GMC Boys Basketball Returning on Wednesday

Boys Hoops to Resume After Garden State Dodges Bullet with Northeast Blizzard

SOUTH PLAINFIELD, NJ–After an early week that was filled with early dismissals, delayed openings, and school closings, things are getting back to normal around New Jersey, and one of those things is the resumption of the high school boys basketball season on Wednesday.  The Garden State dodged a bullet on Monday and Tuesday as the brunt of the monster Northeast Blizzard that dumped up to 3 feet of snow in parts of New England and brought about 2.5 feet on portions of Eastern Long Island, stayed far enough east to keep all of that heavy snowfall away from just about all of New Jersey.

There has been some controversy about the performance of the area weather forecasters.  Even a meteorologist from the NWS office in Mount Holly, New Jersey, which issues the forecasts for Middlesex County, apologized for the inconvenience that the “busted” forecast caused.  I’ve been watching the local news, CNN, and the Weather Channel for over the past several days, and in defense of the weather forecasters, this was a tough one to call.  There were basically three numerical models that forecasters were looking at to make the call on the snowfall amounts:  the new and improved GFS or American model, the ECMWF, or the European model, and the NAM, which is the North American Model.

Leading up to the storm’s approach to New York and New Jersey, both the ECMWF and the NAM were calling for blockbuster storm totals across much of the eastern portion of New Jersey.  Anywhere from 18 to 24 inches in places such as my hometown or South Plainfield, or Northwestern Middlesex County, to 24 to 36 inches along the Jersey Shore.  Meanwhile, the GFS, which has been updated with improved mathematical equations, gave the forecast that ended up being right calling for about 6 inches in South Plainfield, and about 8 to 10 along the Jersey Shore.  The forecasters decided to go with the ECMWF, which had performed very well during Hurricane Sandy, and the NAM.  They had basically agreed that the new and improved GFS was out to lunch.

Another factor in the blizzard’s busted forecast for Jersey was the fact that the storm ended up going about 100 miles to the east of where the models had forecasted it to be.  The displacement of the storm further to the right had big implications since there was such as sharp disparity in snowfall totals from say New York City and the eastern half of Jersey to the eastern portion of Suffolk County on Long Island.  Over that area of about 60 miles, the snowfall amounts went from 6″ to about 2 feet.  Now, there are many out there, who will say that the forecasters don’t deserve sympathy because they get paid a very good amount of money to do what they do, but these people take what they do very seriously, and use an extreme amount of care in making sure the information that they are issuing is as accurate as it can be.

With that said, people in New York and New Jersey were upset with the fact that there were a lot of precautions made that ended up not having to be done.  Let’s just put things this way, the NYC metro area, including the Garden State, got away very lucky with this storm.  Talk to people in the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, who had to contend with 14 consecutive hours of blizzard conditions, and had to also contend with coastal flooding due to storm surge that was consistent with a Category One Hurricane.  If this storm had tracked 100 miles to the west, or further as those two models had indicated, conditions could have been much worse, especially for a Jersey Shore that is still recovering from the effects of Hurricane Sandy a little less than two and a half years ago.

OK now on to basketball!!  GMC Hoops, which has seen 45 games so far this season and covered 29 of the 31 teams in the Greater Middlesex Conference, will be back on the basketball beat with two games on Wednesday night.  First, the site will travel over to Piscataway Tech High School to see the Raiders for the first time this season against South River.  These two teams met up about a couple weeks ago, and the Rams gave P-Way Tech all it could handle before bowing out 72-70.  Afterwards, the site will head over to St. Joseph’s to see what is left of the game between the second ranked Falcons and Piscataway, which is coming off an upset win over 8th ranked North Brunswick last week.  On Thursday, the site will travel to P-Way again to see some of the contest between Perth Amboy and Piscataway before heading out to South Brunswick to take in the remainder of the contest between the Vikings and North Brunswick.

GMC Hoops will then finish out the week with a couple more games involving P-Way Tech as the Raiders will be hosting Perth Amboy Tech on Friday evening, and then travel to South Amboy on Saturday morning for a contest with the Guvs that was originally scheduled for Monday night, but was postponed due to the impending storm.  On Saturday night, GMC Hoops also plans to take in some college hoops action as Princeton takes on Harvard in an Ivy League clash.