The State Powers Open the 2005 Football Season

By Chuck Durante

In these lengthened and increasingly balanced high school football seasons, the teams that adjust most effectively tend to win. Newark has dominated the sport for nearly a decade, often by tossing the mid-season playbook in championship games.

Last Friday [September 9] Salesianum won the state’s 2005 football opener by making adjustments. After a first quarter when Newark’s mercurial runners threatened to dominate the game, a teeming Baynard Stadium watched Sallies wear down the Yellowjackets, 23-7 in a match of the state’s most storied football powers.

"They have some special players on the field and two of them are their defensive ends," said Newark’s Butch Simpson.

He was referring to Andrew Szczerba and Michael Jornlin, Salesianum’s mobile and athletic bookends, whose quickness and lateral play helped prevent Newark’s latest backfield talents, quarterback Steve Williams and Esthervell Cotton, from dominating Salesianum the way they will probably dominate most of the season.

Every Salesianum graduate can spell Szczerba, a clan that has enriched the school’s lineups for nearly a half-century. Andrew’s dad, Ed, was among the most noteworthy, an end on the last 11-man all-state team in 1972, Mike Thomas’ bodyguard on the Sals’ near-miss state championship basketball team that winter, and a slugger for Father Bob Kenney after the snow melted. As a Villanova defensive end, Ed kept tabs on Jeff Komlo better than the FBI.

Salesianum’s latest Szczerba is huge, even by contemporary standards (6-foot-6, a lean 250 pounds) quick and versatile. Andrew, a junior, starts on both offense and defense and plays basketball. His soft hands caught the 27-yard pass that set up Salesianum’s second touchdown.

In the game’s most crucial play, midway into the third quarter, Szczerba jarred the ball from Williams’ cocked arm. Jornlin pounced on the ball. Two plays later, Newark was done, as Bob Sabol’s 19-yard run lifted Sallies to a 23-7 lead. The score held until the game’s final minute, when Szczerba, Jornlin and John Prisco mobbed Newark quarterback Jared Keith in the end zone.

Sabol surprised the crowd by just playing the second half. He was helped off the field after what was feared to be a knee injury late in the first half.

"Oh, the injury was mostly in my head," Sabol chuckled later. "I couldn’t give up on them."

Earlier, he had electrified the field with an 87-yard scoring kickoff return that deflated Newark, fresh from a game-opening touchdown by Williams.

With five two-way starters – including Michael Mendola, who scored the second touchdown, Salesianum might have been expected to wilt against Newark’s large line. The opposite happened. Kwame and Orien don’t live here anymore, and Kimphus Daniels has graduated.

There was no mystery to Salesianum’s offense – "plain vanilla," said coach Bill DiNardo, who called just two second-half passes – but Newark’s line didn’t cope. Of Salesianum’s three second-half possessions, two yielded touchdowns, the other a systematic 70-yard drive that led to no score but clinched the game.

Williams, also Newark’s most capable basketball player last year, and Cotton show great promise and flair, but Newark’s offense was undone by penalties, dropped passes, and especially Salesianum’s resourceful defense.

"We were stunting after the first quarter," explained Jornlin. The Salesianum defensive ends "concentrated on keeping them controlled in the backfield, on deeper coverage, slowing them down in the backfield, rushing at the quarterback."

Jornlin stopped Newark’s final drive, with a fourth-down sack of Williams, whose 25-yard pass to Matt Grygiel had brought the Yellowjackets to the Salesianum 12. Nine minutes remained. Newark next got the ball with 46 seconds remaining.

"The question now is, ‘how do we regroup?’," said Simpson. "That’s a humbling experience for Newark team, to lose at all. Let’s give credit where it belongs and that’s to the Salesianum team that outplayed us completely, the entire game. We didn’t execute."

Mindful that the whole state was watching, Salesianum kept its offense elementary, resorting repeatedly to carries by Nick Dominelli, Dave Willard and Mendola.

"We’re not going to get beyond ourselves," said DiNardo. "Don’t want to do too much and not do it well."

NOTES: Yes, the season is longer. The schedule remains 10 games, but now that the state tournament has three rounds, the season must start the weekend after Labor Day for 10 games to fit. Schools used to have to get special dispensation from Dover to start on September 10.  With some schools now opening before Labor Day, practice might start in the second week of August.  ... Salesianum’s offensive line of Matt Gillen, Nick Amoroso, Ed Kowalski, Kevin Walker and Joe Amoroso averages 258 pounds.

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