Shutdowns throwing wrench into wacky season
The abbreviated New Jersey high school wrestling season is now two weeks old, and everything has progressed pretty much as expected.
The season is not going full blast and it has not been a complete disaster. Rather, it’s just kind of lamely limping along.
Rarely does a day go by where you don’t hear about some program being forced to shut down and going into quarantine. In terms of The Trentonian’s coverage area, this list includes No. 1 North Hunterdon, No. 2 Hunterdon Central and, most recently, Northern Burlington.
As it stands right now, North Hunterdon and Hunterdon Central are not due to return to the mat until April 6 when they are scheduled to wrestle each other.
Whether that match will even happen, however, is entirely unclear. The same goes for the Kingsway at North Hunterdon match on April 9 in what would be a rematch of last year’s Group IV final.
North Hunterdon-Kingsway would also be one of the top matches of the entire season with no sectionals or groups this year. It also is a sad reminder of what could have been in Group IV.
In addition to the North Hunterdon/Phillipsburg sectional survivor and Kingsway, right in the Group IV mix would have been Brick Memorial. For its part, Memorial is off to a 5-1 start with the lone blemish on its record coming last week in an 34-27 battle against defending Group V state champion
Southern.
As for Kingsway, it is rolling along at 6-0 with its most impressive win coming in a 15-point victory over Christian Brothers. North Hunterdon, meanwhile, overcame a big deficit to rally for a 32-23 win over Phillipsburg last week.
No matter what happens with the remainder of its dual-match season, at least North Hunterdon does have the immense satisfaction of having beaten Phillipsburg for the third time in a row.
The season would have been even better, of course, for the Lions if North Hunterdon could have avenged the group loss it once suffered to Brick Memorial when the Mustangs pulled a fast one by doctoring their weight-in sheet.
In addition to teams going into quarantine, another thing taking the luster off an already severely watered-down dual match season is the fact many coaches are announcing they intend to take their top wrestlers out of their
lineups shortly — if they haven’t done so already. Who can blame them? Why risk having your top wrestlers and, presumably, regional qualifiers being forced into quarantine for what are more often than not meaningless regular-season matches?
Furthermore, it’s already difficult to know what to make out of some teams’ lineups right now. A classic example is High Point, which lost to Kittatinny, 36-30 last week.
High Point would have been the favorite to repeat as the Group II champion and coach John Gardner is still in the process of straightening out his lineup. Be that as it may, that didn’t damper the Kittatinny celebration and you know Cougar coach John Gill just had to love the way he was able to get his 600th win against the arch-rival Hillbillies.
You simply couldn’t have written a better script for one of the best coaches in the state.
Northern Burlington is
apparently shut down until April 8, and among its matches that are currently postponed/canceled is its annual war against Rancocas Valley. Hopefully, there will be some way to get this rescheduled.
In addition to RV-NBC almost always producing some fireworks, it would be yet another in a long list of competitive Burlington County matches this season. Whether you call it parity or match-ups, there have been all kinds of intriguing results to date.
Seneca has come from seemingly out of nowhere and is now our top-ranked Burlington team in the third spot in The Trentonian ratings. Its lone loss is to Southern, and Seneca really opened some eyes last week by ripping sisterschool Cherokee, 43-18.
Next up is Cinnaminson, which showed it’s for real by beating Moorestown, 34-32, after previously knocking off Northern Burlington, 39-28.
Cherokee and Moorestown have just the one
loss apiece and Rancocas Valley is on the upswing with a win over Shawnee and a near miss against Cherokee.
On the Mercer County front, two things of note happened last week. One was Hightstown’s Mike Russo becoming just the third coach in Mercer County to reach the 300win mark.
The other was the 51-24 drubbing undefeated Robbinsville put on Hightstown. The Raven win further set up their collision at Hopewell Valley on April 8 in what is clearly the match of the year in the Colonial Valley Conference.
We’ll take a more complete look at this match next week, but in many ways you can see how it’s going to unfold. Robbinsville is set in the first eight or so weights and is sure to pile up some points in that stretch. As for Hopewell Valley, it should clean up in the upperweights.
Hopewell Valley projects as the favorite because of bonus points, but the match has the potential to be real close. Although Hopewell Valley coach Mario Harpel traditionally wrestles his lineup straight up, it will be interesting to see if he makes an obvious move in the middleweights.