Sussex County Sports Blog

By Dan Cleary

7/14/2009 - Opening Day Will Be Tough

Ah, mid-July. A time for barbeques, trips to the beach (if it isn’t raining!) and working on your tan.

But for area football coaches and players, not so much.

Mid-July has always been a time for coaches to start planning for the “official” start of practice, while players work out in preparation for the season to begin. This summer is no different, but there is a twist, and it is a big one.

Due to realignment, seven Mugs Media area teams will open the season against teams they have never played before which should make for a very interesting opening weekend of play.

After 30-plus years in existence, the coaches in the Sussex County Interscholastic League pretty much knew what to plan for when it came to preparing for SCIL foes. If you were playing Pope John, you had to be ready to figure out a way to slow down whichever outstanding tailback legendary PJ coach Vic Paternostro was going to unleash on the league or if you were going to face Lenape Valley and its vaunted Delaware Wing-T attack, you had to be ready to recognize all the misdirection plays run to perfection by the Pats’ usual stable of superb running backs.

But that has all changed with the formation of the Northwest Jersey Athletic Conference and there will be no period of adjustment come the weekend of Sept. 11. It will be sink or swim time.

The opening weekend of play will bring plenty of intrigue with just only one pair of former SCIL foes going at it as Lenape Valley and Kittatinny will do battle Sept. 12 at Kittatinny in a Division C clash.

Vernon, the area’s lone Group 4 school, is also the area’s lone team in Division A, which houses Morris Knolls, Delbarton, Morristown, Mt. Olive, Randolph Roxbury and West Morris. But this is what Vernon coach Chuck Tepper wanted and he got it. The Vikes were tired of going 6-2 and not making the playoffs due to a lack of power points.

The Vikes open with an independent game, as do the rest of the teams in Division A and B. The Vikes picked up East Orange, a Group 4 school. Vernon will play three Group 4 schools this season (Roxbury and Randolph are the other two), while the rest of its slate is against tough Group 3s like Delbarton, Morristown and Morris Knolls.

The realignment will give the Vikes an opportunity to reach the playoffs with four or five wins, but against their schedule this year, Tepper and the Vikes have their work cut out for them with the return of just two starters.

So, when it came to picking up an independent game, Vernon put its money where its mouth was and picked up a Group 4. But what about the other former SCIL schools that had to schedule an independent game? Did they pick up a tough opponent or took the easy way out. Let’s take a look.

Pope John, by far, scheduled the toughest opponent of the former SCIL schools as the Lions will face Irvington, which went 10-1 last year and lost in the semifinals of the North 2, Group 3 state tournament to eventual champion Phillipsburg.

Hats off to Vic, and Pope John, for not scheduling a small non-public or a public school patsy in its opening game of the season. The Lions are in Division B and will face archrival Sparta (in Week 2) as well as tough clubs like Jefferson, Delbarton and Mendham during the regular season, so you couldn’t blame PJ if it picked up a creampuff, but it didn’t, and good for them.

Jefferson, the only Group 2 school in Division B, was rewarded for its North 1, Group 2 sectional title by being bumped up a division just for football. The Falcons will be in Division C in the other sports, but the Falcons will be playing with the big boys in football.

But the Falcons also did not shy away and picked up its next door neighbor Roxbury on opening night. The Gaels, who are coached by former Lenape Valley assistant and Union High standout Cosmo LaRusso, are as solid as a football program as it gets. The Gaels went 8-2 last year and lost to Rahway and West Morris.

Ok, so far, so good, as far as independents are concerned. Let’s see who Sparta picked up in its first game. The Spartans return a talented core of players and will compete in Division B after sharing the SCIL crown with Pope John and Jefferson last year.

Sparta AD and football coach Pat Shea went out of the box a little and picked up a Group 1 school. A Group 1 school? Yes, but not your ordinary Group 1 school. The Spartans will face Hoboken the first weekend. The game won’t yield gigantic power points, but the Redwings play a rough slate in Hudson County, so the residual points should help the Spartans down the road.

Hoboken, which played Sparta in the Group 3 playoffs several years ago, is still a force to be reckoned with and went 8-4 last year and made to the final of the North 2, Group 1 tourney. So a good choice by the Spartans.

But if fans of Sussex County football miss the Hoboken-Sparta clash, they can see the Redwings again later in the season when Kittatinny, in a bold move, will host Hoboken in Week 6. Jim Green has never dodged anyone and despite a rough season last year, look for the Cougars to more than hold their own in the Division C and against Hoboken.

All the schools in Divison C had to schedule an independent, but the schools will play divisonal clashes on opening day.

And it could be worth the price of admission to see the looks of the faces of the kids from Hoboken when they get off the bus in Hampton after an hour-plus bus ride and a trip over the two, one-lane bridges en route to Kittatinny.

Lenape Valley, which had no problem winning SCIL titles in football despite being a Group 2 school, looked to Central Jersey and found a good one in Somerville, which went 5-5 and qualified for the Central Jersey Group 2 playoffs.

The Pioneers play in the Skyland Conference and have been a perennial power, so this is no cakewalk for Lenape Valley, which will play in Division C.

All right, let’s go to Newton, where the Braves had a disappointing season last year, a year in which they had hoped to win the SCIL title. Newton is in Division C and will open with Hanover Park, but will play Mahwah in Week 4 in its independent game. Jeff Remo does a great job with the Thunderbirds every year and they went 5-5 last year and just missed the North 1, Group 2 playoffs, so a real solid pick by Newton.

Now High Point struggled last year, but came on at the end of the year and played some real nice football for Jim Delaney. But playing in Division B will be a tall order for the Wildcats and wins will be tough to come by so High Point picked up Mount Olive for its opening night clash.

Both teams should be evenly matched as Mt. Olive went 2-7-1 last year, which included a very impressive tie with Morristown. So another good choice by a local school.

So that leaves us with Wallkill Valley, the school that championed realignment, at least for football. The Rangers are in Division C and will play Madison on opening day, but who are the Rangers playing in their independent game?

Sussex Tech.

Now, I think the world of the guys at Wallkill Valley, and Todd Van Orden, in just one year, has become a top-notch athletic director. But picking up Sussex Tech, which just resumed varsity play after a long layoff last year, is a head-scratcher.

I know years ago whenever Wallkill drew Tech in the state consolation game, the Rangers hated it. And when Wallkill left the SCIL and went independent for two seasons, the Rangers played a solid Group 2 slate and went 10-10. So what gives with Tech?

I’ve been told Wallkill looked all over and couldn’t find anyone and I have no reason to doubt that, considering that many schools in Passaic and Bergen counties didn’t even know what conference they were going to be in for this fall, until over a month ago.

But the guys at Wallkill have to know that the truth and public perception are not always the same and scheduling Tech will just fuel the fire of the schools who resent Wallkill for bringing up the subject of realignment over 10 years ago.

So in conclusion, the former SCIL schools did a fine job in scheduling independents as the schools they picked up had a combined mark of 45-35 (.563) last year. Now we will have to see what happens on the field.

ANSWER TIME—Last week I asked who were the nine football coaches who led their teams on the first weekend in 1975, the first year of the SCIL. If you got all nine, you are a SCIL freak because Vic Paternostro, who was one of them, couldn’t remember all nine.

Here they are, Vic, Norm Anderson of High Point, Bob Urwin of Hopatcong, Don Panciello of Kittatinny (the Cougars were junior varsity in 1975), Rich Snyder of Lenape Valley (yes, there was a coach before Don Smolyn), Gary Wikander of Newton, Howie Bach of Franklin, Len Smith of Sussex Tech and Dick Wetzel of Vernon.

Sparta didn’t join the SCIL until 1977 and the Spartans were led, of course, by the legend, Dick Cassels. Jefferson joined the loop in 1982, but its coach back in 1975 was good old Frank Dwornikoski, who just celebrated 50 years of coaching this past school year.

Pretty neat stuff. And I hope you are all enjoying our SCIL retrospective. We here at Mugs Media have put a lot of work into it and we have two more shows left, the 1990s and the 2000s, so keep on watching.

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

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Sussex County Sports Blog

By Dan Cleary

7/14/2009 - Opening Day Will Be Tough