The 1989 Ocean County softball team was being told on two levels.
There was the level that involved a lot of good teams like Toms River South, Southern Regional, Lacey, Toms River North and Central Regional.
And then there was the level that involved one team and one team only that spring – Toms River East.
Yes, the Raiders were having that kind of a spring. I knew the Raiders were going to be improved over a 14-win season in coach Debbie Dietrich's debut the year before. And she had most of her top players who had been with the program for a year or two on varsity back, led by the senior battery of catcher Kathy Hawtin and Kim Tompkins and a great group of senior role players such as first baseman Jen Brown, shortstop Cristy Iorio, left fielder Sally Ballantyne, right fielder Kathy Higley and designated hitter Cheryl Stump.
They were a dynamite bunch of softball players who were lacking that one thing that would take them over the top – a winner. East, up to this point, had never won a game in the state tournament and only got as far as the Shore Conference Tournament quarterfinals. And as for the Ocean County Tournament, the Raiders had just one final in their history, a 7-5 loss in 1987 to surprising Lacey when the seniors were sophomores.
And so everything was set with the exception of that "winner."
Enter junior All-County third baseman-pitcher Michelle Carlson. She was going to continue the Central Regional dynasty that saw the Golden Eagles go 27-3 and win the NJSIAA South Jersey Group III championship, get to the SCT semifinal round and win the OCT title for the fourth time in the decade in dramatic fashion over Monsignor Donovan in 1988. She was more than likely going to become the Golden Eagles' number one pitcher with the graduation of Angel Slack.
But everything changed on an October day in 1988 when Carlson's family moved out of Bayville and moved to Toms River ... to the East side of town, no less. Trust me, back in 1988-89, you couldn't have smelled a "conspiracy" of the most talented player in the county leaving a program and going to another one that certainly had more promise than Central's did at that point.
For months, I'm sure Michelle Carlson herself heard the whispers. For years, I know Michelle Carlson Neveling had to explain the move. But in 1988-89, no one involved with Central was all that happy. All coach Norm Selby would do was "wish her well" on the move, though on the inside, I'm sure he felt hurt.
But I believed her when she said it was a move not for advantage. And what was Central's loss soon became East's gain.
And moving Carlson into third base was a pretty big move. That meant junior Christine Grice, who was to take over that spot, could be moved to second base. And with Tompkins about to pitch every single inning of every single game, win or lose, Carlson could concentrate on playing third base.
It was no surprise that to start the 1989 season, East was blazing. The Raiders were off to an 18-0 mark and was one more win from winning the Shore Conference Class A South championship for the first time outright since 1985.
The clinching win was to take place on Thursday, May 18, 1989 down in Manahawkin against Southern Regional. The Rams were no slouch that season, either, and had just pulled off a stunning upset victory in the OCT quarterfinal round against Central Regional at Lakewood's Wilbur Thompson Park. They came onto their field with a 10-7 mark and 6-5 record in A South, not overwhelming records.
Still, coach Dick Manzo's Rams had talent. They, too, had a dynamite senior battery of catcher Dana Veesart and pitcher Greta Jannsch. Shortstop Berri Tuttle and second baseman Kris Susco were capable players up the middle and center fielder Lora Davis, another senior, was an outfielder leader. The Rams had a good team, but they did not possess East's overall talent.
To me, this was going to be nothing more than a division-winning formality. East would win the game thoroughly, get back on the bus and head back up the Garden State Parkway without much fanfare. After all, they had a state tournament game to host the next day against South and had an OCT semifinal at Lakewood against Lacey the day after that.
Only one team had ever started an Ocean County softball season unbeaten after 20 games. That was the 1976 South team of coach Nancy Warren that went 20-0 before losing in the NJSIAA Group IV semifinals to Middletown (now North) High School. East, it was thought, would be soon joining that South team on the list.
I had my position for the game like I normally had: Behind home plate on the open field to the right of the backstop not too far from Southern's on-deck circle and near their dugout. These days, Southern plays its games in the back of the school, but in the 1980s and '90s, their field was in the front of the building where you can see traffic go up and down Route 9.
East's top of the lineup – Carlson, Grice and Iorio – got the first crack at Jannsch, a tall, lanky right-hander with an even-keeled temperament who had put her time in (three seasons) as Southern's pitcher. Little, if ever, did you see Jannsch ever show emotion, the same thing for her counterpart Tompkins, waiting for her turn to pitch to Southern's lineup.
As for Jannsch, she got a flyout from Carlson, a popout from Grice and a comebcker from Iorio. That half-inning alone set the tone for what I was about to see that slightly overcast afternoon.
With one out in the bottom of the first, right fielder Dana Loughran, a sophomore, walked. Veesart flied out to Ballantyne, setting up cleanup hitter Jannsch. The Southern pitcher got the count to 2-2 against Tompkins. Then Tompkins grooved one that found a lot of plate.
East center fielder and talented junior Jeannine Zarrillo never, ever, ever, ever had a chance. The ball flew over her head, an emphatic shot off of Jannsch's bat. I saw a lot of Zarrillo's back on that play as Loughran came home and Manzo didn't hesitate sending Jannsch home to finish out the inside-the-park home run to give Southern a 2-0 lead.
On a field with a fence, that ball would've cleared it by a good 20 to 30 feet. It was crushed. The shot woke up the mundane feel of this game early on.
And for one of the few times this 1989 season, the Toms River East Raiders were trailing.
I figured East's answer would come quickly. And I was right. Hawtin walked to lead off. Jannsch, though, settled down to strike out Brown and Higley. But the left-handed hitting Stump singled Hawtin to second. And Ballantyne delivered a double down the right-fieled line to score Hawtin and send Stump to third, cutting the lead to 2-1.
Yeah. Here came East. Just as I thought. I was in fear for what the joy of Jannsch's home run might do to Southern's softball team as well as Jannsch herself. This East team was one of the very few softball teams I ever covered that not only believed in jumping on you, but putting the dagger in your heart as quickly.
And now Zarrillo was coming up. She was not your ordinary No. 9 hitter. She had power ... but on a team that possessed great hitting up and down the lineup, it was Zarrillo who was put in the No. 9 slot to be the chain link to Carlson and the top of the lineup.
Southern did not look at Zarrillo as anything special, though. They set up in the normal depth that a No. 9 hitter is treated. But, oh, were the Rams about to be stunned.
On a 3-2 pitch that featured a couple of two-strike foul balls, Zarrillo got a hold of what was Jannsch's 47th pitch of the game already. She drilled it.
The ball seemed to go as far as the one that went over Zarrillo's head that Jannsch hit. Now it was Davis having to be the chaser. Davis took a good angle to the ball. Somehow, her timing was right on when the ball was to land – she put her glove up and made the incredible over-the-shoulder catch to end the inning.
East's side had stunned looks on its face. Southern's side yelled in excitement over the amazing catch Davis just made. Southern still led after the inning, 2-1.
That seemed to fuel the Rams. First baseman Jodi Grant drew a walk from Tompkins. Tuttle struck out, but Melanie Berry, the Rams' left fielder, drew a walk. Susco struck out for the second out, but at the top of the order, Davis singled to load the bases for Loughran. Somehow, Hawtin figured Davis was far too off the base and as a senior, she had the green light to go after a baserunner if she felt she ventured too far away from a base.
This was the case with Davis, who after a pitch, found herself scurrying back to first as Hawtin threw a rocket to Brown in the hopes of picking her off.
And she did, all right ... just not the way you want to pick someone off. She put a perfect strike off Davis' helmet. The ricochet from the throw bounced back toward the pitcher's mound, but before Tompkins could retrieve the ball, Grant had scampered home on the errant throw to make it 3-1.
The Raiders would wriggle out of more trouble, but it was apparent Southern Regional had meant business. And maybe East was playing a flat note on this afternoon.
Manzo, though, was being cautious. He put his full trust in both Jannsch and Veesart to call a very good game. In the third inning, Iorio reached second on a forceout and an error by Tuttle, but Jannsch struck out the dangerous Hawtin to end the threat. In the fourth, Brown singled and pinch-runner Teresa Madden moved to third on back-to-back groundouts to second baseman Susco by Higley and Stump. But Jannsch got Ballantyne to groundout to Grant to end that threat.
Meanwhile, the Rams and Manzo were getting frustrated in the middle innings. Jannsch walked and third baseman Sharon Olkowski and Grant singled to load the bases with no outs in the third. But Tompkins, never known as an overwhelming strikeout pitcher, dug deep to strike out Tuttle again and Barry, then got Susco to groundout to Grice. In the fourth, Loughran singled with one out and one out later, Jannsch walked and Olkowski recahed on an error by the dependable Carlson to load the bases again. But Grant hit a flyout to Zarrillo and that threat went by the board.
The game was becoming one of missed opportunities. In the top of the fifth, East launched another rally. Carlson singled with one out and moved to second on a fielder's choice grounder by Grice that she beat the play at second. A wild pitch, one of the few mistakes Jannsch made on this day, moved the runners up to second and third. But Iorio hit a comebacker to Jannsch, who checked Carlson back to third then threw Iorio out for the second out, and Hawtin fanned again to end the inning.
Jannsch again came up as tall as her 5-foot-8 frame.
In the bottom of the fifth, Southern threatened again. Barry walked with one out and Susco followed with a bases on balls. It was Tompkins' eighth bases on balls in the game. Though that was a big-time problem for Tompkins when she was younger, she had figured out the strike zone by the time she was a senior. Just not on this day, though.
A forceout of Susco at second base put runners on first and third with two outs, setting up yet another bizarre moment of the game. Loughran lined a shot to right field for what should have been a single to make it 4-1. Enter Ballantyne, who picked the ball up on a couple of hops and fired the ball to Brown at first.
If you were scoring at home, the out went 9-to-3. Manzo had no speed demons at all on on his roster and Loughran being thrown out at first from right field by nearly two steps was clear evidence. The wind seemed to suck the air out of Southern's sails again.
And once again, East threatened to take command of the game in the top of the sixth. Jannsch got two groundouts to start the inning, but Stump singled and Ballantyne and Zarrillo walked to load the bases. The tying run was on second, the go-ahead run on first and it was getting later in the game.
Oh, and Carlson was coming to the plate. It was a tense time to say the least. I mean, any moment now, the Raiders are going to take command of this game ... right?
But on a 2-1 pitch, Carlson hit a grounder at Tuttle, who swallowed the grounder up and threw to Susco at second for the force to end the inning.
Another dodged bullet.
Maybe, by this point, East was getting tired of all the blown opportunities. The Raiders had left nine runners on base through six innings. The Rams had left 11 through five. The difference, though, was a simple two-run single or costly two-run error. It would take a break for East to get back into it.
In the sixth, though, the Rams made sure the Raiders weren't going to have that break anymore.
Veesart singled. Jannsch, who finished on the mound with three walks and four strikeouts, would get her second hit of the game, a single, and that got followed up by a single from Olkowski to load the bases with no outs. Once again, Tompkins was in trouble, but she struck out Grant and Tuttle, the latter hitter for the fourth straight time (Tompkins finished with seven strikeouts total), leaving it up to Barry.
After not putting a bat on the ball all afternoon long with two walks and a strikeout, Barry made contact. It was at Grice, who flubbed the grounder and as the ball went into no-man's land, Veesart and Jannsch scored to make it 5-1. Susco followed that up with a groundball that hancuffed Iorio at shortstop for another error that brought in Olkowski to make it 6-1.
The damage was done. By this point, I knew the zero in the loss column for East was all but gone.
But East being East that year, the Raiders weren't going to make it easy. Grice beat out an infield single. One out later, Hawtin put down a sacrifice bunt that Jannsch could not properly handle and threw away for an error to allow runners on second and third. Brown hit a foul ball that Grant kept venturing into foul territory. She made the catch, but because she stepped into dead-ball territory on the wide-open Southern field, the out was allowed, but Grice was told to trot home and Hawtin advanced to third.
That foulout, though, was nothing more than a footnote on this incredible afternoon. Higley hit a routine flyball to center that Davis tracked down and caught for the final out, sending Southern players into a frenzy afterward.
Southern had the 6-2 win in a game that saw East strand 10 runners and Southern 12. Southern's season would not be comparable to what East's Raiders would do the rest of the way, but for one afternoon in East's best season ever to that point, the Rams players, especially Jannsch and Veesart, had something to celebrate.
"They have (the A South) title pretty much wrapped up," Manzo said afterward.
"Yeah, but it takes that word unbeaten off of them," Veesart answered.
That it did. Southern had done what 18 other opponents could not do on this day. East's players, Dietrich (now Debbie Schwartz) and assistant coach Diane Morrissey quietly packed up their equipment and headed back to the bus to go back. I hung out with the happy Southern team and interviewed Jannsch, Veesart, Davis and Manzo, who had now claimed two huge victories in the last six days ... and this, I find out, came after he shaved off his mustache he had worn over his lip a long, long time.
He was dunked with water by Veesart, then gave his catcher a hug soon after. He pointed to a loss just 24 hours earlier to Jackson Memorial, 11-10, that may have straightened things out for this day.
Long after East had packed up and left, Southern athletic director Kim DeGraw-Cole came by to offer her congratulations to Manzo, and put a big hug on her coach as if he had just won a major tournament title. She knew what a win against a great East team meant.
Turns out this would be the biggest highlight win of the '89 season for the Rams. They lost to South in the OCT semifinals and did not go far in the other two postseason tournaments, though Jannsch and Veesart would be honored by the Observer as All-County players.
As for the East team, turns out 20 years after that loss that I found out what happened once the players entered the bus. According to Iorio, now Cristy Cenci, Dietrich was about to roast her players for all the runners that were left on base in that game only for Iorio to stop her and remind her that the team did get out to an 18-0 season. Iorio, in some ways, may have saved the rest of the season from having a cloud fixated over the team's head from that loss.
East would beat South in dramatic fashion for its first-ever state tournament win the next day and the day after that, beat Lacey, 8-3, to advance to the OCT title game for the second time in three years. East, as a matter of fact, would go 8-1 the rest of the year after that loss to Southern, falling 2-0 to Washington Township in the NJSIAA South Jersey Group IV semifinals. East would beat South, 9-8, with a run in the bottom of the seventh in Lakewood for the OCT title and its first-ever championship of any kind. And six days after that win, East won the Shore Conference Tournament title for the first time in emphatic fashion, 10-0, over Red Bank Catholic.
That win over RBC, coincidentally, was on the same Southern Regional field that it had lost to Southern on just 20 days earlier. East finished the year out 26-2 and with one of the greatest seasons in Ocean County softball season as Hawtin and Carlson would both earn All-State first-team honors at catcher and third base, respectively.
The 1989 Raiders seemed like they couldn't do any wrong that year.
But they weren't perfect.
The afternoon when Greta Jannsch threw well enough to win and hit a home run in the process was proof enough.
Friday, May 16, 2014
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
The very good ADs I've worked with
I have always said that the most frustrating job that I've come across in my 30 years in this business is dealing with high school athletic directors.
To me or any of my sportswriting brethren, their job is to make sure they get schedules to us and if there are any questions about rescheduled events due to rainouts or other weather-related issues, they have the answers in front of them. And if there was a firing or a new hiring, he or she needs to give the details as to what happened and be ready with a comment or three or four.
That's pretty much it. Other`than that, it's business as usual. They tend to what they have to do and I get on with what I need to do. But over these last 30 years, I've dealt with some real winners as ADs, the ADs who feel like they need their egos stroked to make themselves feel better or those ADs who were so nasty that you felt scorned for calling them.
I've had my share of such athletic directors, it'd make your head spin:
n One AD once told me when I called him late at night over a controversy at the end of a Shore Conference Tournament girls soccer match that involved his school in the tournament he was in charge of that he "was asleep and wasn't going to answer any questions." (1990)
n Another AD who you could never get over the phone after his day at work ... and it was questionable if you ever got him at work, but when it came to a baseball game he lost as head coach and he didn't like your story you did on the game ... preferably the lead ... he was so upset, he ripped you apart in a letter to the editor on the editorial page a few weeks later. (2007)
n An athletic director who I literally asked a question to at a sporting event and he literally walked away (1986).
n An AD who I called up early in my career about a scheduling conflict, then started drilling me as to why I was asking him these questions, then berating me. He passed away less than a year later in 1985.
n Oh, and the creme de la creme of ADs. He's Tom Procopio of Pinelands Regional, who in the early years of his tenure as the school's AD could not have been a nicer human being about anything involving the athletics department and Pinelands. That was until that day in February 1993 when our wrestling writer, John Earle Livingston, asked Pinelands' then-wrestling coach, Bill Savage, about his kids wrestling in an upcoming postseason tournament and the coach mentioned that a couple of kids would not be involved and when pressed by Earle, Savage answered that they were suspended by the school. Why? Because they admitted to egging the basketball coach's car.
Next thing you know, the story gets into the newspaper, Savage practically spends an entire day at the principal's office away from doing his job and the once-affable Procopio becomes a mean, horrible, unlikeable person who would not talk to anyone in our sports department ... yes, including me. He was the reason I personally hand-delivered envelopes with sheets in them pertaining to the rules of the annual Ocean County Softball Tournament for the last six years I helped run the event. I simply had no trust in sending the envelope to the man himself and if I sent the envelope to his coaches, I'm sure that my name would be sullied. And I'm pretty sure he asked other ADs why I was even involved in running the tournament.
I've always said that a good amount of the ADs I've ever dealt with in my 30-year career believe that God walks behind them. They've either been egotistical about their work or they come off like crotchety, old men.
Does the term, "shut up and do your job" mean anything? Yeah, a good amount of the ADs I ever dealt with were bad to terrible decisions to ever lead an athletic department. I am not afraid to say that ... it's why they've gotten a horrific rap from me over the years. And I don't want to hear about their day. As I said before, you got a job to do with me ... service me when I ask you to and service me with a goddamn smile. I don't give you grief ... you don't give me grief at all!
But I can't say that for every AD ... just a select and sadly memorable bunch. They won't make this list. That list is of the 10 best athletic directors I have ever dealt with in my career in my stays in Toms River, Key West and now Palatka. Because the really good ones need being reminded of why they were good at doing their jobs.
So here is that list:
10. Len Rivers (Lakewood): The longtime football coach at a number of outlets, including Lakewood High School in the late 1980s/early 1990s, took over as the school's athletic director. And if there was anything I needed from the man, he would easily get it for me. You see, Len Rivers was old school. He did the job in textbook manner -- in other words, he would answer your questions, he would try to do whatever he could to promote Lakewood High athletically and he was not afraid to engage in a conversation about any of the athletic programs, even if he wasn't well-schooled in them or if they weren't great. And at this particular time he was AD, most of the programs at the school weren't all that good. But he was very supportive of them all and remained positive in the face of possible negativity. He was a good man that I truly miss seeing.
9. Rich Russell (Coral Shores): The only athletic director from the Florida Keys to make this list, Russell was an assistant football coach and the head baseball coach when I was there between 1999-2002. And Russell had a reason to be pro-Coral Shores. First, he was a proud 1975 graduate of the school. Second, where we were located in Key West, it takes nearly 90 miles to get to his school. And trust me, it's a haul considering the speed limit there. But again, a positive man who always kept it real. Any question of the schedule, he had an answer. And he did it with a very monotone voice that I got used to. It was deep, but it was trustworthy. And even after I was gone from my time in Key West, I was still able to help him with getting a couple of his athletes on an all-state team. He knew I could help him and he knew the words I could say to persuade who needed to be persuaded. And he always was appreciative of the efforts I went to single out a kid for something positive over the time I was in Key West. Those are things you never will forget.
8. Bill Larkin (Point Pleasant Boro): Bill Larkin could be gruff at times. That I could understand. But considering the two previous athletic directors at the Boro weren't very good at "public relations" in their job, getting any information from Mr. Larkin was an absolute bonus. And the man was personable to have a conversation with. I definitely could not do that with the other two guys in that job previously. If I had a feature story I was doing on one of the athletes that I needed to get a quote from Larkin, he'd give it to me without question. He knew his athletes there, from the scrubbiest of scrubs to the biggest of them all -- and that was Christie Pearce Rampone, the best female athlete Ocean County ever saw and I ever covered. And when myself and Boro softball coach Ric Malta were taking over the county softball tournament in 1992, Larkin allowed us the access to his field ... even if it was not always in the best of condition. And the sign of a good AD? He would usually have Ric's back when it came to some coach or AD complaining about the tournament. Just as long as you were honest back to him. Both he and longtime athletic trainer Tim Spenard would be in Tim's training cart taking in games, no matter what outdoor sport. It was a pleasure to work with him.
7. Bob Grace (Point Pleasant Beach): Situated across the canal is the smallest high school in Ocean County. And when he took over as Point Beach's athletic director in the early 1990s, Bob Grace had worked at huge schools. So he knew he needed to be prepared for life in a small town high school. And if something didn't read right about little Point Pleasant Beach High School, he'd be the first one defending it, though he would never call you to tell you about it. He had that kind of a memory to ask you or remind you of what was written. Rarely was there ever any harm being done to his school in print, but at least I knew he was passionate about his job, his school, the kids under his jurisdiction in athletics and the community. That aside, he is one of the friendliest athletic directors I've ever been involved around. And when I did a column celebrating my 10th year in the business in 1994, he wrote me a letter congratulating me -- and calling me "Mark Blementhal" as the byline appeared in my first-ever bylined story in 1984. I have to admit it added a special touch.
6. Bernie Reider (Jackson Memorial): He is a legendary wrestling coach from the 1970s at Jackson Memorial and he had to take over the role as the school's AD after the death of the man in charge in 1985. But unlike the other guy who previously held the post, Bernie Reider could not have been a better gentleman to take over the role. Anything I needed ... anything ... he got it for me. He had a whole bunch of sports going on and he had a lot of different types of characters coaching in those sports, but yet, Bernie Reider handled it with a gentle touch, never had a negative thing to say unless you said something that sounded negative and then he'd quietly explain the situation. I had that happen to me after a Jackson wrestling match in the Shore Conference Tournament in 1989 when a kid just inexplicably didn't show up to wrestle and one of his teammates was beyond mad at his teammate and I wrote about it. It wasn't coach Al Aires who called me ... it was Bernie Reider, telling me it was not such a positive thing to write and that I didn't know the whole situation. Well I told him I was doing my job and how important his absence was to his team's not winning and we had a good conversation from there. Bernie Reider was like the understanding uncle you could turn to when things got crazy in the world. Too bad there weren't as many Bernie Reiders out there that I could deal with in my time in this business.
5. Ralph Carretta (Jackson Memorial): When Bernie Reider stepped down as AD, it was going to take someone very, very special to fill the position. Enter Ralph Carretta. I knew nothing about the man when he came into the job in 1993. But to my surprise, he was well-versed with all the sports at JMHS. And when I needed something from him, this man who looked a lot like character actor Dan Hadaya was there to get the information. He is one of the easiest conversations I've ever had and at a time when most of the ADs were acting like, well, crotchety old men for no reason at all, here was Ralph Carretta able to schmooze and make sense of a lot of things. He took on a lot of the same character-type coaches that Reider dealt with and he did it just as well. Were there complaints about how things got handled by him from the other coaches privately to me? Sure. They liked Bernie a whole lot. Bernie Reider was going to be a tough act to follow. But all of them knew in the end, Carretta had their backs. And he had my back in one very memorable episode that I will never stop thanking him and another AD on this list for. That's later on.
4. Ron Whitehurst (Interlachen): Ron, like Rich Russell at Coral Shores, is a proud alum of the school he works for now, Interlachen High. And before he got into teaching and then coaching, he was a businessman. I think that certainly helped him become a little more acclimated into the job of athletic director when Doug Feltner stepped down in late 2009. He rarely complains about things involving his school. He's one of the most positive sports coaches you will ever come across, whether he was coaching volleyball, weightlifting, football and, still, softball. Whitehurst is a big ol' teddy bear type that can be brutally honest with you about subjects. That's just him. But I've never met as big a math and numbers geek like myself than him. And he knows his kids by uniform numbers better than anyone I've ever met. He can ramble off stats off the top of his head like no one I've ever known before or most likely after him. The man always seems to have an answer at the top of his head for anything I have. And oh, can the guy tell a story. Personable to say the least and he never holds a grudge. All those are the mark of a great AD -- even if he's a recent guy who took on the job and may not have had the training to be an AD before he got the job. He's just been a natural at it.
3. Terry Goodwin (Peniel Baptist): In looking at it, Terry Goodwin is the same guy as Ron Whitehurst, but has the advantage over him because he's simply done it five years longer. He played athletics at Palatka South and Palatka High and at nearby St. Johns River Community (State) College. He's also a youth pastor. Goodwin has a good understanding of how a small school like little Peniel works. He rarely has a bad thing to say unless it has to do with the status of a program, simply for numbers reasons. That's how small Peniel is. But you won't find a better role model at a small school better than Terry Goodwin. He always remains positive with the program even if it has gone through some dark times. He has always said that whatever bad takes place that things will get better. And in the 2013-14 school year, those positive thoughts were rewarded in a great way. The volleyball team he coached reached the state tournament for the first time in nine years and won a state tournament match against Tallahassee FAMU, the first state tournament win in any sport in Peniel's history. And in the spring, the softball team stunned state Top 10-ranked Lecanto Seven Rivers Christian for its first-ever district tournament championship. The man wears a lot of hats at the school, as an assistant in baseball and the head coach of the boys basketball and volleyball programs. But in spite of his being active, he never ceases to amaze in the job he does in juggling everything he does at Peniel. He's the real pillar of strength at that school.
2. Bill Lundy (Toms River East/Toms River North): Now trust me when I say this -- Bill Lundy is not the most affable person you will come across when it comes to his job. Over the years when he was the AD at two of the three Toms River schools, he and I would get into "discussions" over things that showed in the newspaper or the "attitudes" of his coaches. But when it came to explaining things that had to do with his job, no one in my career was better at it than he was. It was as if he was born to do this job. He knew the ins and outs of the AD job and that's why he was really, really good at it. He also knew how to smooth over rough edges with others within his job. I can remember the day after the controversy involving the girls soccer match I mentioned above. He helped to chair a committee on what to do with the situation and that afternoon, he explained the whole process, from start to finish. That's how good he was at the job -- he could explain anything and do it in layman's terms. He was very good at rules interpretation. So I was never afraid to come to him to ask anything that came to any sport and how the Shore Conference handled matters. He was a terrific communicator and that was needed when I dealt with numerous ADs who simply weren't.
1. Kim DeGraw-Cole (Southern Regional): I will make this statement and I hope no athletic director takes it negatively -- I wish every AD was like Kim DeGraw-Cole. When I first met her in 1984, she was a co-athletic director with a guy named Ben DeFonzo, but pretty soon, the job became hers and though you might wonder why it was a co-AD situation in the first place, I soon found out she could handle the job on her own. She always remained positive and became the face of Southern athletics for over two decades, most of which happening while I was at the Observer. There was one moment where she said if I had reported on something (which turned out to be false in the end anyway) she would never talk to me again, but I told her I just don't do that without proof of something. We had a great reporter-AD relationship that lasted all 15 years I was at the paper. And if she wasn't around to have an answer to a scheduling issue, she always made sure April, her assistant, would have the answer. Always proper in handling things the same way Bill Lundy was. And she did it while wearing a number of hats. She was also the Shore Conference Tournament director for both field hockey and basketball. In 1995 while co-running the softball OCT with Toms River East coach Debbie Schwartz, we were still without the new lights on East's field. We had to break up the quarterfinal round of the tournament into two doubleheaders. The second of those was on a Tuesday. So to help with the situation, I called up both she and Jackson Memorial AD Ralph Carretta and asked both of the ADs if they can have their teams ready to start at 3 p.m. instead of the normal 3:30 p.m. and we'd start the second game (Central and Toms River East) at 5:30 so it would give us a fighting chance to get both games in before losing daylight. Again, DeGraw-Cole didn't bat an eye and neither did Carretta. And both games got in that day. To this day, that pair will never know how much it meant to me to get those games in under difficult circumstances.
But Kim DeGraw-Cole was also into inclusion as well -- if she knew you, chances are she wanted you to help her in something. That even included me ... she knew my prowess of doing the public address for the Ocean County Tournament, and so I got to do the PA for the SCT field hockey championship games between 1990-93 and the 1993 SCT softball final between Central Regional and Toms River North and again in 1994 when Allentown played Central in Norm Selby's last game as Central coach, one his Golden Eagles won, 7-0. And no AD I've ever known was more behind her head coaches than Kim DeGraw-Cole was. Legendary and late girls basketball coach Kathy Snyder always spoke highly of her boss. Most every coach was proud to work for her.
I was most proud to work with her. She absolutely made my job easy and a joy. As I said, if every AD was like Kim DeGraw-Cole, this job would be easy every single day.
To me or any of my sportswriting brethren, their job is to make sure they get schedules to us and if there are any questions about rescheduled events due to rainouts or other weather-related issues, they have the answers in front of them. And if there was a firing or a new hiring, he or she needs to give the details as to what happened and be ready with a comment or three or four.
That's pretty much it. Other`than that, it's business as usual. They tend to what they have to do and I get on with what I need to do. But over these last 30 years, I've dealt with some real winners as ADs, the ADs who feel like they need their egos stroked to make themselves feel better or those ADs who were so nasty that you felt scorned for calling them.
I've had my share of such athletic directors, it'd make your head spin:
n One AD once told me when I called him late at night over a controversy at the end of a Shore Conference Tournament girls soccer match that involved his school in the tournament he was in charge of that he "was asleep and wasn't going to answer any questions." (1990)
n Another AD who you could never get over the phone after his day at work ... and it was questionable if you ever got him at work, but when it came to a baseball game he lost as head coach and he didn't like your story you did on the game ... preferably the lead ... he was so upset, he ripped you apart in a letter to the editor on the editorial page a few weeks later. (2007)
n An athletic director who I literally asked a question to at a sporting event and he literally walked away (1986).
n An AD who I called up early in my career about a scheduling conflict, then started drilling me as to why I was asking him these questions, then berating me. He passed away less than a year later in 1985.
n Oh, and the creme de la creme of ADs. He's Tom Procopio of Pinelands Regional, who in the early years of his tenure as the school's AD could not have been a nicer human being about anything involving the athletics department and Pinelands. That was until that day in February 1993 when our wrestling writer, John Earle Livingston, asked Pinelands' then-wrestling coach, Bill Savage, about his kids wrestling in an upcoming postseason tournament and the coach mentioned that a couple of kids would not be involved and when pressed by Earle, Savage answered that they were suspended by the school. Why? Because they admitted to egging the basketball coach's car.
Next thing you know, the story gets into the newspaper, Savage practically spends an entire day at the principal's office away from doing his job and the once-affable Procopio becomes a mean, horrible, unlikeable person who would not talk to anyone in our sports department ... yes, including me. He was the reason I personally hand-delivered envelopes with sheets in them pertaining to the rules of the annual Ocean County Softball Tournament for the last six years I helped run the event. I simply had no trust in sending the envelope to the man himself and if I sent the envelope to his coaches, I'm sure that my name would be sullied. And I'm pretty sure he asked other ADs why I was even involved in running the tournament.
I've always said that a good amount of the ADs I've ever dealt with in my 30-year career believe that God walks behind them. They've either been egotistical about their work or they come off like crotchety, old men.
Does the term, "shut up and do your job" mean anything? Yeah, a good amount of the ADs I ever dealt with were bad to terrible decisions to ever lead an athletic department. I am not afraid to say that ... it's why they've gotten a horrific rap from me over the years. And I don't want to hear about their day. As I said before, you got a job to do with me ... service me when I ask you to and service me with a goddamn smile. I don't give you grief ... you don't give me grief at all!
But I can't say that for every AD ... just a select and sadly memorable bunch. They won't make this list. That list is of the 10 best athletic directors I have ever dealt with in my career in my stays in Toms River, Key West and now Palatka. Because the really good ones need being reminded of why they were good at doing their jobs.
So here is that list:
10. Len Rivers (Lakewood): The longtime football coach at a number of outlets, including Lakewood High School in the late 1980s/early 1990s, took over as the school's athletic director. And if there was anything I needed from the man, he would easily get it for me. You see, Len Rivers was old school. He did the job in textbook manner -- in other words, he would answer your questions, he would try to do whatever he could to promote Lakewood High athletically and he was not afraid to engage in a conversation about any of the athletic programs, even if he wasn't well-schooled in them or if they weren't great. And at this particular time he was AD, most of the programs at the school weren't all that good. But he was very supportive of them all and remained positive in the face of possible negativity. He was a good man that I truly miss seeing.
9. Rich Russell (Coral Shores): The only athletic director from the Florida Keys to make this list, Russell was an assistant football coach and the head baseball coach when I was there between 1999-2002. And Russell had a reason to be pro-Coral Shores. First, he was a proud 1975 graduate of the school. Second, where we were located in Key West, it takes nearly 90 miles to get to his school. And trust me, it's a haul considering the speed limit there. But again, a positive man who always kept it real. Any question of the schedule, he had an answer. And he did it with a very monotone voice that I got used to. It was deep, but it was trustworthy. And even after I was gone from my time in Key West, I was still able to help him with getting a couple of his athletes on an all-state team. He knew I could help him and he knew the words I could say to persuade who needed to be persuaded. And he always was appreciative of the efforts I went to single out a kid for something positive over the time I was in Key West. Those are things you never will forget.
8. Bill Larkin (Point Pleasant Boro): Bill Larkin could be gruff at times. That I could understand. But considering the two previous athletic directors at the Boro weren't very good at "public relations" in their job, getting any information from Mr. Larkin was an absolute bonus. And the man was personable to have a conversation with. I definitely could not do that with the other two guys in that job previously. If I had a feature story I was doing on one of the athletes that I needed to get a quote from Larkin, he'd give it to me without question. He knew his athletes there, from the scrubbiest of scrubs to the biggest of them all -- and that was Christie Pearce Rampone, the best female athlete Ocean County ever saw and I ever covered. And when myself and Boro softball coach Ric Malta were taking over the county softball tournament in 1992, Larkin allowed us the access to his field ... even if it was not always in the best of condition. And the sign of a good AD? He would usually have Ric's back when it came to some coach or AD complaining about the tournament. Just as long as you were honest back to him. Both he and longtime athletic trainer Tim Spenard would be in Tim's training cart taking in games, no matter what outdoor sport. It was a pleasure to work with him.
7. Bob Grace (Point Pleasant Beach): Situated across the canal is the smallest high school in Ocean County. And when he took over as Point Beach's athletic director in the early 1990s, Bob Grace had worked at huge schools. So he knew he needed to be prepared for life in a small town high school. And if something didn't read right about little Point Pleasant Beach High School, he'd be the first one defending it, though he would never call you to tell you about it. He had that kind of a memory to ask you or remind you of what was written. Rarely was there ever any harm being done to his school in print, but at least I knew he was passionate about his job, his school, the kids under his jurisdiction in athletics and the community. That aside, he is one of the friendliest athletic directors I've ever been involved around. And when I did a column celebrating my 10th year in the business in 1994, he wrote me a letter congratulating me -- and calling me "Mark Blementhal" as the byline appeared in my first-ever bylined story in 1984. I have to admit it added a special touch.
6. Bernie Reider (Jackson Memorial): He is a legendary wrestling coach from the 1970s at Jackson Memorial and he had to take over the role as the school's AD after the death of the man in charge in 1985. But unlike the other guy who previously held the post, Bernie Reider could not have been a better gentleman to take over the role. Anything I needed ... anything ... he got it for me. He had a whole bunch of sports going on and he had a lot of different types of characters coaching in those sports, but yet, Bernie Reider handled it with a gentle touch, never had a negative thing to say unless you said something that sounded negative and then he'd quietly explain the situation. I had that happen to me after a Jackson wrestling match in the Shore Conference Tournament in 1989 when a kid just inexplicably didn't show up to wrestle and one of his teammates was beyond mad at his teammate and I wrote about it. It wasn't coach Al Aires who called me ... it was Bernie Reider, telling me it was not such a positive thing to write and that I didn't know the whole situation. Well I told him I was doing my job and how important his absence was to his team's not winning and we had a good conversation from there. Bernie Reider was like the understanding uncle you could turn to when things got crazy in the world. Too bad there weren't as many Bernie Reiders out there that I could deal with in my time in this business.
5. Ralph Carretta (Jackson Memorial): When Bernie Reider stepped down as AD, it was going to take someone very, very special to fill the position. Enter Ralph Carretta. I knew nothing about the man when he came into the job in 1993. But to my surprise, he was well-versed with all the sports at JMHS. And when I needed something from him, this man who looked a lot like character actor Dan Hadaya was there to get the information. He is one of the easiest conversations I've ever had and at a time when most of the ADs were acting like, well, crotchety old men for no reason at all, here was Ralph Carretta able to schmooze and make sense of a lot of things. He took on a lot of the same character-type coaches that Reider dealt with and he did it just as well. Were there complaints about how things got handled by him from the other coaches privately to me? Sure. They liked Bernie a whole lot. Bernie Reider was going to be a tough act to follow. But all of them knew in the end, Carretta had their backs. And he had my back in one very memorable episode that I will never stop thanking him and another AD on this list for. That's later on.
4. Ron Whitehurst (Interlachen): Ron, like Rich Russell at Coral Shores, is a proud alum of the school he works for now, Interlachen High. And before he got into teaching and then coaching, he was a businessman. I think that certainly helped him become a little more acclimated into the job of athletic director when Doug Feltner stepped down in late 2009. He rarely complains about things involving his school. He's one of the most positive sports coaches you will ever come across, whether he was coaching volleyball, weightlifting, football and, still, softball. Whitehurst is a big ol' teddy bear type that can be brutally honest with you about subjects. That's just him. But I've never met as big a math and numbers geek like myself than him. And he knows his kids by uniform numbers better than anyone I've ever met. He can ramble off stats off the top of his head like no one I've ever known before or most likely after him. The man always seems to have an answer at the top of his head for anything I have. And oh, can the guy tell a story. Personable to say the least and he never holds a grudge. All those are the mark of a great AD -- even if he's a recent guy who took on the job and may not have had the training to be an AD before he got the job. He's just been a natural at it.
3. Terry Goodwin (Peniel Baptist): In looking at it, Terry Goodwin is the same guy as Ron Whitehurst, but has the advantage over him because he's simply done it five years longer. He played athletics at Palatka South and Palatka High and at nearby St. Johns River Community (State) College. He's also a youth pastor. Goodwin has a good understanding of how a small school like little Peniel works. He rarely has a bad thing to say unless it has to do with the status of a program, simply for numbers reasons. That's how small Peniel is. But you won't find a better role model at a small school better than Terry Goodwin. He always remains positive with the program even if it has gone through some dark times. He has always said that whatever bad takes place that things will get better. And in the 2013-14 school year, those positive thoughts were rewarded in a great way. The volleyball team he coached reached the state tournament for the first time in nine years and won a state tournament match against Tallahassee FAMU, the first state tournament win in any sport in Peniel's history. And in the spring, the softball team stunned state Top 10-ranked Lecanto Seven Rivers Christian for its first-ever district tournament championship. The man wears a lot of hats at the school, as an assistant in baseball and the head coach of the boys basketball and volleyball programs. But in spite of his being active, he never ceases to amaze in the job he does in juggling everything he does at Peniel. He's the real pillar of strength at that school.
2. Bill Lundy (Toms River East/Toms River North): Now trust me when I say this -- Bill Lundy is not the most affable person you will come across when it comes to his job. Over the years when he was the AD at two of the three Toms River schools, he and I would get into "discussions" over things that showed in the newspaper or the "attitudes" of his coaches. But when it came to explaining things that had to do with his job, no one in my career was better at it than he was. It was as if he was born to do this job. He knew the ins and outs of the AD job and that's why he was really, really good at it. He also knew how to smooth over rough edges with others within his job. I can remember the day after the controversy involving the girls soccer match I mentioned above. He helped to chair a committee on what to do with the situation and that afternoon, he explained the whole process, from start to finish. That's how good he was at the job -- he could explain anything and do it in layman's terms. He was very good at rules interpretation. So I was never afraid to come to him to ask anything that came to any sport and how the Shore Conference handled matters. He was a terrific communicator and that was needed when I dealt with numerous ADs who simply weren't.
1. Kim DeGraw-Cole (Southern Regional): I will make this statement and I hope no athletic director takes it negatively -- I wish every AD was like Kim DeGraw-Cole. When I first met her in 1984, she was a co-athletic director with a guy named Ben DeFonzo, but pretty soon, the job became hers and though you might wonder why it was a co-AD situation in the first place, I soon found out she could handle the job on her own. She always remained positive and became the face of Southern athletics for over two decades, most of which happening while I was at the Observer. There was one moment where she said if I had reported on something (which turned out to be false in the end anyway) she would never talk to me again, but I told her I just don't do that without proof of something. We had a great reporter-AD relationship that lasted all 15 years I was at the paper. And if she wasn't around to have an answer to a scheduling issue, she always made sure April, her assistant, would have the answer. Always proper in handling things the same way Bill Lundy was. And she did it while wearing a number of hats. She was also the Shore Conference Tournament director for both field hockey and basketball. In 1995 while co-running the softball OCT with Toms River East coach Debbie Schwartz, we were still without the new lights on East's field. We had to break up the quarterfinal round of the tournament into two doubleheaders. The second of those was on a Tuesday. So to help with the situation, I called up both she and Jackson Memorial AD Ralph Carretta and asked both of the ADs if they can have their teams ready to start at 3 p.m. instead of the normal 3:30 p.m. and we'd start the second game (Central and Toms River East) at 5:30 so it would give us a fighting chance to get both games in before losing daylight. Again, DeGraw-Cole didn't bat an eye and neither did Carretta. And both games got in that day. To this day, that pair will never know how much it meant to me to get those games in under difficult circumstances.
But Kim DeGraw-Cole was also into inclusion as well -- if she knew you, chances are she wanted you to help her in something. That even included me ... she knew my prowess of doing the public address for the Ocean County Tournament, and so I got to do the PA for the SCT field hockey championship games between 1990-93 and the 1993 SCT softball final between Central Regional and Toms River North and again in 1994 when Allentown played Central in Norm Selby's last game as Central coach, one his Golden Eagles won, 7-0. And no AD I've ever known was more behind her head coaches than Kim DeGraw-Cole was. Legendary and late girls basketball coach Kathy Snyder always spoke highly of her boss. Most every coach was proud to work for her.
I was most proud to work with her. She absolutely made my job easy and a joy. As I said, if every AD was like Kim DeGraw-Cole, this job would be easy every single day.
Friday, March 14, 2014
The drama that was Manasquan-Point Boro girls basketball
The Jersey Shore gave me and most anyone growing up there plenty of sports rivalries to talk about over the years: Brick and Brick Memorial, Central Regional and Lacey, all three Toms River schools against one another and Southern Regional against all three Toms Rivers.
It was a great time to be a journalist cutting his teeth in the business. But one rivalry stood out above the rest in my opinion.
Point Pleasant Boro against Manasquan. The two schools had fierce sports backings and when the two got together in sports for divisional matchups, it was "must-see-in-person" stuff, especially in sports the two schools were evenly matched up in ... even in football where the Big Blue Warriors and coach Vic Kubu had the edge over coach Al Saner's Panthers.
But for all the years the two schools faced one another in athletics, never had they faced one another in the state tournament. That's because the so-called borderline between Central Jersey and South Jersey was the Monmouth-Ocean border. So the two schools -- separated by all of four miles -- were also separated by an imaginary line with Monmouth-based Manasquan playing in Central Jersey and Point Boro playing in South Jersey.
That all changed, though, on Tuesday night, March 5, 1991, when the Panthers and Big Blue won sectional Group II championships in girls basketball. Suddenly, they were paired up in a game that really counted.
The Big Blue of coach Dick Johnson was used to getting this far in postseason play. This Central Jersey Group II title was Manasquan's fourth in a five-year period and the program won back-to-back overall NJSIAA Group II championships in 1986-87 and 1987-88. And Johnson's team, which was 22-5 at this point, had a number of solid contributors, led by 5-foot-9 senior forward Janet Beaver, 5-5 junior all-everything guard Dara Hahn, 5-8 junior forward Jen Kackos, who did a lot of the dirty work under the boards for Johnson's team, and 5-2 senior point guard Meaghan Mahoney.
At Manasquan, the Big Blue never rebuilt ... they reloaded.
And though to say the two schools are "rivals" would not be accurate at that time on a basketball court. The Big Blue had upended coach Peter Cooke's Panthers 14 straight times -- 14 straight! But that all changed on January 31, 1991 when Boro finally broke through the stranglehold with a 55-51 win at home behind 19 points from senior point guard Wendi Pearce and 18 points from younger sister and sophomore guard Christie Pearce.
Ah, yes -- the Pearce sisters, the best sister combination I've ever watched in athletic competition. Both made things look easy in whatever sport they played in and basketball was no different. Wendi Pearce was the undoubted leader of this Panther club and she ran the offense like a conductor runs a symphony minus the baton.
And a lot of the times, the plays were going to her younger sister, who by now had done something that no Ocean County girls basketball player had done before -- reach 1,000 career points by her sophomore season. I was there when Pearce got her 1,000th career point almost two weeks earlier in a Shore Conference Tournament first-round loss to Toms River South. Other than an inconsistent jump shot -- or at times a non-existent jump shot -- Christie Pearce had all the tools to be an amazing basketball player. If you gave her an opening to the basket, she was taking it and if you put the ball down on the floor, forget it ... she was swiping you like a cat burglar in the dark.
A taller Sterling team found out a lot about how good Christie Pearce was and how much she matured in a year when the Panthers and Sterling played in the NJSIAA South Jersey Group II title game in Pennsauken on March 5. She scored 25 points, pulled down 12 rebounds and had seven steals in that 53-30 blowout of the two-time defending NJSIAA Group II champion Silver Knights, exactly one year after Point Boro was hammered by Sterling, 86-46, in the SJ II semifinal round.
But the Panthers, who were also 22-5 going in, didn't get to this point by just the two sisters alone. They had some good supporting cast talent behind them in shooting guard Meaghie Campacci, a sophomore who had transferred that year into Point Boro, sophomore Karen Brzyski, who at 5-5 had to play a power forward position, and senior Krissy Lubas, who at 5-8 was relegated to be the team's center. And if Lubas got into any foul trouble, Cooke was not afraid to call on two taller players to go in -- 5-10 junior Tara Haugh and 5-9 junior Melissa Devlin.
Though Manasquan's starting lineup was not as tall as Sterling's -- the frontcourt being Beaver, Kackos and 5-9 sophomore Sharon Ormsbee -- they were certainly more active. As a matter of fact, going into the final, Johnson, finishing up his 15th year as Manasquan's coach, claimed that his team was not active enough in the 55-51 loss to Point Boro just over a month earlier and that they needed to penetrate the Boro defense a little more this time around.
With this being the backdrop -- and the two coach's admiration for one another (yes, the two admired one another and at one time, Cooke was the freshman coach for Johnson's team in the early 1980s) -- the game was set two days after the sectional championships on Thursday, March 7, 1991.
And the site for this rivalry between two schools situated four miles apart, the NJSIAA chose ... Hamilton East-Steinert High School in Mercer County, practically the other side of the state and about 45 minutes away for both competitors.
Couldn't get spacious Brick Memorial or Red Bank Regional to host the game or even Brookdale Community College or Monmouth College to host. Nooooooooo! Instead, the NJSIAA -- which would give Southern Regional and Toms River North a waiver to play the NJSIAA South Jersey Group IV championship game in back-to-back years at Toms River East instead of a far-away gymnasium in 1996 and '97 -- forced the schools to travel out of their way to near Trenton to play this important game.
Turns out the reason why they couldn't do this back in 1991 was the state semifinal sites were set compared to a sectional championship and the sectional title game sites were more "flexible" than a state semifinal site.
Whatever. The game was getting played at Steinert no matter what.
The good news before the game was that the night before, I had hit four out of six numbers on one of my Lotto tickets and I was going to the 7-Eleven that I bought the ticket beforehand to collect $68 in winnings. Yay me! It is one of only three times in my entire life that I got four numbers on a Lotto ticket. So some of that money was invested into gas at a staggering 91 cents a gallon. (Oy vey, the good ol' days!)
The game started at 6:30 p.m. because the Group IV semifinal matchup was to take place after the Group II semifinal sometime after 8 p.m. Good thing my game was early so I can get back to the newspaper office and write the story without the fear of dealing with a deadline. After all, this was the only show in town with spring sports not starting up until April 1.
I had left from the 7-Eleven at around 4:30 that afternoon and after getting my gas, it took me almost an hour to get to Steinert High, not located far off of I-195 near the Trenton area. Both teams had already arrived and I had set up on press row for the game. They had a very large table for the writers to cover games, something that I woefully miss having for Florida-based basketball games. What they give you at those games is pathetic and most of the time, I have to go cover the games sitting high up in the bleachers at the midcourt line.
Well before the game, I talked with both Johnson and Cooke. While Johnson was a confident, assured coach who had been there, done that with his team and had said his team was as prepared as it was going to be, Cooke, whose repertoire was somewhere between tough talk and sarcasm, had a little bit of doubt. But in his eighth year as the Panthers' coach, he had them as ready. He had even said the night before, "We're certainly not confident after losing to a team 14 straight times. If anything, we're the underdog, which is what I think we deserve to be."
And Cooke was right -- when you constantly lose to the same team over and over and over again, then beat them after losing over and over and over again, you have something to prove and that one win was not a fluke. His leader, Wendi Pearce, was my best quote on his team, so how she did in this game would give me an indication of how well my story may write itself out.
For a game that was 45 minutes away from both schools, the gymnasium was packed with enthusiastic fans from both schools. Point Boro brought an entourage of some of my favorite people in town I knew over the years. And the student fan base that came dressed up for the occasion in black paint was loud and boisterous. And they had someone in mind to pick on the entire night.
It was Beaver, the tall blonde who played with the intensity of a guy. Point Boro male and female students were going to have a field day for the young lady even as undeserving as the ribbing was.
As for the game, the Big Blue knew what they were going to do -- they were going to play the two Pearces in a triangle and force the other three starters to try and beat them on this evening. And though Point Boro wanted to go uptempo, the defense it was facing and the tall Big Blue players were not going to allow the Panthers to do so. And so the game became a low-scoring affair. But the Big Blue struggled, too, as the Panther defense stole everything the Big Blue put on the floor. Coming into the game, the Panthers had come up with 59 steals and had forced 88 turnovers in three state tournament games.
Manasquan was going to be no different to Point Boro than all the others.
And sure is day is light and night is dark, every time Beaver touched the ball, she was "warmly" greeted by Boro fans who had no problem grilling her all night long. You can see on her face her frustration when a play went wrong, but other than the few occasions, she held her composure.
By the time we got to late in the game, the Panthers and Big Blue had traded leads 11 times and had 10 ties in this one. Manasquan carried a 38-35 lead with just over four minutes to go, but the Pearces had started to figure things out. If they could not get to the basket, at least collect fouls against Manasquan and get to the free-throw line. And so Wendi Pearce was able to draw the fourth foul on Kackos, who was having a terrific game. She calmly nailed two free throws to make it 38-37. Campacci was able to cause a foul on Hahn and hit one of two free throws to tie it. Then after a turnover, Christie Pearce was fouled by Beaver and gave the Panthers the lead at 39-38 with 2:57 to go.
The Big Blue, were going to be deliberate, though. Guarding against getting out into a foot race with the Panthers all night -- a battle they knew they would lose the moment the Panthers got any hint of that -- they whittled the clock down to under two minutes, then under one as Johnson called a pair of timeouts in that period. With 56 seconds left, Christie Pearce picked up her third foul against Hahn. Amid the frenzy of the loud Point Boro fan base, Hahn missed the first free throw, but was able to bury the second to tie it up at 39-all.
Now it was up to Point Boro to finish the deal and send themselves to the state Group II championship game for the first time under Cooke. From the timeout, the Panthers set up the play and put it into the hands of Wendi Pearce. But Pearce had nowhere to go, Manasquan cutting off all the alleys to the basket. As time ran out, she was forced to throw up a high-arcing 3-point shot. It missed the mark and the game was now headed to overtime.
The Big Blue got the ball off the tip to start the overtime and cashed in as Mahoney grabbed a rebound off a missed shot and put the ball back in for the 41-39 lead. After a Boro miss, the Big Blue had the ball again, but Campacci came up with a steal and fed Wendi Pearce. The assured standout then took the pass from Campacci and buried a 15-footer to tie it at 41-all, sending Boro's fan base into a frenzy.
Mahoney then came up big again when she took the ball to the basket on the next Big Blue possession and got Devlin in the air for her fifth foul, forcing her out of the game. She hit two free throws to give Manasquan the lead back at 43-41. But Christie Pearce found an opening and drew a foul. She hit two free throws to tie it up at 43 with less than a minute left in the overtime.
Another timeout by Johnson set up what he was hoping was the final shot and go-ahead basket. And so the Big Blue worked the ball around until they got it to Beaver. As Boro fans mockingly shouted at her, Beaver hit a short jumper just over Lubas and suddenly, Manasquan had a two-point lead with 19 seconds left.
I can still see Cooke to my left working the white board with assistant coach Bill Moore for what was the final play. I knew one thing -- it was going to be a Pearce once again taking the final shot. From the huddle, the Panthers inbounded under their own basket and brought it up the court. The ball landed in the hands of Christie Pearce, who during the season averaged almost 21 points a game. She had struggled all night against Manasquan's specialized defense against her, but now she had the chance to tie it and send it to another overtime. She took it to the hole as the clock counted down.
She floated a shot up that missed the mark. The ball was still loose as time clicked away ... four, three, two. Suddenly, it landed in Campacci's hands. She had a pair of far-taller Big Blue pursuing her. She put a floater up that would've threatened to touch flying ducks if this were outside.
And as the clock hit zero, the ball swished through the net.
Double overtime and another three minutes put up on the clock. No matter how this was going to end, this was already the best girls basketball game I had ever covered.
Both teams were getting exhausted, but more importantly, a lot of key players in this game were on the verge of fouling out. Once again, the Big Blue won the center tip and 16 seconds in, Hahn took a shot. She missed, but the aggressive Kackos, who would finish this one with 19 points and eight rebounds, yanked down the offensive rebound and was fouled by Christie Pearce. It was her fifth foul of the night and that meant disqualification.
It also meant the best player on the court -- for that matter, the best female athlete I have ever covered -- was out of the game. Kackos nailed both free throws to give the Big Blue the lead again at 47-45.
On the next possession, Brzyski decided to take over where Christie Pearce left off. She took the ball to the hoop and caused a foul on Kackos. It was her fifth foul and a huge ovation came from the Boro crowd as she came off the court. But Brzyski could only hit one free throw. However, on the miss of the second free throw, it was 5-2 Campacci to the rescue again. She played like she was half a foot taller, missing the first shot, rebounding, missing the second shot, then rebounding again and connecting on the third shot to give the Panthers their first overtime lead, 48-47 with under two minutes to go.
At the other end, Hahn, who had 19 points, delivered a basket, to give the Big Blue the lead back at 49-48, only to have Haugh respond at the other end to make it 50-49.
Something was telling me this was not going to a third overtime.
It stayed like that until Beaver collected a missed shot by Hahn and scored on the putback and was fouled by Lubas in the process. With 57 seconds left, she finished out the three-point play to give the Big Blue a 52-50 lead. All night long, Manasquan just flustered Point Boro on the boards at both sides of the court.
The Panthers had set it up to get the ball to Haugh, who had scored at that end on the previous possession. Sounded like a good idea. She, however, missed the short jumper and Ormsbee was fouled on the rebound. Having not scored a point all night, I figured like most everyone else that Ormsbee would be nervous. But she sank the first free throw to make it a three-point lead. Then she missed the second ... but Hahn was there and was fouled with 31 seconds left.
Hahn calmly hit her two free throws and the Panthers were in trouble down five. But Wendi Pearce wasted little time at the other end -- she drove to the basket for the layup to cut the lead to three points with 21 seconds left.
The Panthers called one last timeout and set up to try to steal the ball back. They couldn't this time and Hahn was fouled by Campacci with 17 seconds to go. One free throw would cause damage to Boro's hopes.
But Hahn missed both. Haugh rebounded and the Panthers had one more chance to tie the game. The ball ended up in Haugh's hands again and from behind the 3-point arc, she let fly as time wound down.
The ball hit the front end of the iron. Ormsbee rebounded it and the clock ran out.
Just like that, it was over. The Panthers fell short by three points of moving on to a Group II final date with Harrison, one that Manasquan would win two days later for a state championship.
I didn't have to encapsulate what I just saw. I knew this was an epic that I was glad to be a part of as a reporter. But after adding up the statistics of this one, it was my duty to do the interviews, first Johnson, who was proud of his kids, but didn't think either side deserved to lose it, saying of Boro, "I just felt really bad about (them losing)."
And he was genuine. I talked with Cooke, who was also proud of his players afterward. "It was a dead-even game," he told me. "We just came up short a little bit. We had a good year. Nobody can take that away from us."
No, no one would. A lot of teams would've killed for a 22-6 season and a state sectional title. But it was over. And I wanted to find Wendi Pearce to talk to her. But I couldn't. She was balling her eyes out, knowing she gave everything she had, but it wasn't enough. Manasquan's defense had bottled both she and her sister, holding Christie Pearce to only 12 points on 2-of-14 shooting from the field. It was Brzyski who led the Panthers in scoring on this night with 13 points.
I had left at the same time as the Boro bus pulling out of the parking lot ahead of me. But moments after the bus began to roll, it stopped.
Someone came off of it. I recognized who it was. It was Wendi Pearce. She ran off the bus and to a dark side that no one could see her heaving. Whether she was still upset or maybe a bit under the weather, I can see what was going on. She eventually got back on the bus and the team and I headed back to Ocean County separately.
I got back into the office to write the story, help with the newspaper and then went home just after deadline.
That night will always stand out. It was an amazing evening of basketball. Dick Johnson was right -- neither team deserved to lose this one. Five years later, Boro won the SJ II title again and this time, the Panthers completed an unbelievable run to a state Group II championship. Both Wendi and Christie Pearce were long gone by then, displaying their soccer (and basketball for Christie) talents at Monmouth University.
But on that night in '91, both teams threw everything out there in a game that had 16 lead changes and 12 ties.
And two rivals played in it, mere miles from one another and playing on the other side of the state.
This drama was really that good.
It was a great time to be a journalist cutting his teeth in the business. But one rivalry stood out above the rest in my opinion.
Point Pleasant Boro against Manasquan. The two schools had fierce sports backings and when the two got together in sports for divisional matchups, it was "must-see-in-person" stuff, especially in sports the two schools were evenly matched up in ... even in football where the Big Blue Warriors and coach Vic Kubu had the edge over coach Al Saner's Panthers.
But for all the years the two schools faced one another in athletics, never had they faced one another in the state tournament. That's because the so-called borderline between Central Jersey and South Jersey was the Monmouth-Ocean border. So the two schools -- separated by all of four miles -- were also separated by an imaginary line with Monmouth-based Manasquan playing in Central Jersey and Point Boro playing in South Jersey.
That all changed, though, on Tuesday night, March 5, 1991, when the Panthers and Big Blue won sectional Group II championships in girls basketball. Suddenly, they were paired up in a game that really counted.
The Big Blue of coach Dick Johnson was used to getting this far in postseason play. This Central Jersey Group II title was Manasquan's fourth in a five-year period and the program won back-to-back overall NJSIAA Group II championships in 1986-87 and 1987-88. And Johnson's team, which was 22-5 at this point, had a number of solid contributors, led by 5-foot-9 senior forward Janet Beaver, 5-5 junior all-everything guard Dara Hahn, 5-8 junior forward Jen Kackos, who did a lot of the dirty work under the boards for Johnson's team, and 5-2 senior point guard Meaghan Mahoney.
At Manasquan, the Big Blue never rebuilt ... they reloaded.
And though to say the two schools are "rivals" would not be accurate at that time on a basketball court. The Big Blue had upended coach Peter Cooke's Panthers 14 straight times -- 14 straight! But that all changed on January 31, 1991 when Boro finally broke through the stranglehold with a 55-51 win at home behind 19 points from senior point guard Wendi Pearce and 18 points from younger sister and sophomore guard Christie Pearce.
Ah, yes -- the Pearce sisters, the best sister combination I've ever watched in athletic competition. Both made things look easy in whatever sport they played in and basketball was no different. Wendi Pearce was the undoubted leader of this Panther club and she ran the offense like a conductor runs a symphony minus the baton.
And a lot of the times, the plays were going to her younger sister, who by now had done something that no Ocean County girls basketball player had done before -- reach 1,000 career points by her sophomore season. I was there when Pearce got her 1,000th career point almost two weeks earlier in a Shore Conference Tournament first-round loss to Toms River South. Other than an inconsistent jump shot -- or at times a non-existent jump shot -- Christie Pearce had all the tools to be an amazing basketball player. If you gave her an opening to the basket, she was taking it and if you put the ball down on the floor, forget it ... she was swiping you like a cat burglar in the dark.
A taller Sterling team found out a lot about how good Christie Pearce was and how much she matured in a year when the Panthers and Sterling played in the NJSIAA South Jersey Group II title game in Pennsauken on March 5. She scored 25 points, pulled down 12 rebounds and had seven steals in that 53-30 blowout of the two-time defending NJSIAA Group II champion Silver Knights, exactly one year after Point Boro was hammered by Sterling, 86-46, in the SJ II semifinal round.
But the Panthers, who were also 22-5 going in, didn't get to this point by just the two sisters alone. They had some good supporting cast talent behind them in shooting guard Meaghie Campacci, a sophomore who had transferred that year into Point Boro, sophomore Karen Brzyski, who at 5-5 had to play a power forward position, and senior Krissy Lubas, who at 5-8 was relegated to be the team's center. And if Lubas got into any foul trouble, Cooke was not afraid to call on two taller players to go in -- 5-10 junior Tara Haugh and 5-9 junior Melissa Devlin.
Though Manasquan's starting lineup was not as tall as Sterling's -- the frontcourt being Beaver, Kackos and 5-9 sophomore Sharon Ormsbee -- they were certainly more active. As a matter of fact, going into the final, Johnson, finishing up his 15th year as Manasquan's coach, claimed that his team was not active enough in the 55-51 loss to Point Boro just over a month earlier and that they needed to penetrate the Boro defense a little more this time around.
With this being the backdrop -- and the two coach's admiration for one another (yes, the two admired one another and at one time, Cooke was the freshman coach for Johnson's team in the early 1980s) -- the game was set two days after the sectional championships on Thursday, March 7, 1991.
And the site for this rivalry between two schools situated four miles apart, the NJSIAA chose ... Hamilton East-Steinert High School in Mercer County, practically the other side of the state and about 45 minutes away for both competitors.
Couldn't get spacious Brick Memorial or Red Bank Regional to host the game or even Brookdale Community College or Monmouth College to host. Nooooooooo! Instead, the NJSIAA -- which would give Southern Regional and Toms River North a waiver to play the NJSIAA South Jersey Group IV championship game in back-to-back years at Toms River East instead of a far-away gymnasium in 1996 and '97 -- forced the schools to travel out of their way to near Trenton to play this important game.
Turns out the reason why they couldn't do this back in 1991 was the state semifinal sites were set compared to a sectional championship and the sectional title game sites were more "flexible" than a state semifinal site.
Whatever. The game was getting played at Steinert no matter what.
The good news before the game was that the night before, I had hit four out of six numbers on one of my Lotto tickets and I was going to the 7-Eleven that I bought the ticket beforehand to collect $68 in winnings. Yay me! It is one of only three times in my entire life that I got four numbers on a Lotto ticket. So some of that money was invested into gas at a staggering 91 cents a gallon. (Oy vey, the good ol' days!)
The game started at 6:30 p.m. because the Group IV semifinal matchup was to take place after the Group II semifinal sometime after 8 p.m. Good thing my game was early so I can get back to the newspaper office and write the story without the fear of dealing with a deadline. After all, this was the only show in town with spring sports not starting up until April 1.
I had left from the 7-Eleven at around 4:30 that afternoon and after getting my gas, it took me almost an hour to get to Steinert High, not located far off of I-195 near the Trenton area. Both teams had already arrived and I had set up on press row for the game. They had a very large table for the writers to cover games, something that I woefully miss having for Florida-based basketball games. What they give you at those games is pathetic and most of the time, I have to go cover the games sitting high up in the bleachers at the midcourt line.
Well before the game, I talked with both Johnson and Cooke. While Johnson was a confident, assured coach who had been there, done that with his team and had said his team was as prepared as it was going to be, Cooke, whose repertoire was somewhere between tough talk and sarcasm, had a little bit of doubt. But in his eighth year as the Panthers' coach, he had them as ready. He had even said the night before, "We're certainly not confident after losing to a team 14 straight times. If anything, we're the underdog, which is what I think we deserve to be."
And Cooke was right -- when you constantly lose to the same team over and over and over again, then beat them after losing over and over and over again, you have something to prove and that one win was not a fluke. His leader, Wendi Pearce, was my best quote on his team, so how she did in this game would give me an indication of how well my story may write itself out.
For a game that was 45 minutes away from both schools, the gymnasium was packed with enthusiastic fans from both schools. Point Boro brought an entourage of some of my favorite people in town I knew over the years. And the student fan base that came dressed up for the occasion in black paint was loud and boisterous. And they had someone in mind to pick on the entire night.
It was Beaver, the tall blonde who played with the intensity of a guy. Point Boro male and female students were going to have a field day for the young lady even as undeserving as the ribbing was.
As for the game, the Big Blue knew what they were going to do -- they were going to play the two Pearces in a triangle and force the other three starters to try and beat them on this evening. And though Point Boro wanted to go uptempo, the defense it was facing and the tall Big Blue players were not going to allow the Panthers to do so. And so the game became a low-scoring affair. But the Big Blue struggled, too, as the Panther defense stole everything the Big Blue put on the floor. Coming into the game, the Panthers had come up with 59 steals and had forced 88 turnovers in three state tournament games.
Manasquan was going to be no different to Point Boro than all the others.
And sure is day is light and night is dark, every time Beaver touched the ball, she was "warmly" greeted by Boro fans who had no problem grilling her all night long. You can see on her face her frustration when a play went wrong, but other than the few occasions, she held her composure.
By the time we got to late in the game, the Panthers and Big Blue had traded leads 11 times and had 10 ties in this one. Manasquan carried a 38-35 lead with just over four minutes to go, but the Pearces had started to figure things out. If they could not get to the basket, at least collect fouls against Manasquan and get to the free-throw line. And so Wendi Pearce was able to draw the fourth foul on Kackos, who was having a terrific game. She calmly nailed two free throws to make it 38-37. Campacci was able to cause a foul on Hahn and hit one of two free throws to tie it. Then after a turnover, Christie Pearce was fouled by Beaver and gave the Panthers the lead at 39-38 with 2:57 to go.
The Big Blue, were going to be deliberate, though. Guarding against getting out into a foot race with the Panthers all night -- a battle they knew they would lose the moment the Panthers got any hint of that -- they whittled the clock down to under two minutes, then under one as Johnson called a pair of timeouts in that period. With 56 seconds left, Christie Pearce picked up her third foul against Hahn. Amid the frenzy of the loud Point Boro fan base, Hahn missed the first free throw, but was able to bury the second to tie it up at 39-all.
Now it was up to Point Boro to finish the deal and send themselves to the state Group II championship game for the first time under Cooke. From the timeout, the Panthers set up the play and put it into the hands of Wendi Pearce. But Pearce had nowhere to go, Manasquan cutting off all the alleys to the basket. As time ran out, she was forced to throw up a high-arcing 3-point shot. It missed the mark and the game was now headed to overtime.
The Big Blue got the ball off the tip to start the overtime and cashed in as Mahoney grabbed a rebound off a missed shot and put the ball back in for the 41-39 lead. After a Boro miss, the Big Blue had the ball again, but Campacci came up with a steal and fed Wendi Pearce. The assured standout then took the pass from Campacci and buried a 15-footer to tie it at 41-all, sending Boro's fan base into a frenzy.
Mahoney then came up big again when she took the ball to the basket on the next Big Blue possession and got Devlin in the air for her fifth foul, forcing her out of the game. She hit two free throws to give Manasquan the lead back at 43-41. But Christie Pearce found an opening and drew a foul. She hit two free throws to tie it up at 43 with less than a minute left in the overtime.
Another timeout by Johnson set up what he was hoping was the final shot and go-ahead basket. And so the Big Blue worked the ball around until they got it to Beaver. As Boro fans mockingly shouted at her, Beaver hit a short jumper just over Lubas and suddenly, Manasquan had a two-point lead with 19 seconds left.
I can still see Cooke to my left working the white board with assistant coach Bill Moore for what was the final play. I knew one thing -- it was going to be a Pearce once again taking the final shot. From the huddle, the Panthers inbounded under their own basket and brought it up the court. The ball landed in the hands of Christie Pearce, who during the season averaged almost 21 points a game. She had struggled all night against Manasquan's specialized defense against her, but now she had the chance to tie it and send it to another overtime. She took it to the hole as the clock counted down.
She floated a shot up that missed the mark. The ball was still loose as time clicked away ... four, three, two. Suddenly, it landed in Campacci's hands. She had a pair of far-taller Big Blue pursuing her. She put a floater up that would've threatened to touch flying ducks if this were outside.
And as the clock hit zero, the ball swished through the net.
Double overtime and another three minutes put up on the clock. No matter how this was going to end, this was already the best girls basketball game I had ever covered.
Both teams were getting exhausted, but more importantly, a lot of key players in this game were on the verge of fouling out. Once again, the Big Blue won the center tip and 16 seconds in, Hahn took a shot. She missed, but the aggressive Kackos, who would finish this one with 19 points and eight rebounds, yanked down the offensive rebound and was fouled by Christie Pearce. It was her fifth foul of the night and that meant disqualification.
It also meant the best player on the court -- for that matter, the best female athlete I have ever covered -- was out of the game. Kackos nailed both free throws to give the Big Blue the lead again at 47-45.
On the next possession, Brzyski decided to take over where Christie Pearce left off. She took the ball to the hoop and caused a foul on Kackos. It was her fifth foul and a huge ovation came from the Boro crowd as she came off the court. But Brzyski could only hit one free throw. However, on the miss of the second free throw, it was 5-2 Campacci to the rescue again. She played like she was half a foot taller, missing the first shot, rebounding, missing the second shot, then rebounding again and connecting on the third shot to give the Panthers their first overtime lead, 48-47 with under two minutes to go.
At the other end, Hahn, who had 19 points, delivered a basket, to give the Big Blue the lead back at 49-48, only to have Haugh respond at the other end to make it 50-49.
Something was telling me this was not going to a third overtime.
It stayed like that until Beaver collected a missed shot by Hahn and scored on the putback and was fouled by Lubas in the process. With 57 seconds left, she finished out the three-point play to give the Big Blue a 52-50 lead. All night long, Manasquan just flustered Point Boro on the boards at both sides of the court.
The Panthers had set it up to get the ball to Haugh, who had scored at that end on the previous possession. Sounded like a good idea. She, however, missed the short jumper and Ormsbee was fouled on the rebound. Having not scored a point all night, I figured like most everyone else that Ormsbee would be nervous. But she sank the first free throw to make it a three-point lead. Then she missed the second ... but Hahn was there and was fouled with 31 seconds left.
Hahn calmly hit her two free throws and the Panthers were in trouble down five. But Wendi Pearce wasted little time at the other end -- she drove to the basket for the layup to cut the lead to three points with 21 seconds left.
The Panthers called one last timeout and set up to try to steal the ball back. They couldn't this time and Hahn was fouled by Campacci with 17 seconds to go. One free throw would cause damage to Boro's hopes.
But Hahn missed both. Haugh rebounded and the Panthers had one more chance to tie the game. The ball ended up in Haugh's hands again and from behind the 3-point arc, she let fly as time wound down.
The ball hit the front end of the iron. Ormsbee rebounded it and the clock ran out.
Just like that, it was over. The Panthers fell short by three points of moving on to a Group II final date with Harrison, one that Manasquan would win two days later for a state championship.
I didn't have to encapsulate what I just saw. I knew this was an epic that I was glad to be a part of as a reporter. But after adding up the statistics of this one, it was my duty to do the interviews, first Johnson, who was proud of his kids, but didn't think either side deserved to lose it, saying of Boro, "I just felt really bad about (them losing)."
And he was genuine. I talked with Cooke, who was also proud of his players afterward. "It was a dead-even game," he told me. "We just came up short a little bit. We had a good year. Nobody can take that away from us."
No, no one would. A lot of teams would've killed for a 22-6 season and a state sectional title. But it was over. And I wanted to find Wendi Pearce to talk to her. But I couldn't. She was balling her eyes out, knowing she gave everything she had, but it wasn't enough. Manasquan's defense had bottled both she and her sister, holding Christie Pearce to only 12 points on 2-of-14 shooting from the field. It was Brzyski who led the Panthers in scoring on this night with 13 points.
I had left at the same time as the Boro bus pulling out of the parking lot ahead of me. But moments after the bus began to roll, it stopped.
Someone came off of it. I recognized who it was. It was Wendi Pearce. She ran off the bus and to a dark side that no one could see her heaving. Whether she was still upset or maybe a bit under the weather, I can see what was going on. She eventually got back on the bus and the team and I headed back to Ocean County separately.
I got back into the office to write the story, help with the newspaper and then went home just after deadline.
That night will always stand out. It was an amazing evening of basketball. Dick Johnson was right -- neither team deserved to lose this one. Five years later, Boro won the SJ II title again and this time, the Panthers completed an unbelievable run to a state Group II championship. Both Wendi and Christie Pearce were long gone by then, displaying their soccer (and basketball for Christie) talents at Monmouth University.
But on that night in '91, both teams threw everything out there in a game that had 16 lead changes and 12 ties.
And two rivals played in it, mere miles from one another and playing on the other side of the state.
This drama was really that good.
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
The long night at Jones High ... the longer night getting through Orlando
This story has really nothing to do with what went on during the play on the field or on a court. As a matter of fact, the game turned into a blowout.
This story is more about what it took for me to go to a city I had really no familiarity with before and how I got a story to our paper with an early deadline in mind.
Yeah, don't try this at a paper with a rookie. You might get burned, editors.
It was Thursday, February 26, 2004. I had been at the Palatka Daily News for over six months and had gotten huge praise for how I had handled things at the paper when I had first gotten there, from my boss' heart attack and having to work the sports department alone the first month and a half to whatever layout and editing I did with the section to being reliable to get a story to my boss before deadline.
OK, I'll admit it -- I was the star prodigy. But I also welcomed doing events away from Putnam County, which I was finding out early had as much as excitement within its boundaries as a Saturday gathering at a picnic to watch grass grow. So when my boss said he had season press passes to cover the Jacksonville Jaguars, I jumped on that like a fat boy to cake. And if there was a state championship worthy of covering, I could easily just combine it with something else that I could cover the day before. For instance, in early November 2003, I got to cover Crescent City Junior-Senior High's final football game of the season, a blowout loss at St. Petersburg Catholic, a good three hours from the building. After I got to write that story up at the local Kinko's in Clearwater, I had a hotel room waiting for me in St. Pete to stay overnight to cover the FHSAA 2A cross country championship meet the next day since both Talisa Bishop and Jeremy Criscione were running to represent Interlachen High. Jeremy finished sixth in that meet, Talisa had finished 27th in her final high school race that night. It was also the last varsity event I covered involving the late Dwayne Cox, who would pass away in August 2004.
It was Saturday, February 21, 2004, that I had covered Crescent City's District 8-2A boys basketball championship victory at home against Father Lopez High of Daytona Beach, the first district title for coach Al Carter in his sixth season in charge. While I got to see Carter's Raiders win that title, my boss got to see Palatka High lose its district championship game at Nease High against Nease's Panthers, 78-67 ... the same coach Bud Beech-led Nease High team that I saw torment Key West High in the state 3A championship two years earlier in Lakeland, though Chet Stachitas was looooong gone by then. As a side note, one Nease player who came off the bench to score seven points in that outing was a sophomore named Tim Tebow.
With Crescent City winning the district title and Palatka losing its district championship, it meant that Crescent City would open up the state tournament hosting Jacksonville Providence, a private school, in the Region 2-2A tournament, while Palatka, though losing to Nease, would be on the road in the first round of the Region 2-4A tournament against District 8-2A champion Jones High of Orlando.
By Monday night, though, we were finding out that the Friday edition of our newspaper had to be out and running on the presses at 10 p.m.
F**king 10 p.m.!
Why, you may wonder? At that time in early 2004, we were running advertisement circulars from Wal-mart. And they came separately from the newspaper that was being printed, so to make life a bit easier for our carriers who had to put the papers together, they wanted us to be done early so the carriers weren't delivering the newspapers at say, 5 in the morning.
I look back now on some of the hoops we had to jump through at that time and it makes me happy we eventually updated into the 21st century. It was a long time coming.
But it wasn't going to help us on this particular Thursday night. I know Andy, very close to those at Palatka High and still to this day close them, wanted to go to see the Panthers play Jones High's Tigers. But the game was down in Orlando, and quite honestly, he needed to be laying out our section early so he could get the stories he and I wrote, put the pictures James, our photographer then, took of the Crescent City-Providence game, and get the paper out by 10 p.m. as management wanted. Andy was more adept at it than I was, even though I knew the system fairly well.
So we switched for the sake of getting the paper out on time. He took the Crescent City game with Providence, while it was I who got to make the road trip to Orlando.
It was exciting for me, but one problem – in all my life, I had never ventured through Orlando other than the one time just over two years earlier when I was taking a vacation from the Key West Citizen and I had a Westgate timeshare that I finished paying for and took the week before Christmas to stay in Orlando for a week. It was really, really nice I do admit. I got to see Orlando outside of Disney World and I had a blast.
But that was it. I had driven through Orlando on I-4, but had not actually stopped there in my six months at the paper. Now I was going somewhere that I was not all that familiar with. And with the early deadline, I didn't want to have to run to the Orlando Sentinel to write the story in which time is the key. So just a couple of days before this game in O-town, I called up Mapquest to see where the heck I was going.
The game was not going to be played at Jones High. The school gymnasium was going through renovations, so all the basketball games they hosted were held at the Memorial Middle School gymnasium. The good news, I find out, was that this gym and school was located right off of I-4 and off Orange Blossom Trail. Figured I'd be there in no time.
Back in 2004, though, I had a penchant for road trips in which I could accomplish two or three things in one long roadie. And before I finally got a subscription to the magazine, my Billboard magazines came to the local bookstores on Wednesdays in northeast Florida. But the one store I had any trust in to have the magazine for a Thursday pickup was the Books-A-Million store located off of State Road-200 in Ocala. Billboard, the top news-worthy music magazine in the business better known for their weekly charts, including the Hot 100, was a staple of mine ever since I got my first one in December 1979.
I can't live without my mag, let's just say that.
So after preparing the scoreboard page like I normally do when I have a road trip the night before, I didn't have to see the office that night one bit. All I had to do was get to my game and get there safely, then get to the local Kinko's and get there safely. And then get home and, yeah, you get it -- get home safely.
The first part of the road trip was to Ocala where I would trek along State Road-20 past Interlachen to get to Hawthorne. I'd veer off onto US-301 and head south from there to Ocala. It was a straight shot down, but the one thing I remember from making this ride was in the northbound lane, these two very good-looking women were hitch-hiking north. My thought, was, "Oh, if only I was going north!"
I wasn't though. I had left at 4 p.m. with the goal of getting to the Books-A-Million by just after 5. I found it, they had the Billboard magazine copy I needed, I paid for it and got a nice discount from the store for using their card and was on my way back to US-301, which was now US-301/US-441. The plan here was to take US-301/441 south all the way to Orlando. Sound easy, right?
Well little did I know that the trip on US-441 from Ocala to Orlando wasn't going to be your normal run-of-the-mill, get-there-in-90-minute trip. I completely forgot to factor in traffic lights and I must have hit every red light you can imagine from Ocala through Leesburg through Tavares through Zellwood and through Apopka.
This was where I knew I blew it for not being well-versed with the roads around Orlando: It was 6:20 p.m. and I knew I needed some kind of a shortcut, anywhere that would get me closer to my destination. And along US-441 as I was going toward Orlando, I should have remained on the road until it linked up with State Road-50 or gotten on the first toll road I saw and let that hook up with Florida's Turnpike and onto the East-West Expressway. I would have gotten dumped off back on US-17/92/441 ... the OBT ... and would have been about five miles from my destination.
But no, I just kept going and made a wrong turn and found myself on State Road-46 – heading away from Orlando. By the time I figured this all out, it was 6:45 p.m. and I was getting getting onto I-4 at Exit 90 with 15 minutes to go to get to the game and a possible traffic jam ahead of me between Exit 90 and Exit 81 since I was driving through the heart of Orlando.
And sure as anything, there was some traffic, but thankfully, not the kind of traffic that holds you up for minutes upon minutes. I was able to navigate my way through the I-4 jigsaw puzzle and toward Exit 80, which was the OBT. I jumped off that left-handed exit and realized the moment I got off ... I was heading the wrong way!! It was not even 10 seconds and I knew I was on the wrong side of I-4.
Again, thankfully, I didn't have traffic that badly behind me and there was nothing in front of me. So I could get into the middle lane and just turn the car around going the other way on OBT. And that's where I saw "her."
Yeah, my first Orange Blossom Trail hooker. She was dressed the part: An African-American young lady scantily-clad, tight jeans and fairly long heels. It was dark and it didn't take long from there to realize that yeah, I was in the really, really, really bad part of Orlando.
From the directions I had, I got to the first traffic light and made a left turn. I had to drive almost half a mile through this dumpy area of the city to get to the middle school. By the time I get out of the car in the school parking lot, it's just about 7 p.m. I had wasted valuable time with a turn I didn't make and now I found myself rushing through the parking lot to get to my destination.
But as I get to the entrance to the gym, I see both teams starting to warm up ... and there's like 10 minutes before the game on the scoreboard clock. It's almost 7:05 p.m. The game is starting at 7. I see Palatka coach Willie Mitchell by the bench watching his team and asked what's going on.
"We took a wrong turn on the way here," he said. "We just got here about 10 minutes ago so they were kind enough to let us warm up with the usual time."
On one hand, I was relieved I didn't miss a moment of this state tournament game. The bad news, though, was that I had a 10 p.m. deadline to play with and what if this game goes to overtime? This is going to be a nightmare. I have confidence I can bang a story and boxscore on this game out in about 30 minutes, but this is now too close for comfort.
Palatka's team had talent, and leading the charge was our paper's eventual player of the year, Tavarres Williams, a senior averaging 25.8 points a game who was on his way to the University of Southern Mississippi to play both football and basketball for the Eagles. They had a nice forward tandem in junior Laveras Keenan and senior James Kiser. They had talented youngsters in A.C. Leonard and Josh Miller. And their point guard, senior Teddy Brown, could not have been more than 5-foot-3.
But laugh as I may about Young's height, he epitomized the shortness of the Panther squad. And that was going to be a problem against a Jones team that had lost the state 3A championship the year before and was bringing back a good amount of its talent, including 6-foot-6 senior center Antoine Dade, a manchild that no Panther player could match up efficiently with.
So with that disadvantage in my mind already going in, I had to take a look to see what the rest of the team had in store. They were big and they were quick. I suddenly realized that the Panthers, who were 13-9 going in, had very little chance against the Tigers, who were 23-4 on the court, but had to forfeit five of their victories during the season because of the use of an ineligible player.
By 7:25 p.m., the game finally tipped off. And it didn't take long for this game to be decided.
The first Palatka possession actually. Williams got to the midcourt line and as if someone barked an order, senior guard Elwin Carbon came rushing toward the cool-as-a-cucumber Williams. So startled by what he saw, Williams dribbled the ball off his foot and out of bounds. Palatka, to its credit, though, rebounded from the first of those 25 turnovers and took a 5-2 lead in the first 93 seconds of the game.
But I knew it wasn't going to last long. Point guard Darius Walker hit Dade with an alley-oop pass. He got a hand on the ball and directed it into the basket while being fouled by Kiser in the process. He hit the free throw after that to tie the game at 5-all.
Kiser hit one of two free throws on the next possession down and the Panthers led 6-5.
That would be the last lead they would have on the night. Palatka did it tie it one more time at 10-all before Walker hit Jarvis Williams with a bullet pass underneath and Williams put in the layup while getting fouled by Miller. He completed the three-point play and Jones led 13-10 with 3:16 left in the opening quarter. And it was only going to get worse as for the rest of the quarter, Jones outscored Palatka 16-2 to take a 29-12 lead after one period.
Still holding a 36-21 lead just two minutes into the second quarter, Jones' Tigers went on another run, this time 7-0 to go up 43-21 as Jarvis Williams, who finished with 19 points, hit a 3-pointer and a layup and Walker hit a layup. They would lead it 51-30 at halftime.
The game was still long from being in 35-point, running-clock mode, but I knew the Panthers were not making a tremendous comeback in the second half. I called Andy to let him know where my game stood and that it started late. I could hear the sound of concern in his voice as his game was already nearing the end of the third quarter with Crescent City leading 30-27. I assured him I knew where I was going after the game to file my story – the Kinko's not too far from where I was sitting at the moment.
It was going to be interesting to say the least.
Starting the third quarter, Keenan bombed in a 3-pointer to cut the lead to 51-33. But that only made the Tigers mad. They went on a 15-3 run and suddenly had a 66-36 lead with 4:55 to go. And it was getting worse. Jones led it 71-44 going into the final quarter. And they were about to pour it on more thanks to Jarvis Williams and Dade, who finished with 18 points, seven rebounds and one blocked shot. By the midway point of the already decided matchup, the Jones lead ballooned to 35 points. And with that, the clock ran freely the rest of the way. This, still, didn't stop the Tigers from running their offense, even with the substitutes in the ballgame. By the end of the night, Jones shot 51.4 percent from the field, going 38-for-74, and out-rebounded Palatka, 46-28.
Suddenly, the Tigers were at 90-plus points. And they weren't stopping. They got to 92, then 94, 96 and 98 with about 80 seconds left.
Damn, they were trying to break the scoreboard and flash triple-digits. This, though, was not going to happen. Palatka took its sweet time down the court down 98-64 and with about 55 seconds left, the diminutive Brown at the free-throw line after being fouled. Now keep in mind, a running clock is a running clock. The Jones fans still there were demanding Brown speed up his free-throw routine. But all Brown did was smile. He missed the first one. The clock was down to about 28 seconds and he was still taking his sweet time in preparing to take the second shot.
He did and he hit the shot. But there was about nine seconds left. The Tigers rushed the ball up the court and took some wild 3-point shot that missed the mark. The buzzer sounded and the Tigers had their 98-65 victory.
Before he could go into the locker room to talk to his kids, I grabbed Mitchell and asked him a few quick questions for which I was only going to use one of those questions' answers for my story. I jumped back into the car and drove off to the Kinko's to do my story. It was now about 9:10 p.m. and I had 50 minutes to get to the Kinko's, re-add my statistics, type in the agate boxscore and do the story. They were serious about this 10 p.m. deadline thing.
Again, though, I had really no idea of where this Kinko's was located. I found myself back on I-4 and heading west for about six miles to Sand Lake Drive (Exit 74). Once I got off that exit, I headed south toward my next turn. That would be Orange Blossom Trail. I was back on US-441 and heading north toward the Kinko's, which I would find by about 9:35 p.m. If I had just taken OBT south, I would have gotten to my destination more than likely 10-15 minutes sooner.
Now the pressure was really on. I had to bang that story out fast. I don't know how I did it, but I got both the story and boxscore done by 9:55 p.m. Andy did a quick-read and got the last two pages out and onto the presses by 10:05 p.m. He had asked earlier in the day without my knowledge for a few minutes more since we were covering state tournament basketball games. And though our managing editor was reluctant (this guy was reluctant to allow us to breathe upon asking), he gave us an extra 10 minutes to finish up. I found out from Andy that Crescent City held a 10-point lead with over four minutes to go against Providence and got outscored, 12-1, the rest of the way to lose its regional tournament game, 43-42. He DEFINITELY had the better game of the two of us that night.
With my night done, I ended up going to the Ale House not too far from the Kinko's on OBT. I was there to meet an online lady friend named Denise who had blue eyes that were prettier than the waters around Bermuda. She was an Ohio native who happened to be a huge Philadelphia Eagles fan. We had a good time. I left the restaurant by about 12:30 in the morning and headed north back to Palatka after what was a really, really long day and night.
It was an experience I will never forget from start to finish.
And none of the better drama from that day even happened in the game I was covering.
This story is more about what it took for me to go to a city I had really no familiarity with before and how I got a story to our paper with an early deadline in mind.
Yeah, don't try this at a paper with a rookie. You might get burned, editors.
It was Thursday, February 26, 2004. I had been at the Palatka Daily News for over six months and had gotten huge praise for how I had handled things at the paper when I had first gotten there, from my boss' heart attack and having to work the sports department alone the first month and a half to whatever layout and editing I did with the section to being reliable to get a story to my boss before deadline.
OK, I'll admit it -- I was the star prodigy. But I also welcomed doing events away from Putnam County, which I was finding out early had as much as excitement within its boundaries as a Saturday gathering at a picnic to watch grass grow. So when my boss said he had season press passes to cover the Jacksonville Jaguars, I jumped on that like a fat boy to cake. And if there was a state championship worthy of covering, I could easily just combine it with something else that I could cover the day before. For instance, in early November 2003, I got to cover Crescent City Junior-Senior High's final football game of the season, a blowout loss at St. Petersburg Catholic, a good three hours from the building. After I got to write that story up at the local Kinko's in Clearwater, I had a hotel room waiting for me in St. Pete to stay overnight to cover the FHSAA 2A cross country championship meet the next day since both Talisa Bishop and Jeremy Criscione were running to represent Interlachen High. Jeremy finished sixth in that meet, Talisa had finished 27th in her final high school race that night. It was also the last varsity event I covered involving the late Dwayne Cox, who would pass away in August 2004.
It was Saturday, February 21, 2004, that I had covered Crescent City's District 8-2A boys basketball championship victory at home against Father Lopez High of Daytona Beach, the first district title for coach Al Carter in his sixth season in charge. While I got to see Carter's Raiders win that title, my boss got to see Palatka High lose its district championship game at Nease High against Nease's Panthers, 78-67 ... the same coach Bud Beech-led Nease High team that I saw torment Key West High in the state 3A championship two years earlier in Lakeland, though Chet Stachitas was looooong gone by then. As a side note, one Nease player who came off the bench to score seven points in that outing was a sophomore named Tim Tebow.
With Crescent City winning the district title and Palatka losing its district championship, it meant that Crescent City would open up the state tournament hosting Jacksonville Providence, a private school, in the Region 2-2A tournament, while Palatka, though losing to Nease, would be on the road in the first round of the Region 2-4A tournament against District 8-2A champion Jones High of Orlando.
By Monday night, though, we were finding out that the Friday edition of our newspaper had to be out and running on the presses at 10 p.m.
F**king 10 p.m.!
Why, you may wonder? At that time in early 2004, we were running advertisement circulars from Wal-mart. And they came separately from the newspaper that was being printed, so to make life a bit easier for our carriers who had to put the papers together, they wanted us to be done early so the carriers weren't delivering the newspapers at say, 5 in the morning.
I look back now on some of the hoops we had to jump through at that time and it makes me happy we eventually updated into the 21st century. It was a long time coming.
But it wasn't going to help us on this particular Thursday night. I know Andy, very close to those at Palatka High and still to this day close them, wanted to go to see the Panthers play Jones High's Tigers. But the game was down in Orlando, and quite honestly, he needed to be laying out our section early so he could get the stories he and I wrote, put the pictures James, our photographer then, took of the Crescent City-Providence game, and get the paper out by 10 p.m. as management wanted. Andy was more adept at it than I was, even though I knew the system fairly well.
So we switched for the sake of getting the paper out on time. He took the Crescent City game with Providence, while it was I who got to make the road trip to Orlando.
It was exciting for me, but one problem – in all my life, I had never ventured through Orlando other than the one time just over two years earlier when I was taking a vacation from the Key West Citizen and I had a Westgate timeshare that I finished paying for and took the week before Christmas to stay in Orlando for a week. It was really, really nice I do admit. I got to see Orlando outside of Disney World and I had a blast.
But that was it. I had driven through Orlando on I-4, but had not actually stopped there in my six months at the paper. Now I was going somewhere that I was not all that familiar with. And with the early deadline, I didn't want to have to run to the Orlando Sentinel to write the story in which time is the key. So just a couple of days before this game in O-town, I called up Mapquest to see where the heck I was going.
The game was not going to be played at Jones High. The school gymnasium was going through renovations, so all the basketball games they hosted were held at the Memorial Middle School gymnasium. The good news, I find out, was that this gym and school was located right off of I-4 and off Orange Blossom Trail. Figured I'd be there in no time.
Back in 2004, though, I had a penchant for road trips in which I could accomplish two or three things in one long roadie. And before I finally got a subscription to the magazine, my Billboard magazines came to the local bookstores on Wednesdays in northeast Florida. But the one store I had any trust in to have the magazine for a Thursday pickup was the Books-A-Million store located off of State Road-200 in Ocala. Billboard, the top news-worthy music magazine in the business better known for their weekly charts, including the Hot 100, was a staple of mine ever since I got my first one in December 1979.
I can't live without my mag, let's just say that.
So after preparing the scoreboard page like I normally do when I have a road trip the night before, I didn't have to see the office that night one bit. All I had to do was get to my game and get there safely, then get to the local Kinko's and get there safely. And then get home and, yeah, you get it -- get home safely.
The first part of the road trip was to Ocala where I would trek along State Road-20 past Interlachen to get to Hawthorne. I'd veer off onto US-301 and head south from there to Ocala. It was a straight shot down, but the one thing I remember from making this ride was in the northbound lane, these two very good-looking women were hitch-hiking north. My thought, was, "Oh, if only I was going north!"
I wasn't though. I had left at 4 p.m. with the goal of getting to the Books-A-Million by just after 5. I found it, they had the Billboard magazine copy I needed, I paid for it and got a nice discount from the store for using their card and was on my way back to US-301, which was now US-301/US-441. The plan here was to take US-301/441 south all the way to Orlando. Sound easy, right?
Well little did I know that the trip on US-441 from Ocala to Orlando wasn't going to be your normal run-of-the-mill, get-there-in-90-minute trip. I completely forgot to factor in traffic lights and I must have hit every red light you can imagine from Ocala through Leesburg through Tavares through Zellwood and through Apopka.
This was where I knew I blew it for not being well-versed with the roads around Orlando: It was 6:20 p.m. and I knew I needed some kind of a shortcut, anywhere that would get me closer to my destination. And along US-441 as I was going toward Orlando, I should have remained on the road until it linked up with State Road-50 or gotten on the first toll road I saw and let that hook up with Florida's Turnpike and onto the East-West Expressway. I would have gotten dumped off back on US-17/92/441 ... the OBT ... and would have been about five miles from my destination.
But no, I just kept going and made a wrong turn and found myself on State Road-46 – heading away from Orlando. By the time I figured this all out, it was 6:45 p.m. and I was getting getting onto I-4 at Exit 90 with 15 minutes to go to get to the game and a possible traffic jam ahead of me between Exit 90 and Exit 81 since I was driving through the heart of Orlando.
And sure as anything, there was some traffic, but thankfully, not the kind of traffic that holds you up for minutes upon minutes. I was able to navigate my way through the I-4 jigsaw puzzle and toward Exit 80, which was the OBT. I jumped off that left-handed exit and realized the moment I got off ... I was heading the wrong way!! It was not even 10 seconds and I knew I was on the wrong side of I-4.
Again, thankfully, I didn't have traffic that badly behind me and there was nothing in front of me. So I could get into the middle lane and just turn the car around going the other way on OBT. And that's where I saw "her."
Yeah, my first Orange Blossom Trail hooker. She was dressed the part: An African-American young lady scantily-clad, tight jeans and fairly long heels. It was dark and it didn't take long from there to realize that yeah, I was in the really, really, really bad part of Orlando.
From the directions I had, I got to the first traffic light and made a left turn. I had to drive almost half a mile through this dumpy area of the city to get to the middle school. By the time I get out of the car in the school parking lot, it's just about 7 p.m. I had wasted valuable time with a turn I didn't make and now I found myself rushing through the parking lot to get to my destination.
But as I get to the entrance to the gym, I see both teams starting to warm up ... and there's like 10 minutes before the game on the scoreboard clock. It's almost 7:05 p.m. The game is starting at 7. I see Palatka coach Willie Mitchell by the bench watching his team and asked what's going on.
"We took a wrong turn on the way here," he said. "We just got here about 10 minutes ago so they were kind enough to let us warm up with the usual time."
On one hand, I was relieved I didn't miss a moment of this state tournament game. The bad news, though, was that I had a 10 p.m. deadline to play with and what if this game goes to overtime? This is going to be a nightmare. I have confidence I can bang a story and boxscore on this game out in about 30 minutes, but this is now too close for comfort.
Palatka's team had talent, and leading the charge was our paper's eventual player of the year, Tavarres Williams, a senior averaging 25.8 points a game who was on his way to the University of Southern Mississippi to play both football and basketball for the Eagles. They had a nice forward tandem in junior Laveras Keenan and senior James Kiser. They had talented youngsters in A.C. Leonard and Josh Miller. And their point guard, senior Teddy Brown, could not have been more than 5-foot-3.
But laugh as I may about Young's height, he epitomized the shortness of the Panther squad. And that was going to be a problem against a Jones team that had lost the state 3A championship the year before and was bringing back a good amount of its talent, including 6-foot-6 senior center Antoine Dade, a manchild that no Panther player could match up efficiently with.
So with that disadvantage in my mind already going in, I had to take a look to see what the rest of the team had in store. They were big and they were quick. I suddenly realized that the Panthers, who were 13-9 going in, had very little chance against the Tigers, who were 23-4 on the court, but had to forfeit five of their victories during the season because of the use of an ineligible player.
By 7:25 p.m., the game finally tipped off. And it didn't take long for this game to be decided.
The first Palatka possession actually. Williams got to the midcourt line and as if someone barked an order, senior guard Elwin Carbon came rushing toward the cool-as-a-cucumber Williams. So startled by what he saw, Williams dribbled the ball off his foot and out of bounds. Palatka, to its credit, though, rebounded from the first of those 25 turnovers and took a 5-2 lead in the first 93 seconds of the game.
But I knew it wasn't going to last long. Point guard Darius Walker hit Dade with an alley-oop pass. He got a hand on the ball and directed it into the basket while being fouled by Kiser in the process. He hit the free throw after that to tie the game at 5-all.
Kiser hit one of two free throws on the next possession down and the Panthers led 6-5.
That would be the last lead they would have on the night. Palatka did it tie it one more time at 10-all before Walker hit Jarvis Williams with a bullet pass underneath and Williams put in the layup while getting fouled by Miller. He completed the three-point play and Jones led 13-10 with 3:16 left in the opening quarter. And it was only going to get worse as for the rest of the quarter, Jones outscored Palatka 16-2 to take a 29-12 lead after one period.
Still holding a 36-21 lead just two minutes into the second quarter, Jones' Tigers went on another run, this time 7-0 to go up 43-21 as Jarvis Williams, who finished with 19 points, hit a 3-pointer and a layup and Walker hit a layup. They would lead it 51-30 at halftime.
The game was still long from being in 35-point, running-clock mode, but I knew the Panthers were not making a tremendous comeback in the second half. I called Andy to let him know where my game stood and that it started late. I could hear the sound of concern in his voice as his game was already nearing the end of the third quarter with Crescent City leading 30-27. I assured him I knew where I was going after the game to file my story – the Kinko's not too far from where I was sitting at the moment.
It was going to be interesting to say the least.
Starting the third quarter, Keenan bombed in a 3-pointer to cut the lead to 51-33. But that only made the Tigers mad. They went on a 15-3 run and suddenly had a 66-36 lead with 4:55 to go. And it was getting worse. Jones led it 71-44 going into the final quarter. And they were about to pour it on more thanks to Jarvis Williams and Dade, who finished with 18 points, seven rebounds and one blocked shot. By the midway point of the already decided matchup, the Jones lead ballooned to 35 points. And with that, the clock ran freely the rest of the way. This, still, didn't stop the Tigers from running their offense, even with the substitutes in the ballgame. By the end of the night, Jones shot 51.4 percent from the field, going 38-for-74, and out-rebounded Palatka, 46-28.
Suddenly, the Tigers were at 90-plus points. And they weren't stopping. They got to 92, then 94, 96 and 98 with about 80 seconds left.
Damn, they were trying to break the scoreboard and flash triple-digits. This, though, was not going to happen. Palatka took its sweet time down the court down 98-64 and with about 55 seconds left, the diminutive Brown at the free-throw line after being fouled. Now keep in mind, a running clock is a running clock. The Jones fans still there were demanding Brown speed up his free-throw routine. But all Brown did was smile. He missed the first one. The clock was down to about 28 seconds and he was still taking his sweet time in preparing to take the second shot.
He did and he hit the shot. But there was about nine seconds left. The Tigers rushed the ball up the court and took some wild 3-point shot that missed the mark. The buzzer sounded and the Tigers had their 98-65 victory.
Before he could go into the locker room to talk to his kids, I grabbed Mitchell and asked him a few quick questions for which I was only going to use one of those questions' answers for my story. I jumped back into the car and drove off to the Kinko's to do my story. It was now about 9:10 p.m. and I had 50 minutes to get to the Kinko's, re-add my statistics, type in the agate boxscore and do the story. They were serious about this 10 p.m. deadline thing.
Again, though, I had really no idea of where this Kinko's was located. I found myself back on I-4 and heading west for about six miles to Sand Lake Drive (Exit 74). Once I got off that exit, I headed south toward my next turn. That would be Orange Blossom Trail. I was back on US-441 and heading north toward the Kinko's, which I would find by about 9:35 p.m. If I had just taken OBT south, I would have gotten to my destination more than likely 10-15 minutes sooner.
Now the pressure was really on. I had to bang that story out fast. I don't know how I did it, but I got both the story and boxscore done by 9:55 p.m. Andy did a quick-read and got the last two pages out and onto the presses by 10:05 p.m. He had asked earlier in the day without my knowledge for a few minutes more since we were covering state tournament basketball games. And though our managing editor was reluctant (this guy was reluctant to allow us to breathe upon asking), he gave us an extra 10 minutes to finish up. I found out from Andy that Crescent City held a 10-point lead with over four minutes to go against Providence and got outscored, 12-1, the rest of the way to lose its regional tournament game, 43-42. He DEFINITELY had the better game of the two of us that night.
With my night done, I ended up going to the Ale House not too far from the Kinko's on OBT. I was there to meet an online lady friend named Denise who had blue eyes that were prettier than the waters around Bermuda. She was an Ohio native who happened to be a huge Philadelphia Eagles fan. We had a good time. I left the restaurant by about 12:30 in the morning and headed north back to Palatka after what was a really, really long day and night.
It was an experience I will never forget from start to finish.
And none of the better drama from that day even happened in the game I was covering.
Friday, January 31, 2014
The 11-year wait that almost ended in a title
Eleven long years had passed between the most infamous game in South Jersey girls basketball history and this game I was about to cover on Monday, March 6, 1995, at Rancocas Valley High School in Mount Holly.
After coming up short of reaching the NJSIAA South Jersey Group IV final the year before when it lost to Vineland, Southern Regional was in the SJ IV championship game after an 11-year absence. And the opponent on the other side of the court for this title game was Washington Township -- the same Minutemen program that beat the Rams in the 1984 SJ IV title game in overtime.
The problem, though, was when doing the preview for the game with longtime Southern Regional basketball coach Kathy Snyder, she didn't want to discuss the game. I knew this because the year before, she didn't want to talk about the game that ended the most wonderful season in her time with the program. The 1983-84 Southern team had talented players on it like Patti Gallant, Kathy Harlfinger and Judy Keefer, but had the star player of the Shore area in senior all-everything guard Jill Spaschak.
It was Spaschak that hit the "jumper heard 'round the Shore" on February 25, 1984 at the buzzer that lifted Southern to the 42-40 victory over Neptune in the Shore Conference Tournament championship game at Brick Memorial High School. Ten years later and almost to the date, I talked to Spaschak about that team, that game, that season, along with Snyder, who was Kathy Leslie at the time of the championship.
They were literal fountains when talking about that team. Once they started jabbering, you couldn't get them to stop. So many memories in those phone calls. By the end of their calls, I felt like I knew every single game they played that year and that I was in that Brick Memorial gym when Spaschak hit that game-winner. Unfortunately, I never got to see that Southern team -- that was my senior year in high school and I was focusing on just being a senior. So I had a lot of catch-up to do, though, I had done a feature story on Keefer when we were both at Ocean County College and she was just a delight to talk to.
However, there was one sore spot that was off limits. I didn't know it, but when I asked Snyder about the night of Saturday, March 10, 1984, she simply said, "I don't want to discuss that. It's still too painful."
And it was. It was the loss that ended that magical 28-2 Southern season. But it wasn't just any loss. This was a hurtful one. Southern led 24-0 Washington Township by as many as a dozen points early in the fourth quarter in the SJ IV title game at Overbrook High School. Then midway through the fourth quarter, Spaschak got called for her fourth foul, a mystery foul that she wasn't really near when the call was made. But mere moments later, she committed her fifth foul that disqualified her from the game. Again, she was nowhere near the site of the foul. How do I know this? It just so happened that Adelphia-Cable 8 was doing the game for future broadcast. And it was pretty darn clear to me that if there was a foul called, it wasn't on Jill Spaschak.
Southern, sadly, fell apart in that game, Washington Township tied it and ultimately won the game in overtime, 51-46. And the memory of that broadcast was the stuff that wasn't allowed to be said on the air. Game announcers Ken Turp and the outspoken Nick "The Quick" Werkman were reporting "angry." They were livid with the officiating that was being done and let their feelings be known in that broadcast of 30 years ago.
And I have to agree to this day, they were right. I wish I was in that Overbrook High gym that night, but I wasn't. And what I saw on TV was just deplorable. Every close call went against Southern and the whistles seemed to avoid Washington Township. In the Ocean County Observer's account of the game, Kathy Snyder was not once quoted in it.
That's how angry she was. And it didn't make her feel any better when she found out that one of the officials for that particular game was the roommate of one of the Washington Township head coaches!
Excuse me, but how the h-e-double hockey sticks was that assignment allowed to happen? Needless to say, the NJSIAA, looking stupid as expected over what happened, passed down a rule that said officials could not do the games of relatives, friends, roommates, etc., shortly after the incident.
It was a little too late for Kathy Snyder or that amazingly talented team of '84. And it took 11 years for that program to get back to the SJ IV title game.
But here they were, and the fact that it would be a talented Washington Township team on the other side was just pure coincidence. Then again, these Minutemen were ranked No. 1 in the Associated Press' state poll. They had a star senior guard named Jen Natale, who was closing in on 1,000 career points in this final. Their supporting cast was a strong one and they liked to run it up and down.
And that was playing perfectly into the hands of a master defensive coach like Snyder, who could turn any sports car into a bicycle with her team playing the right pressure defense and could slow the pace effectively offensively. And with a 21-2 record during the season, it's easy to say she had the kind of team that could slow the opponent down at any time.
The brains of the outfit was senior point guard Jodie Davis, who was Snyder's eyes on the court and could pretty much control what was happening on a basketball court. She was paired in the backcourt with another senior, Kirsten Sciallo. Jamie Bogdol was an effective forward. But the scoring brunt was handled by a 6-foot-1 16-year-old sophomore center named Candice McCallum, who by now, I had figured out that her first name was spelled with an 'i' in it so to remember that her play was like 'ice.'
The things you gotta do sometimes.
I knew I was in for a good game. But it was early in the afternoon, I got a phone call from work. The dayshift editor, Helen, had left me a message from Tom "The Candy Man" Kelleher. In all my years of working at the Observer and all those years I covered events where Tom was also there to hand out his trademark candy and sing his patriotic songs, never did I have to give him a call about anything.
Seems he heard that I was covering the game this night. He first thought one of our stringers at the time that he had known a lot better than me for years was doing the game. Well needless to say, word got to him that I was going out to Mount Holly to cover the game and just about five hours before the game, I was calling him at his Toms River home.
"Yeah, I heard you're doing the game tonight."
"Yup. That'd be me going out there."
"Can you pick me up and take me with you?"
I had to think about it. But it didn't take long for an answer.
"Suuuuuure. Give me your address and I will be there about 5 o'clock."
The game was a 6:30 p.m. start, and I knew it would take almost an hour to get out to Rancocas Valley. So I left my folks' place at 4:45 and headed toward near Indian Head Road where Tom lived. In all these years I was friendly with the man, I never knew where he lived, but he lived in a very modest house. He came out after I knocked on the door and he was dressed up like he always was, wearing his "Candy Man" hat, his blue metal-button jacket and buoyed by his waist-strapped pocket holder that nothing but Jolly Ranchers, gum and Tootsie Rolls.
Believe me when I say this -- this man was a dentist's dream.
So we head out on Route 571 and turn onto Route 70. From there, it was into Manchester and out of there. When the turnoff toward Pemberton came upon us, I made a slight right turn and it was one winding road after another until we found Route 38 and ultimately, we found the street that Rancocas Valley High was located.
By the time we got there at 6 p.m., I had left him to go do his thing and I went to do my thing. I knew he wasn't going to cause me any problems on this night and he knew I had a game to cover. I jotted down both teams' lineups and set up my statistical sheet and shot box soon after while sitting up top in the bleachers looking down at midcourt.
And when I heard who was singing the national anthem -- it was Tom -- I found myself saying, "Man, he works people quickly, doesn't he?" He did a stellar job as usual on the anthem.
This Washington Township team looked like it wanted to run. But defensive tempo does dictate a lot of things and on this night, Kathy Snyder's team wasn't going to allow that to happen.
And the Rams had one weapon that the Minutemen had no idea how to keep in check. That was the tall and lanky McCallum, Washington Township had a center to try and neutralize her named Melissa Pickering. She was no match and Snyder, Davis and McCallum knew that. Basically, what Davis or Sciallo did was throw high lob passes for McCallum over Pickering and McCallum laid those shots in for easy baskets.
While McCallum was having a blast in taking advantage of the defense the Minutemen were playing against her, Davis was effectively slowing things up and making sure that she was getting her center with passes in a positive position down low. Two times, the Rams built leads of seven points on the Minutemen in the second quarter and just as halftime approached, Davis delivered one more lob pass for an easy McCallum bucket to finish her 15-point first half. And Southern led at halftime once again by seven points.
Yeah, the No. 1 team in the state was losing by seven points to slow-'em-down Southern, 25-18. They were not wilting under the Washington Township pressure, turning it over just nine times in the first half. They were winning the rebounding war, 12-7, and were shooting almost 58 percent from the floor (11-of-19).
I had to make sure I was really watching this. Apparently, word never got to Washington Township's coaches (who were different from to the debacle of '84) that Southern liked slowing things down.
First I checked in with Tom to see if he was alright. This man, who was over 80 years old at this point, told me he was doing fine. Then I found a payphone in the hallway and called my boss.
"Observer sports, may I help you?"
"Mike, it's me."
"Oh ... hi me! How's it going out there?"
"You're not going to believe me when I tell you this, but Southern is up seven at halftime and Kathy Snyder has brilliantly coached the first 16 minutes."
"I see that. How's Tom doing?"
"Oh, he's staying out of trouble and hasn't gotten us thrown out yet. This is a plus."
"Good, well let me know what happens when it's over."
I felt good about Southern's performance after one half. But I was cautious, too. I had seen this script in a game the year before against Toms River North in which Southern slowed it down to the tune of leading 8-6 at halftime ... only for North to make the proper adjustments and win the game in the end, 32-18.
And that was what was going on in Washington Township's locker room at halftime. They knew they were conceding too many points to McCallum, so to cut the head of the monster off, they were going to have to pressure Davis and Sciallo.
That was exactly what happened. And the Rams couldn't buy a basket even if it was on sale at the concession stand. For the first 6:50 of the third quarter, Southern went scoreless. And Washington Township began to exploit the Rams. Defensively, they forced the Rams into nine third-quarter turnovers. And that led to the Minutemen scoring the first 12 points of the quarter to take a 29-25 lead.
McCallum rebounded a Bogdol free throw miss and scored to make it a 29-27 game. But Natale drove the basket to score on a layup to make it 31-27. The basket marked her 1,000th career point and the game was stopped for the moment. It also allowed Southern to regroup while the short ceremony was taking place.
The teams traded baskets to start the fourth quarter, but the Minutemen began to start pulling away. Southern, though, hung in there and those who made the trip across state for this one, stood up and yelled loudly for the gold-and-black-clad Rams.
It wasn't going to be enough -- Washington Township went 8-for-9 from the free-throw line and eventually pulled away for the 49-41 victory and the SJ IV title.
Washington players and coaches were excited that they survived this one to capture a sectional championship. Southern's heads were understandably down afterward. Unlike 11 years earlier in one of the more controversial games in history, Snyder was subdued. She gave credit where credit was due -- to Washington for adjusting and eventually winning the game.
She gave her team credit for the kind of game it played. She called her team's performance in the first half "picture perfect" and that "they could've done anything they wanted" in that first half. But the writing was on the wall and Washington Township showed why they were No. 1 in the state.
McCallum finished the night with 29 points and nine rebounds and was continuing to build her own legacy as a Ram after just two years. Davis handed out eight assists in what was her final basketball game at Southern. "We tried our hardest. They can be beaten and I think we had a chance of doing that," McCallum said. "I just wish we could have that chance again."
I got my interviews done and collected Tom with me. For the next hour, we drove back across New Jersey talking about the game a little and about the rest of that school year. Girls basketball was over for the year in Ocean County. He had a whole bunch of plans for the spring season.
Less than an hour later, I dropped him off at his place and I proceeded to head home to write the story on one of our Tandy 180 machines at the dining room table of my folks' place. I don't know why it took me an unusual amount of time, but I ended up getting the story done sometime after 11 p.m. that night.
Once I confirmed with Mike I had the story, all was good.
Southern Regional's girls had a hard pill to swallow that night. So close, yet it slipped away when Washington Township decide it wanted to make the lives of Davis and Sciallo miserable. They both graduated, but Southern and Snyder persevered. In 1996, the Rams lost to Class A South rival Toms River North for the SJ IV championship, but one year later, Snyder had her elusive sectional title by beating North in the SJ IV final. By then, Snyder was finishing up her 18th season as head coach. McCallum would finish with close to 2,000 career points and remains one of the two best tall girls I ever covered in the sport along with Consuelo Lezcano of Keys based-Marathon High in Florida.
As for Tom, it was an honor to take him to do his labor of love and what he did best. Sadly, though, I only saw him at a ball game one more time ... it was that spring I saw him for the last time. He was in failing health the last few years of his life and he couldn't go out anymore and do what he did best -- make others happy. He passed away in December 1998 and there are days I miss seeing him at anything I cover now.
Snyder continued coaching the Rams into the 21st century, long after I left the Observer, until her sudden passing on Friday, January 24, 2014 at the age of 58. She and longtime Toms River North two-sport mentor Becky Miller are still the greatest female sports coach I ever covered in nearly 30 years. It was an honor to finally see her win that SJ IV title over North in '97.
It would have been nicer to have done it against the No. 1 team in the state two years earlier. But it wasn't meant to be. Still, this SJ IV final against Washington Township on that Monday night in March 1995 didn't end the way it sadly ended 11 years earlier.
And it only made the wait for Snyder's elusive SJ IV championship that much more bearable and special when it did happen.
After coming up short of reaching the NJSIAA South Jersey Group IV final the year before when it lost to Vineland, Southern Regional was in the SJ IV championship game after an 11-year absence. And the opponent on the other side of the court for this title game was Washington Township -- the same Minutemen program that beat the Rams in the 1984 SJ IV title game in overtime.
The problem, though, was when doing the preview for the game with longtime Southern Regional basketball coach Kathy Snyder, she didn't want to discuss the game. I knew this because the year before, she didn't want to talk about the game that ended the most wonderful season in her time with the program. The 1983-84 Southern team had talented players on it like Patti Gallant, Kathy Harlfinger and Judy Keefer, but had the star player of the Shore area in senior all-everything guard Jill Spaschak.
It was Spaschak that hit the "jumper heard 'round the Shore" on February 25, 1984 at the buzzer that lifted Southern to the 42-40 victory over Neptune in the Shore Conference Tournament championship game at Brick Memorial High School. Ten years later and almost to the date, I talked to Spaschak about that team, that game, that season, along with Snyder, who was Kathy Leslie at the time of the championship.
They were literal fountains when talking about that team. Once they started jabbering, you couldn't get them to stop. So many memories in those phone calls. By the end of their calls, I felt like I knew every single game they played that year and that I was in that Brick Memorial gym when Spaschak hit that game-winner. Unfortunately, I never got to see that Southern team -- that was my senior year in high school and I was focusing on just being a senior. So I had a lot of catch-up to do, though, I had done a feature story on Keefer when we were both at Ocean County College and she was just a delight to talk to.
However, there was one sore spot that was off limits. I didn't know it, but when I asked Snyder about the night of Saturday, March 10, 1984, she simply said, "I don't want to discuss that. It's still too painful."
And it was. It was the loss that ended that magical 28-2 Southern season. But it wasn't just any loss. This was a hurtful one. Southern led 24-0 Washington Township by as many as a dozen points early in the fourth quarter in the SJ IV title game at Overbrook High School. Then midway through the fourth quarter, Spaschak got called for her fourth foul, a mystery foul that she wasn't really near when the call was made. But mere moments later, she committed her fifth foul that disqualified her from the game. Again, she was nowhere near the site of the foul. How do I know this? It just so happened that Adelphia-Cable 8 was doing the game for future broadcast. And it was pretty darn clear to me that if there was a foul called, it wasn't on Jill Spaschak.
Southern, sadly, fell apart in that game, Washington Township tied it and ultimately won the game in overtime, 51-46. And the memory of that broadcast was the stuff that wasn't allowed to be said on the air. Game announcers Ken Turp and the outspoken Nick "The Quick" Werkman were reporting "angry." They were livid with the officiating that was being done and let their feelings be known in that broadcast of 30 years ago.
And I have to agree to this day, they were right. I wish I was in that Overbrook High gym that night, but I wasn't. And what I saw on TV was just deplorable. Every close call went against Southern and the whistles seemed to avoid Washington Township. In the Ocean County Observer's account of the game, Kathy Snyder was not once quoted in it.
That's how angry she was. And it didn't make her feel any better when she found out that one of the officials for that particular game was the roommate of one of the Washington Township head coaches!
Excuse me, but how the h-e-double hockey sticks was that assignment allowed to happen? Needless to say, the NJSIAA, looking stupid as expected over what happened, passed down a rule that said officials could not do the games of relatives, friends, roommates, etc., shortly after the incident.
It was a little too late for Kathy Snyder or that amazingly talented team of '84. And it took 11 years for that program to get back to the SJ IV title game.
But here they were, and the fact that it would be a talented Washington Township team on the other side was just pure coincidence. Then again, these Minutemen were ranked No. 1 in the Associated Press' state poll. They had a star senior guard named Jen Natale, who was closing in on 1,000 career points in this final. Their supporting cast was a strong one and they liked to run it up and down.
And that was playing perfectly into the hands of a master defensive coach like Snyder, who could turn any sports car into a bicycle with her team playing the right pressure defense and could slow the pace effectively offensively. And with a 21-2 record during the season, it's easy to say she had the kind of team that could slow the opponent down at any time.
The brains of the outfit was senior point guard Jodie Davis, who was Snyder's eyes on the court and could pretty much control what was happening on a basketball court. She was paired in the backcourt with another senior, Kirsten Sciallo. Jamie Bogdol was an effective forward. But the scoring brunt was handled by a 6-foot-1 16-year-old sophomore center named Candice McCallum, who by now, I had figured out that her first name was spelled with an 'i' in it so to remember that her play was like 'ice.'
The things you gotta do sometimes.
I knew I was in for a good game. But it was early in the afternoon, I got a phone call from work. The dayshift editor, Helen, had left me a message from Tom "The Candy Man" Kelleher. In all my years of working at the Observer and all those years I covered events where Tom was also there to hand out his trademark candy and sing his patriotic songs, never did I have to give him a call about anything.
Seems he heard that I was covering the game this night. He first thought one of our stringers at the time that he had known a lot better than me for years was doing the game. Well needless to say, word got to him that I was going out to Mount Holly to cover the game and just about five hours before the game, I was calling him at his Toms River home.
"Yeah, I heard you're doing the game tonight."
"Yup. That'd be me going out there."
"Can you pick me up and take me with you?"
I had to think about it. But it didn't take long for an answer.
"Suuuuuure. Give me your address and I will be there about 5 o'clock."
The game was a 6:30 p.m. start, and I knew it would take almost an hour to get out to Rancocas Valley. So I left my folks' place at 4:45 and headed toward near Indian Head Road where Tom lived. In all these years I was friendly with the man, I never knew where he lived, but he lived in a very modest house. He came out after I knocked on the door and he was dressed up like he always was, wearing his "Candy Man" hat, his blue metal-button jacket and buoyed by his waist-strapped pocket holder that nothing but Jolly Ranchers, gum and Tootsie Rolls.
Believe me when I say this -- this man was a dentist's dream.
So we head out on Route 571 and turn onto Route 70. From there, it was into Manchester and out of there. When the turnoff toward Pemberton came upon us, I made a slight right turn and it was one winding road after another until we found Route 38 and ultimately, we found the street that Rancocas Valley High was located.
By the time we got there at 6 p.m., I had left him to go do his thing and I went to do my thing. I knew he wasn't going to cause me any problems on this night and he knew I had a game to cover. I jotted down both teams' lineups and set up my statistical sheet and shot box soon after while sitting up top in the bleachers looking down at midcourt.
And when I heard who was singing the national anthem -- it was Tom -- I found myself saying, "Man, he works people quickly, doesn't he?" He did a stellar job as usual on the anthem.
This Washington Township team looked like it wanted to run. But defensive tempo does dictate a lot of things and on this night, Kathy Snyder's team wasn't going to allow that to happen.
And the Rams had one weapon that the Minutemen had no idea how to keep in check. That was the tall and lanky McCallum, Washington Township had a center to try and neutralize her named Melissa Pickering. She was no match and Snyder, Davis and McCallum knew that. Basically, what Davis or Sciallo did was throw high lob passes for McCallum over Pickering and McCallum laid those shots in for easy baskets.
While McCallum was having a blast in taking advantage of the defense the Minutemen were playing against her, Davis was effectively slowing things up and making sure that she was getting her center with passes in a positive position down low. Two times, the Rams built leads of seven points on the Minutemen in the second quarter and just as halftime approached, Davis delivered one more lob pass for an easy McCallum bucket to finish her 15-point first half. And Southern led at halftime once again by seven points.
Yeah, the No. 1 team in the state was losing by seven points to slow-'em-down Southern, 25-18. They were not wilting under the Washington Township pressure, turning it over just nine times in the first half. They were winning the rebounding war, 12-7, and were shooting almost 58 percent from the floor (11-of-19).
I had to make sure I was really watching this. Apparently, word never got to Washington Township's coaches (who were different from to the debacle of '84) that Southern liked slowing things down.
First I checked in with Tom to see if he was alright. This man, who was over 80 years old at this point, told me he was doing fine. Then I found a payphone in the hallway and called my boss.
"Observer sports, may I help you?"
"Mike, it's me."
"Oh ... hi me! How's it going out there?"
"You're not going to believe me when I tell you this, but Southern is up seven at halftime and Kathy Snyder has brilliantly coached the first 16 minutes."
"I see that. How's Tom doing?"
"Oh, he's staying out of trouble and hasn't gotten us thrown out yet. This is a plus."
"Good, well let me know what happens when it's over."
I felt good about Southern's performance after one half. But I was cautious, too. I had seen this script in a game the year before against Toms River North in which Southern slowed it down to the tune of leading 8-6 at halftime ... only for North to make the proper adjustments and win the game in the end, 32-18.
And that was what was going on in Washington Township's locker room at halftime. They knew they were conceding too many points to McCallum, so to cut the head of the monster off, they were going to have to pressure Davis and Sciallo.
That was exactly what happened. And the Rams couldn't buy a basket even if it was on sale at the concession stand. For the first 6:50 of the third quarter, Southern went scoreless. And Washington Township began to exploit the Rams. Defensively, they forced the Rams into nine third-quarter turnovers. And that led to the Minutemen scoring the first 12 points of the quarter to take a 29-25 lead.
McCallum rebounded a Bogdol free throw miss and scored to make it a 29-27 game. But Natale drove the basket to score on a layup to make it 31-27. The basket marked her 1,000th career point and the game was stopped for the moment. It also allowed Southern to regroup while the short ceremony was taking place.
The teams traded baskets to start the fourth quarter, but the Minutemen began to start pulling away. Southern, though, hung in there and those who made the trip across state for this one, stood up and yelled loudly for the gold-and-black-clad Rams.
It wasn't going to be enough -- Washington Township went 8-for-9 from the free-throw line and eventually pulled away for the 49-41 victory and the SJ IV title.
Washington players and coaches were excited that they survived this one to capture a sectional championship. Southern's heads were understandably down afterward. Unlike 11 years earlier in one of the more controversial games in history, Snyder was subdued. She gave credit where credit was due -- to Washington for adjusting and eventually winning the game.
She gave her team credit for the kind of game it played. She called her team's performance in the first half "picture perfect" and that "they could've done anything they wanted" in that first half. But the writing was on the wall and Washington Township showed why they were No. 1 in the state.
McCallum finished the night with 29 points and nine rebounds and was continuing to build her own legacy as a Ram after just two years. Davis handed out eight assists in what was her final basketball game at Southern. "We tried our hardest. They can be beaten and I think we had a chance of doing that," McCallum said. "I just wish we could have that chance again."
I got my interviews done and collected Tom with me. For the next hour, we drove back across New Jersey talking about the game a little and about the rest of that school year. Girls basketball was over for the year in Ocean County. He had a whole bunch of plans for the spring season.
Less than an hour later, I dropped him off at his place and I proceeded to head home to write the story on one of our Tandy 180 machines at the dining room table of my folks' place. I don't know why it took me an unusual amount of time, but I ended up getting the story done sometime after 11 p.m. that night.
Once I confirmed with Mike I had the story, all was good.
Southern Regional's girls had a hard pill to swallow that night. So close, yet it slipped away when Washington Township decide it wanted to make the lives of Davis and Sciallo miserable. They both graduated, but Southern and Snyder persevered. In 1996, the Rams lost to Class A South rival Toms River North for the SJ IV championship, but one year later, Snyder had her elusive sectional title by beating North in the SJ IV final. By then, Snyder was finishing up her 18th season as head coach. McCallum would finish with close to 2,000 career points and remains one of the two best tall girls I ever covered in the sport along with Consuelo Lezcano of Keys based-Marathon High in Florida.
As for Tom, it was an honor to take him to do his labor of love and what he did best. Sadly, though, I only saw him at a ball game one more time ... it was that spring I saw him for the last time. He was in failing health the last few years of his life and he couldn't go out anymore and do what he did best -- make others happy. He passed away in December 1998 and there are days I miss seeing him at anything I cover now.
Snyder continued coaching the Rams into the 21st century, long after I left the Observer, until her sudden passing on Friday, January 24, 2014 at the age of 58. She and longtime Toms River North two-sport mentor Becky Miller are still the greatest female sports coach I ever covered in nearly 30 years. It was an honor to finally see her win that SJ IV title over North in '97.
It would have been nicer to have done it against the No. 1 team in the state two years earlier. But it wasn't meant to be. Still, this SJ IV final against Washington Township on that Monday night in March 1995 didn't end the way it sadly ended 11 years earlier.
And it only made the wait for Snyder's elusive SJ IV championship that much more bearable and special when it did happen.
Saturday, January 18, 2014
A tough last pill to swallow
By almost 9 p.m. on Wednesday, January 19, 2011, the balloon's air had been blown out completely. And my one long-term lasting memory of that night at Interlachen High School will be of star soccer midfielder/forward Jacqueline Fraga belly down on the ground, fists pounding at the turf in tears.
This should have been her time. It should have been Interlachen's time, really.
But it wasn't.
When the 2010-11 girls soccer season began in early November for Interlachen's Rams, there was a lot expected of the team. They had strong leadership with numerous seniors on the club, starting in the back with two standout defenders in Rebecca Beatty and Jasmine Beamon. They had a dynamite third-year starting goalkeeper in junior Terri Tompson, who was getting stronger with each year.
But the centerpiece of this club were the two seniors who had won the previous three Palatka Daily News Girls Soccer Player of the Year honors in forward Alana Christian, the recipient of the honor in her freshman and sophomore years and Fraga, who was the winner of the honor her junior year.
Interlachen was 10-6-5 during the season, but most of the losses were to the three teams that finished with a better district record than the Rams did -- Bishop Snyder of Jacksonville, perennial rival Keystone Heights and surprising West Nassau of Callahan. To that point, the season for the Rams and seventh-year coach Mike Stevens had been a disappointment. They needed to turn it around and the district tournament would be the starting point.
That district tournament was to be held this season at Interlachen High, so for the seniors, the last hurrah would be in front of friends and family. And for as talented as this Rams team had been over the years, there was one glaring oversight on their resumes.
No, it wasn't a state tournament berth. It was the fact the team didn't even win a single game in the previous three district tournaments. Even when the Rams were a No. 2 seed in 2009, they lost to Pierson Taylor. I still have visions of Stevens running as fast as he can to get a ball that had gone out of bounds to give to his player throwing it in as time was running out on what would be a 2-1 loss at Keystone Heights High that year.
Now the Rams had to put up or shut up in this tournament. Christian, the third 100-goal scorer I ever covered in high school girls soccer after legendary Point Pleasant Boro High standouts Kim Yankowski and Christie Pearce, had scored 26 goals that season while teams were double-teaming her. That was freeing things up for Fraga, who led the team with 27 goals. Though polar opposites of one another, the outgoing and outspoken Fraga and the quiet and shy Christian knew how to work with one another effectively.
Most importantly, they needed each other for this tournament for if the Rams had not gotten to the state tournament for the first time since their only trip in 2006, the season was a failure in some ways.
So on Tuesday, January 18, 2011, the Rams opened play up on a crisp, cool evening against sixth-seeded and Putnam County rival Crescent City. Unfortunately, the Rams were going to play this game without Christian, who had been hampered for the better part of two weeks with a hamstring injury. That's just something you can't take a chance on running up and down and turning and twisting on soccer fields.
Fraga, though, came to the rescue. She scored both goals the Rams put in and the defense did the rest in a 2-0 victory, the first for the program in the postseason since beating Pierson Taylor, 2-1, in the 2006 district semifinals to advance to their first state tournament berth.
That 400-pound gorilla finally stopped jumping up and down these girls' backs. But one was still having a good ol' time jumping up and down -- the one that had them avoiding the state tournament the last three years. But that was not going to be easy for Bishop Snyder's Cardinals were going to be a formidable foe as the top seed of the tournament.
The Cardinals had a nice team going into Wednesday's semifinal, sporting a 14-2 record. They didn't have a star player defensively and in the midfield, but they had one true leader up front in Taylor Savage, who had scored more than 40 goals for her team.
The winner was going to the state tournament with an automatic berth and would play in the district final on Friday night against the Keystone Heights-West Nassau winner on the same Interlachen turf.
This Wednesday night was a tense one and was a night in the low 60s temperature-wise, making for comfortable weather. I can still see the focus on Fraga's face as she prepped for what would be the biggest game of her life. Stevens had a decision to make with Christian. He felt that the extra day of rest was worth it and inserted her into the lineup.
But from the get-go, you can see her mobility was going to be limited to staying within the first one-third of the soccer field, patiently waiting for the ball to come her way and fighting for all the loose balls within her area without straying too far. This wasn't sitting all that well for Fraga, who herself was fighting a slight fracture in her foot but you wouldn't have known that the way she was going full throttle.
From the start, you can tell that the Cardinals as a team were much, much better than the Rams and you could see why they were the top seed of the tournament. They were more aggressive to the ball and made things look much easier than the scrappy Rams, who in their own right were talented.
And that's where the intensity level was ratcheted up another notch. What the Rams did was take a more physical approach against the Cardinals -- not the kind of play that would knock bodies to the ground, but at least some bumpin' that would get their opponent's attention.
However, 10 minutes into the match and already having a good amount of the play in Interlachen's end, Bishop Snyder struck as Victoria Verveille pushed a ball forward toward the goal. Tompson made the split-second decision to try to meet the ball before Savage did.
She came out second best in that battle. Savage got her foot on the ball and poke-kicked the ball into the net for the 1-0 lead.
Stevens did not get down. He continued to encourage his girls to stay strong in this one. There was still 70 minutes left and he was under the impression Bishop Snyder wasn't going to blow his team off the field. His players felt that way, too. So did the Rams fans.
So did I. The problem was the Cardinals just weren't allowing the Rams to get anything going on offense. They continued to peck away at the Rams' defense. But this was working to one player's advantage.
Alana Christian. Because she was relegated to nothing more than an offensive player, she did not have to come back and play much defense. And because Snyder had played the Rams twice during the season, it was a good idea to have someone stay with her throughout the game. Heck, the two of them could have gotten to know one another throughout the entire game with long conversations. That's how close they were to one another.
With only a few minutes left in the first half, the Rams finally broke out and had a chance. Fraga delivered the shot. It went wide left of the mark. But for the first time in a while, the field was spread out instead of being in one section of play. The Rams were going to continue to threaten and push the issue in these last moments before halftime. If you were a Rams fan, you felt awfully good about what was going on.
The Rams got the ball to Christian and she slipped by her defenders to dribble in on the net. Her shot was deflected by a Snyder player. But right there to scoop up the rebound was a freshman named Taryn Davis, who was able to capture the ball on the other side and persuade defenders and goalie Sarah Fisher to come out at her. She simply put a pass right back to Christian, who had the wide-open net to score her 27th goal of the season and tie it at 1-1 with 31 seconds left before the break.
Interlachen players were excited. Fans were excited. Stevens was elated. His team had decided to go on a much more defensive approach and took advantage of the opportunities it did have to tie it at the break.
In my mind, I could see Interlachen stunning this Bishop Snyder team. But I stopped myself because I was expecting more of the same in the second half. And that's exactly what happened at the start of the second half as the Cardinals put pressure on the Rams' defense again. This time, Verveille took a shot that Tompson seemed to have cut off the angle when the ball was booted. By mere luck, though, the ball just found the inside of the goal and with 32:37 left in the game, the Cardinals had re-taken the lead at 2-1.
Still, there was plenty of time left. And as strange as it sounded, I felt as if Interlachen was in control of things even if they would be out-shot in this game, 26-5, and the bulk of this battle was taking place in Interlachen's end. It would take one "jail break" and the game would be tied up. It just needed a moment and a place to happen.
Less than four minutes after Verveille's goal, that opportunity came. The taller Christian won a headball battle and was able to run onto the ball and make a move toward the goal when she was tripped up by a Snyder defender just outside the 18-yard box. Because the call came outside the box, it meant no penalty kick. However, the Rams had a direct kick to take from the 25 just to the right side of the goal.
And the Rams had the right person to take this kick. The night before against Crescent City, Fraga delivered a direct kick goal in the 2-0 win. Now she was about to deliver another memorable long-distance kick. She booted the ball over the makeshift wall three Snyder defenders built. It kept rising and rising as it approached Fisher.
Fisher had no chance of even getting a finger on the ball. It cleared just underneath the crossbar and into the net.
Voila! The game was tied again at 2-2 because Fraga, who was about to become our paper's player of the year for the second straight year, had delivered her 30th goal of the season.
Now it was any one's game with just under 29 minutes to go. And the intensity went up another level as bodies now were starting to fly. But to the officials' credit, they allowed both teams to play. Still, though, the Cardinals had the better of the play in the Rams' end. They put up numerous shots against Tompson, but the shots went wide of the mark or were knocked aside by the keeper.
As it crept under four minutes to go, I had the feeling that I was going to be seeing sudden-death overtime sessions on the field, the possibility of a golden goal or a shootout, which I was favoring Tompson over Fisher. Felt the same way with three minutes to go ... then again when it got to two minutes to play.
The clock on the Interlachen High scoreboard was stopped at two minutes. The time would be kept on the field from this point. Snyder made one last push and a midfielder put a ball into the Rams' box. There was a scramble for the ball. There was nothing out of the ordinary from what I had seen in the previous 78 minutes. Both teams were fighting for the ball. It had skipped to Tompson, who was about to cover up and clear it.
That's when I heard a whistle. Play was stopped.
Enter the head official of this battle, who had done a superb job in controlling the game. Now he was about to make a decision that would decide both teams' fates.
He called the Rams for something called "handling." Was it holding? No explanation was made. Well, who was it? No explanation of who was the culprit. Can you point out where it happened? Not really.
These were some of the questions Stevens and Rams players had at that particular moment. And because the foul was called inside the Rams' box, that constituted a penalty kick. Savage was called upon to make the kick against Tompson. Still looking stunned over the call she had nothing to do with, Tompson had to re-focus on making the save against Savage, all the bit as surprised as everyone else that she was about to deliver the go-ahead goal.
The whistle sounded. Savage approached her kick. She nailed her shot past Tompson's right side to give the Cardinals a 3-2 lead. Tompson was helpless. So were the Rams, who now had 91 seconds to make one last run.
Rams players did everything they could to get the ball to the feet of either Christian or Fraga. If Davis was open, they tried to get it to her. But each threat was met by a Cardinals' defender, who was getting the job done in lockdown mode.
And just as this head official sounded the whistle, the game was over. A number of Interlachen players started screaming in anger over what had just happened moments earlier. Some walked away visibly shaken and crying. And others started to go after the official and the officiating crew who had just taken this hard-fought game away from them.
The officiating crew was smart. Mere moments after the game ended, they made their obligatory handshakes with the coaches and got out of IHS as fast as they could before Rams fans started chasing them through the parking lot.
They were screwed. Unequivocally screwed. To this day, no one knows who committed the "foul" or "hold" or "handle" for that matter that caused the penalty kick. And why make that call now when the physical nature of the game was pronounced throughout. It's a pretty lousy time to start giving out penalty kicks when the game has been like this throughout.
I never want to believe that the officials just wanted to give Snyder the penalty kick because they wanted to get the heck out of there and avoid officiating the overtime sessions. But that phantom call has left a big hole for me for these last three years.
It also left a hole for Fraga, who was there on the ground pounding her fists in tears because her senior season was over without really an explanation. It was all she was left to do because the thought of chasing the officials down to the parking lot was gone by the time that trio got in their cars and left Thompson-Baker Field.
Snyder players were laughing and having a good time on the other end of the field, mobbing each other because they had just gotten away with virtual murder in picking up a state tournament berth.
That same berth that may have had Interlachen's name all over it except for the call that led to the penalty kick that kept the Rams from the state tourney. The Rams have still not made it back to the state tournament since 2006.
Fraga and Christian were inconsolable. They didn't want their careers to end this way. Beatty, meanwhile, was hotter than a jalapeno pepper.
"We're playing soccer ... we're not playing golf, we're not playing tennis," she adamantly began, the vitriol seeping through her words. "(The official) told me there was 'handling' in the box and that someone grabbed a jersey. I asked him, 'Who was it?' and he did not say. We put everything into this and to have it end this way was wrong."
The usually even-keel Stevens wasn't having none of the officials' explanations of what happened near the end of the game either.
"I can live with getting it to overtime, play 10 and 10 minute (periods) and if (Snyder) scores a golden goal to win it, then that's it," he said. "But this was unnecessary. Obviously, we are good enough to push one of the best teams in Jacksonville around to where they need the 12th man (the official)."
And with the outcome, I had just witnessed the second-worst call in my long career in covering sports. Ironically, the two worst calls I've ever witnessed happened within a few 100 feet of each other and within almost three month's time. On October 28, 2010 in the Interlachen High gymnasium, I watched Crescent City's Kayshia Brady deliver an emphatic spike -- only to have it overturned by an official as a "carry," which I've seen the replay dozens and dozens of times since showing it wasn't even close to a carry -- in the critical fifth set that gave Keystone Heights the deciding point and district volleyball tournament semifinal win that sent the Indians to the state tournament and sent the Raiders home for the season.
But Brady and most of her teammates were coming back from that debacle in 2011. Fraga, Christian, Beatty and the other seniors weren't coming back. It was a travesty in how it ended.
Before I left the field that night, I politely asked all-around good guy and Interlachen High athletic director Ron Whitehurst if he knew who the officials were.
"No. But I can get the names on the card up in the press box."
"Could you please do that?"
"No problem."
He was still upset at what happened, too, and that two of the biggest officiating screwings had taken place at his complex in a short amount of time. He got the names for me a few minutes later and I jotted down the officiating crew and left to head back to the office to write this tale of wronged woe against the IHS Rams girls soccer team.
Christian never pursued a college soccer career even though she had the potential to play at the next level. I never truly knew why she didn't go off to college. Fraga, though, did. But her one year of soccer experience at Warner University in Polk County, Florida, was not good and what she was hoping for. She left after that freshman year.
Bishop Snyder ultimately beat Keystone Heights in the district tournament final and won a first-round state match before falling to another Jacksonville-based school, The Bolles School, in the regional semifinal.
Maybe the Rams don't get as far as Snyder does. But they would have been there playing in the tournament. And it would have at least let those seniors go away with some kind of glory in the end.
Unfortunately, one official took that opportunity away on a call that to this day no one knows where the foul was committed.
Such a sad shame.
This should have been her time. It should have been Interlachen's time, really.
But it wasn't.
When the 2010-11 girls soccer season began in early November for Interlachen's Rams, there was a lot expected of the team. They had strong leadership with numerous seniors on the club, starting in the back with two standout defenders in Rebecca Beatty and Jasmine Beamon. They had a dynamite third-year starting goalkeeper in junior Terri Tompson, who was getting stronger with each year.
But the centerpiece of this club were the two seniors who had won the previous three Palatka Daily News Girls Soccer Player of the Year honors in forward Alana Christian, the recipient of the honor in her freshman and sophomore years and Fraga, who was the winner of the honor her junior year.
Interlachen was 10-6-5 during the season, but most of the losses were to the three teams that finished with a better district record than the Rams did -- Bishop Snyder of Jacksonville, perennial rival Keystone Heights and surprising West Nassau of Callahan. To that point, the season for the Rams and seventh-year coach Mike Stevens had been a disappointment. They needed to turn it around and the district tournament would be the starting point.
That district tournament was to be held this season at Interlachen High, so for the seniors, the last hurrah would be in front of friends and family. And for as talented as this Rams team had been over the years, there was one glaring oversight on their resumes.
No, it wasn't a state tournament berth. It was the fact the team didn't even win a single game in the previous three district tournaments. Even when the Rams were a No. 2 seed in 2009, they lost to Pierson Taylor. I still have visions of Stevens running as fast as he can to get a ball that had gone out of bounds to give to his player throwing it in as time was running out on what would be a 2-1 loss at Keystone Heights High that year.
Now the Rams had to put up or shut up in this tournament. Christian, the third 100-goal scorer I ever covered in high school girls soccer after legendary Point Pleasant Boro High standouts Kim Yankowski and Christie Pearce, had scored 26 goals that season while teams were double-teaming her. That was freeing things up for Fraga, who led the team with 27 goals. Though polar opposites of one another, the outgoing and outspoken Fraga and the quiet and shy Christian knew how to work with one another effectively.
Most importantly, they needed each other for this tournament for if the Rams had not gotten to the state tournament for the first time since their only trip in 2006, the season was a failure in some ways.
So on Tuesday, January 18, 2011, the Rams opened play up on a crisp, cool evening against sixth-seeded and Putnam County rival Crescent City. Unfortunately, the Rams were going to play this game without Christian, who had been hampered for the better part of two weeks with a hamstring injury. That's just something you can't take a chance on running up and down and turning and twisting on soccer fields.
Fraga, though, came to the rescue. She scored both goals the Rams put in and the defense did the rest in a 2-0 victory, the first for the program in the postseason since beating Pierson Taylor, 2-1, in the 2006 district semifinals to advance to their first state tournament berth.
That 400-pound gorilla finally stopped jumping up and down these girls' backs. But one was still having a good ol' time jumping up and down -- the one that had them avoiding the state tournament the last three years. But that was not going to be easy for Bishop Snyder's Cardinals were going to be a formidable foe as the top seed of the tournament.
The Cardinals had a nice team going into Wednesday's semifinal, sporting a 14-2 record. They didn't have a star player defensively and in the midfield, but they had one true leader up front in Taylor Savage, who had scored more than 40 goals for her team.
The winner was going to the state tournament with an automatic berth and would play in the district final on Friday night against the Keystone Heights-West Nassau winner on the same Interlachen turf.
This Wednesday night was a tense one and was a night in the low 60s temperature-wise, making for comfortable weather. I can still see the focus on Fraga's face as she prepped for what would be the biggest game of her life. Stevens had a decision to make with Christian. He felt that the extra day of rest was worth it and inserted her into the lineup.
But from the get-go, you can see her mobility was going to be limited to staying within the first one-third of the soccer field, patiently waiting for the ball to come her way and fighting for all the loose balls within her area without straying too far. This wasn't sitting all that well for Fraga, who herself was fighting a slight fracture in her foot but you wouldn't have known that the way she was going full throttle.
From the start, you can tell that the Cardinals as a team were much, much better than the Rams and you could see why they were the top seed of the tournament. They were more aggressive to the ball and made things look much easier than the scrappy Rams, who in their own right were talented.
And that's where the intensity level was ratcheted up another notch. What the Rams did was take a more physical approach against the Cardinals -- not the kind of play that would knock bodies to the ground, but at least some bumpin' that would get their opponent's attention.
However, 10 minutes into the match and already having a good amount of the play in Interlachen's end, Bishop Snyder struck as Victoria Verveille pushed a ball forward toward the goal. Tompson made the split-second decision to try to meet the ball before Savage did.
She came out second best in that battle. Savage got her foot on the ball and poke-kicked the ball into the net for the 1-0 lead.
Stevens did not get down. He continued to encourage his girls to stay strong in this one. There was still 70 minutes left and he was under the impression Bishop Snyder wasn't going to blow his team off the field. His players felt that way, too. So did the Rams fans.
So did I. The problem was the Cardinals just weren't allowing the Rams to get anything going on offense. They continued to peck away at the Rams' defense. But this was working to one player's advantage.
Alana Christian. Because she was relegated to nothing more than an offensive player, she did not have to come back and play much defense. And because Snyder had played the Rams twice during the season, it was a good idea to have someone stay with her throughout the game. Heck, the two of them could have gotten to know one another throughout the entire game with long conversations. That's how close they were to one another.
With only a few minutes left in the first half, the Rams finally broke out and had a chance. Fraga delivered the shot. It went wide left of the mark. But for the first time in a while, the field was spread out instead of being in one section of play. The Rams were going to continue to threaten and push the issue in these last moments before halftime. If you were a Rams fan, you felt awfully good about what was going on.
The Rams got the ball to Christian and she slipped by her defenders to dribble in on the net. Her shot was deflected by a Snyder player. But right there to scoop up the rebound was a freshman named Taryn Davis, who was able to capture the ball on the other side and persuade defenders and goalie Sarah Fisher to come out at her. She simply put a pass right back to Christian, who had the wide-open net to score her 27th goal of the season and tie it at 1-1 with 31 seconds left before the break.
Interlachen players were excited. Fans were excited. Stevens was elated. His team had decided to go on a much more defensive approach and took advantage of the opportunities it did have to tie it at the break.
In my mind, I could see Interlachen stunning this Bishop Snyder team. But I stopped myself because I was expecting more of the same in the second half. And that's exactly what happened at the start of the second half as the Cardinals put pressure on the Rams' defense again. This time, Verveille took a shot that Tompson seemed to have cut off the angle when the ball was booted. By mere luck, though, the ball just found the inside of the goal and with 32:37 left in the game, the Cardinals had re-taken the lead at 2-1.
Still, there was plenty of time left. And as strange as it sounded, I felt as if Interlachen was in control of things even if they would be out-shot in this game, 26-5, and the bulk of this battle was taking place in Interlachen's end. It would take one "jail break" and the game would be tied up. It just needed a moment and a place to happen.
Less than four minutes after Verveille's goal, that opportunity came. The taller Christian won a headball battle and was able to run onto the ball and make a move toward the goal when she was tripped up by a Snyder defender just outside the 18-yard box. Because the call came outside the box, it meant no penalty kick. However, the Rams had a direct kick to take from the 25 just to the right side of the goal.
And the Rams had the right person to take this kick. The night before against Crescent City, Fraga delivered a direct kick goal in the 2-0 win. Now she was about to deliver another memorable long-distance kick. She booted the ball over the makeshift wall three Snyder defenders built. It kept rising and rising as it approached Fisher.
Fisher had no chance of even getting a finger on the ball. It cleared just underneath the crossbar and into the net.
Voila! The game was tied again at 2-2 because Fraga, who was about to become our paper's player of the year for the second straight year, had delivered her 30th goal of the season.
Now it was any one's game with just under 29 minutes to go. And the intensity went up another level as bodies now were starting to fly. But to the officials' credit, they allowed both teams to play. Still, though, the Cardinals had the better of the play in the Rams' end. They put up numerous shots against Tompson, but the shots went wide of the mark or were knocked aside by the keeper.
As it crept under four minutes to go, I had the feeling that I was going to be seeing sudden-death overtime sessions on the field, the possibility of a golden goal or a shootout, which I was favoring Tompson over Fisher. Felt the same way with three minutes to go ... then again when it got to two minutes to play.
The clock on the Interlachen High scoreboard was stopped at two minutes. The time would be kept on the field from this point. Snyder made one last push and a midfielder put a ball into the Rams' box. There was a scramble for the ball. There was nothing out of the ordinary from what I had seen in the previous 78 minutes. Both teams were fighting for the ball. It had skipped to Tompson, who was about to cover up and clear it.
That's when I heard a whistle. Play was stopped.
Enter the head official of this battle, who had done a superb job in controlling the game. Now he was about to make a decision that would decide both teams' fates.
He called the Rams for something called "handling." Was it holding? No explanation was made. Well, who was it? No explanation of who was the culprit. Can you point out where it happened? Not really.
These were some of the questions Stevens and Rams players had at that particular moment. And because the foul was called inside the Rams' box, that constituted a penalty kick. Savage was called upon to make the kick against Tompson. Still looking stunned over the call she had nothing to do with, Tompson had to re-focus on making the save against Savage, all the bit as surprised as everyone else that she was about to deliver the go-ahead goal.
The whistle sounded. Savage approached her kick. She nailed her shot past Tompson's right side to give the Cardinals a 3-2 lead. Tompson was helpless. So were the Rams, who now had 91 seconds to make one last run.
Rams players did everything they could to get the ball to the feet of either Christian or Fraga. If Davis was open, they tried to get it to her. But each threat was met by a Cardinals' defender, who was getting the job done in lockdown mode.
And just as this head official sounded the whistle, the game was over. A number of Interlachen players started screaming in anger over what had just happened moments earlier. Some walked away visibly shaken and crying. And others started to go after the official and the officiating crew who had just taken this hard-fought game away from them.
The officiating crew was smart. Mere moments after the game ended, they made their obligatory handshakes with the coaches and got out of IHS as fast as they could before Rams fans started chasing them through the parking lot.
They were screwed. Unequivocally screwed. To this day, no one knows who committed the "foul" or "hold" or "handle" for that matter that caused the penalty kick. And why make that call now when the physical nature of the game was pronounced throughout. It's a pretty lousy time to start giving out penalty kicks when the game has been like this throughout.
I never want to believe that the officials just wanted to give Snyder the penalty kick because they wanted to get the heck out of there and avoid officiating the overtime sessions. But that phantom call has left a big hole for me for these last three years.
It also left a hole for Fraga, who was there on the ground pounding her fists in tears because her senior season was over without really an explanation. It was all she was left to do because the thought of chasing the officials down to the parking lot was gone by the time that trio got in their cars and left Thompson-Baker Field.
Snyder players were laughing and having a good time on the other end of the field, mobbing each other because they had just gotten away with virtual murder in picking up a state tournament berth.
That same berth that may have had Interlachen's name all over it except for the call that led to the penalty kick that kept the Rams from the state tourney. The Rams have still not made it back to the state tournament since 2006.
Fraga and Christian were inconsolable. They didn't want their careers to end this way. Beatty, meanwhile, was hotter than a jalapeno pepper.
"We're playing soccer ... we're not playing golf, we're not playing tennis," she adamantly began, the vitriol seeping through her words. "(The official) told me there was 'handling' in the box and that someone grabbed a jersey. I asked him, 'Who was it?' and he did not say. We put everything into this and to have it end this way was wrong."
The usually even-keel Stevens wasn't having none of the officials' explanations of what happened near the end of the game either.
"I can live with getting it to overtime, play 10 and 10 minute (periods) and if (Snyder) scores a golden goal to win it, then that's it," he said. "But this was unnecessary. Obviously, we are good enough to push one of the best teams in Jacksonville around to where they need the 12th man (the official)."
And with the outcome, I had just witnessed the second-worst call in my long career in covering sports. Ironically, the two worst calls I've ever witnessed happened within a few 100 feet of each other and within almost three month's time. On October 28, 2010 in the Interlachen High gymnasium, I watched Crescent City's Kayshia Brady deliver an emphatic spike -- only to have it overturned by an official as a "carry," which I've seen the replay dozens and dozens of times since showing it wasn't even close to a carry -- in the critical fifth set that gave Keystone Heights the deciding point and district volleyball tournament semifinal win that sent the Indians to the state tournament and sent the Raiders home for the season.
But Brady and most of her teammates were coming back from that debacle in 2011. Fraga, Christian, Beatty and the other seniors weren't coming back. It was a travesty in how it ended.
Before I left the field that night, I politely asked all-around good guy and Interlachen High athletic director Ron Whitehurst if he knew who the officials were.
"No. But I can get the names on the card up in the press box."
"Could you please do that?"
"No problem."
He was still upset at what happened, too, and that two of the biggest officiating screwings had taken place at his complex in a short amount of time. He got the names for me a few minutes later and I jotted down the officiating crew and left to head back to the office to write this tale of wronged woe against the IHS Rams girls soccer team.
Christian never pursued a college soccer career even though she had the potential to play at the next level. I never truly knew why she didn't go off to college. Fraga, though, did. But her one year of soccer experience at Warner University in Polk County, Florida, was not good and what she was hoping for. She left after that freshman year.
Bishop Snyder ultimately beat Keystone Heights in the district tournament final and won a first-round state match before falling to another Jacksonville-based school, The Bolles School, in the regional semifinal.
Maybe the Rams don't get as far as Snyder does. But they would have been there playing in the tournament. And it would have at least let those seniors go away with some kind of glory in the end.
Unfortunately, one official took that opportunity away on a call that to this day no one knows where the foul was committed.
Such a sad shame.
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