I certainly have some more to say about Wayne Valley and Brian O’Connor, but I have some early scheduling news on the Big Five (DePaul, you got anything?), plus the River Dell football clinics are back!
And I will start with that. River Dell and head football coach DJ Nimphius will be starting their free (repeat: free) football clinic series on Wednesday, Jan. 15th at 7 p.m. at River Dell HS in the upper wing.
The speaker will be Pascack Valley assistant coach Jim Cleary and the topic will be outside LB play in the 3-4 defense.
This will be the 6th year that River Dell will be running free clinics. They run 1 clinic each month January thru May. They bring in a variety of speakers from both the high school and college level to speak on a particular topic.
I attended one a few years ago and enjoyed it tremendously and I have tentative plans to be there Wednesday night again. It’s informal, but informative and you can’t help but learn something.
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Next up, by my count…well, if you want to count Wayne Valley, I guess we have head coach openings at Fort Lee, Lyndhurst and Teaneck. There might be more, I haven’t seen.
Teaneck hopes to have a new coach in place by Feb. 1st. I’m not sure about the timeline for Fort Lee or Lyndhurst.
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So, schedules.
Of all of the Big Bergen Four, looks like Bosco is the closest to finalizing its 2014 football schedule.
As of now, looks like week 1 is a trip to St. Joes of Philly.
Week 2 is currently open, although there is talk of maybe St. Thomas Aquinas, or a team from Texas traveling to Ramsey.
Week 3 looks like Bosco will be traveling to Bentonville, Arkansas (the home of Wal-Mart).
Week 4 it looks like Bosco is going to Vegas to play Bishop Gorman.
After that the schedule sort of follows the usual pattern, with the rest of the Big North United teams…DePaul, then Paramus Catholic, then Bergen Catholic, then….well, maybe Hackensack (its a new Big North scheduling cycle for 2014-2015, so it may be a different public school foe) and then Joes on Thanksgiving.
Of course, all of this is subject to change, and probably will.
St. Joes, the reigning 3x Non-Public 3 state champs and 2x New Jersey number 1, announced they have struck a 2-year home and home deal with McDonough HS of Maryland, the states No. 2 ranked team in 2013. They will open with McDonough next year. I am also hearing that Joes has a bunch of feelers outs in Ohio (maybe St. Edwards?) and California and…Texas. I know Augie really wanted to get this all put together quickly. I would expect to hear pretty soon.
As for Paramus Catholic, Partridge said they weren’t close to anything yet, and I haven’t heard anything from Bergen Catholic either. I do know that the coaches and ADs like to get all of this squared away once the calendar flips. So we will see.