Someplace in my condominium is stenographer’s pocket book.
It might be seen as a relic of the previous for many journalists — nowadays, you’re hard-pressed to search out any reporter with a paper pocket book, particularly seeing as everybody has a cell phone which has sufficient capability and energy to be the equal of tens of 1000’s of desktop PCs from the 80s.
This pocket book has a label on it: “The MCT Report Ebook.” It’s an incomplete document of the video games performed in one of many eleven county tournaments which dot the New Jersey area hockey calendar.
These FA Cup-style single-elimination tournaments are supposed to match area hockey packages which could not ordinarily meet one another. A few of these tournaments are league tournaments, such because the Higher Middlesex County, the Shore Convention Match, or the Cape-Atlantic League event. One tourney places collectively a big part of northwestern New Jersey, the Hunterdon/Warren/Sussex Match.
Being that my protection space once I was with the dailies encompassed the capital area of New Jersey, I used to be fixated on the Mercer County Match. In 1992, I witnessed an all-day, all-evening quadrupleheader at a short lived area hockey facility at Mercer County Park, with 4 shut video games, three of which went into further time.
It was nice hockey, with a number of future NCAA Division I gamers within the lineups of the eight sides. It was so good that once I was placed on the beat full-time in 1993, I might inform my sports activities editor, “Don’t put me on soccer on Tremendous Saturday.”
Yep, the quarterfinal spherical meant that a lot.
Again then, there have been ten public faculties, together with one parochial faculty, enjoying area hockey within the public-school league, the Colonial Valley Convention. The MCT additionally had illustration from six personal faculties. The groups have been moderately matched; you didn’t know who would win the Mercer County Match from yr to yr.
Quite a lot of modifications occurred for the reason that yr 2000 when it got here to the Mercer ranks. First off, one in every of its largest faculty districts, West Windsor-Plainsboro, break up into two faculties. Second, Allentown joined the CVC regardless that it’s truly situated in Monmouth County. As well as, a brand new highschool in Robbinsville opened. Additionally, one of many long-time prep-school groups, Princeton (N.J.) Day College, attained membership within the NJSIAA and joined the CVC as of this yr. A former area hockey faculty, Trenton Catholic Academy (which had dropped the game earlier than the primary MCT in 1981), joined the Burlington County Scholastic League.
It’s a dizzying sequence of shifts within the scholastic sports activities panorama across the state capital.
And add this different change: as of this yr, there isn’t a extra Mercer County Match in area hockey, or in lots of different sports activities contested on the high-school stage.
Now, within the capital area, the rationale might have been a easy one: to permit somebody apart from Allentown or The Lawrenceville (N.J.) College to make the ultimate. These two rossonieri sides have been the dominant forces in county ranks for a lot of the final quarter-century.
Then once more, for a lot of the final decade and a half, there have been so many elite scholastic sides of their respective county tournaments, you possibly can go straight “chalk” to find out the winner — particularly in case you picked North Caldwell West Essex (N.J.) within the Essex County Match, West Lengthy Department Shore Regional (N.J.) within the Shore County Match, Summit Oak Knoll (N.J.) within the Union County Match, and Washington Warren Hills (N.J.) within the Hunterdon/Warren/Sussex Match.
However a part of the lore and the romance of those sorts of competitions is what can occur when that one crew with a coach that places the assumption into the gamers can go forward and win a championship towards the bigger regional faculty up the street.
In 1995, the Mercer County Match had two Cinderella groups: Hamilton Nottingham (N.J.), a crew which had by no means gained a serious trophy earlier than, and Princeton Stuart Nation Day College (N.J.), an all-girls’ faculty with a 9-12 enrollment of perhaps 130.
Regrettably, we’re not going to see that sort of closing anymore.
And that’s a disgrace.
