Sussex County Sports Blog

By Dan Cleary

6/28/2009 - SCIL Show Special

So, did you miss me? I know, I know, everyone (well, hopefully at least one person!) has been clamoring for a new blog and it has been a while since I last wrote one, but there is a real good reason why and the viewers of the Sports Beat will benefit.

You see, for the last couple of weeks I have been putting together, along with Tyler Adkins, the outstanding editor of the Sports Beat, a retrospective on the history of the now dearly-departed Sussex County Interscholastic League.

As regular readers of this blog know, I was a huge fan of the league all the way back to its inception in fall of 1975 as a fan and later as a player and media member covering it. I loved everything about the league, its history, great players and coaches.

So it only seemed fitting that the Sports Beat, the No. 1 source for local sports in Sussex County, in my opinion, should send the league out in style with a fitting tribute and I think fans of the SCIL will be very pleased with the final product which is slated to air July 4^th weekend.

We haven’t finalized all the details of how we will present it, but the history of the league will be broken down chronologically in some fashion, so you will have to stay tuned to Service Electric Cable Television’s Channel 10 to find out. How’s that for a teaser, huh?

Anyway, as a SCIL history buff, it has been a labor of love going back through the archives at the local libraries in Vernon and Franklin tracing the origins of the league. I spent countless hours looking at microfilm, but I didn’t mind because I would get so caught up in reliving the history of the league.

Just looking at the old newspaper articles and thumbing through old high school yearbooks brought back a lot of memories and a lot of laughs. Tyler and I had a real good laugh going through the 1976 High Point yearbook when we came across a picture of the former outstanding soccer coaches at High Point, Bill Bauer and Gus Salameh.

Remember, it was the 1970s, but the two of them standing together looked exactly like a pair of famous TV cops from that era, that’s right, Starsky and Hutch. Tyler and I couldn’t stop laughing and it was High Point athletic secretary Greer Zeitts, who was tremendous help (I will get to a final thank you later), who pointed out the similarity.

Wendy Whipple, the librarian at Newton High School and No. 1 fan of Newton sports and the coaches and kids who play for the Braves, let us borrow a couple of old Newton yearbooks and going through those books was wild when you see current Sussex County business leaders like Bob McCracken and the Avondoglios back in their high school days. Newton High School has such a rich and amazing tradition and not just in athletics.

And then Tyler and I made a stop at Vernon, my alma mater, and Vernon AD Bill Edelman gave us a box of old photos to sift through and I felt like I was high school again. Seeing the old faces of former teammates and coaches brought a big smile to my face and really brought home how important playing high school sports can be and what a lasting impression it makes.

There are just so many good lessons to be learned by playing sports that will help you as you enter the “real world” and the friendships formed from common experiences shared can last a lifetime. But if you are reading this blog, you probably already know that because the feedback I have received about this blog has come from players, coaches and parents of athletes from the county who know the value of high school athletics.

Anyway, putting together the show has been an arduous task, but extremely rewarding. We brought in athletes and coaches from the 1970s to the 2000s to discuss their favorite memories of the league and take a stroll down Memory Lane. In all we interviewed 17 people for the project, but you will have to tune in to find who we selected. (How about that, another teaser!).

I had a blast talking with Art Smith, the former superintendent of High Point, who helped form the SCIL with Newton AD Art Disque, who has since passed. Smith told me that Disque had been pushing for a league for Sussex County for years but couldn’t get the county superintendents on board, so that is when Smith stepped in and helped make it happen.

According to an article in 1975 in The New Jersey Herald, Disque said, “I’ve been talking about it (forming a Sussex County league) for years. There has been a definite interest in the county for five or six years, but nothing was really consummated until three years ago then Art Smith really initiated the thing.”

Said Smith in the same article, “It wasn’t a new idea, but I could never get it off the ground,” adding that he went to all the superintendents and made his case and “they all bought in.”

In doing my research, I found that Disque had started serious discussions about forming the league in the late 1960s when it was determined that new high schools were going to be built in Vernon and the newly-formed region sending districts of Lenape Valley and Kittatinny. Wallkill Valley, although it did not open until the fall of 1982, was already in the works in the early 1970s as Franklin High School was heading into the sunset.

The only school in the county that opted not to join was Sparta, which was a dominant force in the Skyline Conference under legendary football coach and athletic director Dick Cassels. So when the SCIL made its debut in 1975, the original schools were former Skyline Conference schools, High Point and Franklin, Newton, which had competed in the Iron Area Conference against Morris County schools for years, Hopatcong, Lenape Valley, Sussex County Vocational School (now Sussex Tech) and Pope John, which played independent schedules, and the new kids on the block, Vernon and Kittatinny.

Sparta eventually joined the league two years later in the Fall of 1977. It is pretty interesting that the school that has been the flag bearer for the SCIL wasn’t an original member.

The founders of the new league had to go to the state and ask for permission for the established schools to leave their respective conferences and it wasn’t easy. Some of the Skyline schools were upset that High Point and Franklin were leaving and being replaced by parochial power DePaul of Wayne and Morris County power Montville.

Said Smith in The Herald article, “We wanted to break away in an ethical and moral manner. We wanted to give proper notice.”

Now here is the kicker to all of this and goes hand-in-hand with what is going on today with realignment. One of main reasons the SCIL was formed, according to Smith in 1975, was “to foster cooperation among schools in a similar geographic area.” But later in the article he said, “the only way you can do it is to go against schools of your own size.”

Wow. Even 30-plus years ago school size and competitive balance was in the forefront of any discussion about high school athletics. Pretty amazing.

But the thing that surprised me the most was that even before the league played its first game there was already talk about expanding the league to 14 teams. Yes, you read that right, a small and large school division was in the works, but it never panned out.

“Right now, most of the athletic directors would like to see it move along for a year or two just to see how it going. But we could probably go to 14 teams immediately if we wanted to,” said Disque back in 1975.

Can you imagine that? The solution to the competitive balance issue in the SCIL was sitting right there and it was never implemented. What a shame. If the SCIL would have expanded back then we wouldn’t be talking about the demise of the league. Something to think about.

I’d like to wrap up this blog by thanking all the people who took the time to come to our studio and share their thoughts and memories with us. And a special thanks to Greer Zeitts, Wendy Whipple, Bill Edelman, Jennifer Williams of the Alumni Office at Pope John, Earl Hornayk, assistant girls hoops coach at Wallkill Valley and former Franklin High star basketball player for supplying me with several old articles about the league, the ladies at the Franklin and Vernon branches of the Sussex County Library, Mike Weilamann, our esteemed wrestling guru who provided us with all the wrestling records, and last, but far from least, Bill Rawson, my former collegue at The Herald, for supplying us the list of all the SCIL champs in each sport .

And a special shout out to the crew at Mugs Media, Tyler Adkins, Lance Van Ness, who made the outstanding graphics for the show, and Jerry Morelli, for allowing me the opportunity to put the proper amount of time in to put the show together. I hope everyone enjoys it.

I leave you with a trivia question. Can you name the nine football coaches who guided their teams in the first weekend of SCIL football back in September of 1975? I will have the answer next week.

That’s it for now, see you on the sidelines.

Search the Site

Sponsors

Sussex County Sports Blog

By Dan Cleary

6/28/2009 - SCIL Show Special