joey groaned. “I think it’s so cool. It’s at the town dump, but it’s awesome. People will bring things that they don’t use anymore and are getting rid of, and other people can just take them freely! I love that it has this really cool community feeling when you go in there, and nothing is going to waste. I love it. I bring so much stuff there. I got this little Christmas tree that we have had up all year from there. I think it’s so sick. It’s like this cool feature of Longmeadow that I had never experienced living in Wilbraham.”

“I’ve grown up with that my entire life,” Joey said in response to Steph’s excited outburst, “and you seeing it for the first time was just the funniest thing for me, because you were just so excited. Like, my parents’ house where I grew up was only a mile away, so we would go down there almost every Saturday. When I was younger, it was really cool because me and my friends would go there to get people’s old hockey sticks so we could play street hockey.”

“It’s just so much fun! It’s so exciting when you bring something in and people are just all over it,” Steph said.

Steph and Joey also have a lot of fun stories about their life in Longmeadow together despite only having lived here for a little over a year. “I came home one day and there were just bubbles ALL over the kitchen floor. It was just drenched. It looked like that massive bubble bath from Harry Potter 4. So I went to Joey and asked, ‘Joey, did you try to wash the dishes with Dawn dish soap in the dishwasher?’ He’s like ‘yeah what’s the problem?’ Our floor has never been cleaner,” Steph laughed.

When they first moved into their house in November 2020, it was because they had to quarantine. “We weren’t planning on moving in for a while,” Steph said, “but Joey’s family had been exposed to Covid, so we just bought a TV and an air mattress, and we had nothing else in the house. There was nothing to do since we literally just had the mattress and the TV, and I was getting understandably stressed out, so one day I had a single glass of wine, just to relax. A few nights later I woke up at 2 am and couldn’t get back to sleep, and Joey just goes, ‘Do you want me to pour you some bed wine to get you relaxed and back to bed?’ like I’m some sort of alcoholic!” Steph said between fits of laughter.

“We slept on that stupid air mattress for a week before we even ordered a couch,” Joey laughed. On the topic of those isolated first few weeks, Joey said, “they were some of the loneliest days of my life. We were isolated with just each other for Christmas, and we couldn’t see anybody for one of the best holidays of the year, and it was just the two of us. It was one of the loneliest experiences I think we both ever had, but it was also one of the happiest and most fun because I was with Steph.”

Steph and Joey also have a shepherd mix named Whisky. “His name is actually Whisky Marie,” Steph said. “No, just Whisky,” Joey responded. “Well, I call him Whisky Marie when he is in trouble. It’s his full name,” Steph continued. The young couple picked Whisky up from a rescue in New Hampshire in March of 2021. According to Steph, they were planning on renaming him, but he already knew his name so well. Joey added, “When we were in the pen with him, he responded to his name so well already that renaming him would have been almost a disservice.” They love bringing him to local parks and playing with him, throwing things for him to fetch. They also do that in their back yard, but one time they accidentally got his ball stuck in a tree. “We have this big foam ball for Whisky, and we throw it around the yard for him. He loves to play fetch. So sometimes what I like to do, is I throw it straight up in the air, so it comes up high then bounces, and it doesn’t hurt him if it hits him. But I do it toward the trees, so he has to look for it. The first time Joey does it, he throws it up into one of our big oak trees, and it gets stuck in the ‘v’. Our first thought was to throw more things at it to knock it out. We tried throwing this little dodgeball, but it wasn’t working, so Joey says, ‘okay I’m going to get the ladder.’ While he’s doing that, I’m throwing a water pitcher at it, which is actually still on the roof because I missed! We haven’t gotten it back down. So, what Joey did was he waved the 20-foot ladder like a madman and smacked the ball straight out of the tree,” Steph said while making whooshing sound effects of Joey swinging the ladder.

Steph attended Framingham State University for her undergraduate degree in accounting with a minor in economics. She is working on her master’s degree at the University of Hartford for a dual degree in business administration and science accounting and taxation. Currently, Steph works as the Community Development Director for the Town of West Springfield. The goal of the position is to remove equity barriers in the community. “It’s basically just removing barriers, so everyone has an equal opportunity in the community. We work on a bunch of different stuff, from summer camps to classes for sign language,” Steph said. She also works on the side as a management consultant with a concentration in finance. “Most of it is helping small businesses understand what is happening within them… I want to be able to add a better level of service for these businesses.” Steph is very passionate about her work, and strives to make a positive impact on the communities she works in.

Joey went to Worcester State University as a criminal justice major, where he founded and captained the WSU lacrosse team. He is currently a contract design agent at Ascension Health, which is a hospital group based in the Midwest United States. “I help facilitate the gap between a business owner and an IT lead. Basically, I assemble all the information they need to build a contract,” Joey said. Simply put, he streamlines the process of contracting. “I got this job through sheer, blind luck,” he laughed. “For the one time in my life, I actually responded to a head-hunter on LinkedIn. I was at a period in my first job as a sourcing specialist at Voya Financial where I was facing some burnout and needed a change. I felt more like a cog in the machine rather than an individual working there. At Ascension, it feels like my work is appreciated, and I really like that.” He is also working on a Master of Legal Studies with a concentration in data privacy compliance and cyber security at Drexel University’s Thomas R. Kline School of Law. Joey’s message to his neighbors, and anyone who reads this, is “Just be nice to your neighbors and get to know them. I know it sounds cliché, but I feel like a lot of the ‘neighborhood mentality’ is kind of dying and people are just living in their houses and not really interacting with the people around them… There is a lot of great character in this town, and we really lucked out with our neighbors. I want everyone to be as lucky as we are with their neighbors.”

“Just love everybody, be nice, and pay your property taxes,” Steph advises.