Background to My Senior Year at SPHS 30 Years Ago This Season
This story is going to start out in an odd way, but I will start it like this. The first year of GMC Hoops was in the 2000-01 season. Towards the end of that season, I went to Dunellen High School to see somewhat of an inconsequential game between the Destroyers and Monroe.
To give you an idea of how long ago that game was, Matt Gigliello, the current head coach at Woodbridge, was a junior at Monroe. It was a special night in Dunellen. So special that they didn’t play the game at the Faber, or Faber Elementary School that night, but in the actual Dunellen High School Gym, known today as Mike Shello Gymnasium named after their legendary boys basketball coach that gave the likes of South Plainfield’s legendary coach, Anthony Cotoia a run for his money back in the day.
Dunellen was honoring the 1968 Central Jersey Group II Championship team that included then Monroe head coach, and the recently passed Pistol Pete LoPresti as well as the older brother of then Dunellen HS head coach, Steve Kania. Both LoPresti and Kania’s older brother were key cogs in the 1968 Dunellen Championship team, which I believe defeated neighborhood and Route 28 rival, Bound Brook in the Championship Game that year.
What a second though! Why are you going on talking about a Dunellen vs. Monroe game in the first year of GMC Hoops when the article is about your senior year at South Plainfield High School? Good question. You see, when I was in the gym that night, I had a feeling like I had been there before. As the game went along, my feeling was right! I had been there before. Back when I was playing basketball at South Plainfield Middle School during the 1983-84 season.
Want an idea of how long ago that was? Here’s a hint: The Executive Director of our conference, the Greater Middlesex Conference, Frank Noppenberger was the head coach of East Brunswick High School, and their current head coach, Mark Motusesky had an older brother and solid player named Keith coming up through the ranks there. So why the nostalgia about the 1983-84 South Plainfield Middle School team, and what does it have to do with Dunellen High School’s old gym? Simple. It was the place where that 1983-84 SPMS team defeated Readington, 44-39 in the 1984 March of Dimes Tournament.
The 1983-84 season is pretty much where my official basketball life began. Inspired by the likes of the legendary Joe Thompson, the all time leading scorer at South Plainfield from 1986-2005, and classmates such as Bill Cochrane, Dave Koenig, Erik Miller, Tom Weimer, who were then members of the South Plainfield Falcons, a travel basketball team coached by another local legend, Eddie Devine, I decided to try out for the middle school team in 7th Grade, and ultimately failed. So, like they say, I tried and tried agin, and in 8th Grade, it paid off, I made it.
I can remember the first team meeting in Head Coach Terry Allen’s classroom a week or so prior to tryouts. I can remember seeing guys like myself, Lamar Hall, Tony Grassi, Carl Nelson, and Bob Zehring in the room with veterans like Cochrane, Koenig, Miller, Weimer, Mike Carlucci, Greg Block, Eulas Hairston, and Kevin Beegle. I recall Cochrane and Carlucci saying to each other something to the effect like we were going to be really bad that year. It was kind of a reasonable thing to say in light of the fact that when I was in 7th Grade, the SPMS boys basketball team was about .500 and lost to arch rival Somerville both times by about 50 points.
Here’s an interesting fact about that 1982-83 Somerville team, Piscataway’s Jordan Davidson’s father and uncle were around then, and played on that team. Jordan’s uncle played along side Kier Robinson on the 1983-84 Somerville team that would be one of only two nemeses to that South Plainfield Middle School team I was on in 8th Grade. The team ended up actually not being that bad at all. As a matter of fact, we turned out to defy those pre-season expectations of Cochrane and Carlucci, and went 17-4.
Those four losses came to only two teams: Somerville and Highland Park. However, if you count the win those Middle School Tigers had over Somerville’s recreation team in the semifinals of the 1984 March of Dimes Tourney, we defeated the Pioneers twice. However, those 1983-84 Owls, led by the likes of Deon Miller, never lost to us. There was a nice upset win we had to make up for that though when South Plainfield shocked many middle school hoop followers in the area by defeating Maxon of Plainfield, 58-53 late in the regular season.
Well, ok, you say, but what does all of this have to do with your senior year? It has everything to do with it, and why do you ask? By the time of my senior year, only four seniors players remained on the 1987-88 South Plainfield High School varsity squad from that 1983-84 Middle School team. One starter, and three reserves: Cochrane, Block, Beegle, and myself! True I wasn’t the greatest player to don the uniform at SPHS. Some may think that I was the Bob Uecker of South Plainfield basketball. I may have been even lucky perhaps, and not on just one occasion, but several. Here’s the thing though, and the moral of the story: I DIDN’T QUIT, AND I PERSERVERED!
There were others far better than me, who had either transferred, moved to a different state, decided not to play basketball, quit, or got cut basically because they had quit the year before. Yet, I survived. High school was like basketball: It was survival for me. I have endured, and continue to endure many betrayals from that time, but I feel that the 1987-88 season, taught me the importance of perseverance especially in times of trial, and have an experienced many over the past three decades or so. Recently, I thought to myself and realized that this was the 30th anniversary of that season. It was one where at the beginning, I wasn’t even going to play at all.
In terms of the team, there’s weren’t lofty expectations either. The team, which was coached by current Rahway boys basketball head coach, Jeff Lubreski, who was only in his second year at SPHS. Back then, nobody envisioned him embracing former J.P. Stevens head coach Bobby Jones, and Big Mike Allocco at the RAC on a February night in 2004 when South Plainfield led by the likes of current all time leading scorer, Marquis Jones, Darren Smith, Corey Gilmore, Ian Robinson, Gary Houston, Shawn Brown, and many others, won its first ever GMCT crown in boys basketball by defeating long time nemesis, Colonia, a team those kids beat four times that year. If you did think that was possible back then, you would have won a lot of bets.
Lubreski was our third head coach in as many years, and our fourth in about six when he took over the South Plainfield boys basketball program as a young man of only age 26 in the summer of 1986. To give you an idea of how young that was, he only had an age difference of about 8 years with most of our senior players. The program was not only in transition in terms of coaches, but also in terms of players too. Gone was Thompson, who broke the legendary Wally CIrafesi’s scoring record on the last day of his senior year, February 22, 1986 at St. Mary’s High School in South Amboy, known today as Cardinal McCarrick, one of three catholic schools in the GMC that have vanished in the wind of history.
Also gone were the likes of Jeff Missimer, my big brother from my sophomore year, John Thievon, Jeff Cantamessa, Ryan Jones, who was also a great football player at South Plainfield, and now is a scout for the New York Giants. When Lubreski first met the team, we were playing in the Old Bridge Summer League at Madison Central High School, which is now known today as Carl Sandburg Middle School. The league was run by the late Lenny Sepanak, who has a holiday basketball tournament at Ridge named after him. I would learn later that Sepanak was Lubreski’s head coach in the late 1970s at Bishop Ahr. Sepanak was actually the coach of Cedar Ridge at that time, and the Cougars, which eventually merged with the Spartans of Madison Central to form Old Bridge High School for the 1994-95 school year, were struggling themselves.
Playing in the rough and tumble GMC Red with the likes of Perth Amboy, East Brunswick, St. Joseph’s, and others (No Piscataway until the 1988-89 season), Cedar Ridge was having single digit win seasons. However, by the time I was a senior at South Plainfield, those Cougars, which moved down to the GMC White, would have a magical season led by Tim Klag, a 1,500 point scorer at the school, and become the lowest seed in the history of the GMCT to reach the semifinals. Cedar Ridge would take on then top seeded St. Peter’s as a 12 seed after knocking off New Brunswick Tech in the first round, and Bo Henning’s JFK Mustangs for the third time that season in the quarterfinals.
The South Plainfield Tiger boys basketball squad that was playing in the Old Bridge Summer League in 1986 had the likes of Joe Ranno, Lance Brown, David Krause, Joe Endick, Tehran Ryles, Jahmal Nelson, Kazzie Taylor, Pete Leonardis, Block, Carlucci, and myself. We struggled that summer. On opening day of the league, we lost to St. Mary’s of South Amboy, who had the likes of Dave Nash, who went on to coach at Jonathan Dayton High School in Springfield from about 2005-2008. Then came along losses to the likes of Edison, Matawan, and the ugly 68-9 debacle against a Piscataway team that was led by Tyrone Brewer, who went on to play at Trenton State, now The College of New Jersey, with the likes of Greg Grant on the 1988-89 team that lost in the NCAA Division 3 Championship to a school from Wisconsin.
And you want to know something about that 68-9 game against Piscataway? Yours truly got two points in that affair. Yep, I had a better day than Custer himself with a layup underneath with about 20 seconds to go in the first half. It marked the only time in my ill-fated high school basketball career that I ever accounted for 20 percent or more of the team’s total scoring, but guess what? Today, I wear those two points that I scored in that game like a badge of honor. There were guys on that team that were much better than me that probably didn’t even score in that one, but I did! I also had a good day in another lopsided loss to East Brunswick.
Noppenberger was so kind enough to have his kids play a soft 2-3 zone against us, and I loved to play against zone defenses that offered me a lot of space. I got 6 points in that one, but we lost by about 25 although our team did score well into the about digits that day with about 35 points. Back to the team though, Lubreski did make us more competitive. We would actually win a first round playoff game, and then give P-Way much more of a fight in the quarterfinals by only losing 46-24, and yes, I also score in that one two on a jumper from the right wing, but I celebrated that one a bit too much, and Lubreski had to remind me to get back on defense. Speaking of defense, Lubreski was a defense first coach. He even had us wearing the words DEE FENSE on the back side of our shorts.
Like I said, things didn’t start out that well for Lubreski at South Plainfield. The 1986-87 season saw the Tigers open up with 14 straight losses before we finally won our first game against Madison Central, a team that we had lost to in overtime earlier in the season. The team finished 4-18. The JV, which I played on, and was coached by the late Bill Mosca, whose son Jo Jo now plays at Stevens Tech, was only a little better at 6-17. Lubreski’s first three seasons were difficult ones with a combined record of only 22-48. The second year, my senior year of 1987-88, was the best of those first three years. Those Tigers, led by the four remaining seniors including myself from that 17-4 SPMS team of 1983-84 would go 11-13 although we had lost 13 of our last 20 games of the season after starting out 4-0 to earn the number 10 spot in The Star-Ledger’s Middlesex County Poll when play resumed after that holidays that year.
The team of my senior season at South Plainfield did manage to accomplish quite a bit though. Those Tigers won the 1987 Bound Brook Kiwanis Holiday Tournament, now know today as the Bound Brook Crusader Classic. Actually we defeated a Bound Brook team coached by the same Steve Kania that coached at Dunellen on that night against Monroe in year one of GMC Hoops to win the title. Two years later, many of those Bound Brook players would shock the world by knocking off perennial powerhouse Bridgewater-Raritan West in the 1990 Somerset County Tournament Final on a shot heard round the world by a guy named McKeever.
In addition to our holiday tournament win, we also defeated the eventual GMC White Division champion, J.F. Kennedy (60-49) who had the likes of Metuchen, South Amboy, and Piscataway Tech boys basketball coach, Lenny Reyes, and pre-season number two South Brunswick led by Donnell Lumpkin (69-67). Those two wins helped us to get into the NJSIAA Central Jersey Group II State Tournament, where we won our first round game as an 11th seed at the buzzer over 6th seeded Piscataway Tech (67-66) thanks to the heroics of Kazzie Taylor, who you will find out later, never met a jump shot he didn’t like. We also began the season on opening night by knocking off Colonia for the first time since joining the GMC, and ended their famous 56 game home winning streak (60-50), which came about through the efforts of guys like Gary Battle, Fred Herzog, Tony Payne and Mike Payne.
Here’s another interesting fact about that team that I’m pretty proud off: South Plainfield managed to qualify for the 1988 GMCT, the third ever GMC tournament, as the 16th seeded, and back then it wasn’t an open tournament. Not everybody could get in back then like you can now. All you have to do today is pretty much say we’ll play and your in. Our team, the 1987-88 SPHS Tigers earned our way in although we may have had some luck there. Despite those accomplishments, I can truly say that despite the losses we suffered in terms of talent in those four intervening years between the 1983-84 SPMS team that won the Dunellen March of Dimes tourney, and that 1987-88 squad the finished only 11-13, we actually could have been better. Believe it or not that team could have and should have won 15, 16, and maybe even 17 games.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way. There were five games that the 1987-88 South Plainfield Tigers won by single digits including an overtime loss at South Brunswick (64-56) that we could have actually won in regular since we had the last shot, and that day, the Vikings didn’t have Lumpkin play for some reason or another. We missed a golden opportunity to steal a win there. We also were blown out by a Madison Central team (69-43) that may have won five games that whole year. We also lost to other sub .500 teams like Bishop Ahr (65-61) in early January to cap a three game losing streak that put us at 4-3, and Sayreville (56-47), which was coached by my sister’s godmother’s son. Some of the top players acted selfishly during those times, and it cost us a chance to reach better heights.