Thanksgiving Football Not on the Menu for RBC

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By Jim Hintelmann and Dillon Stambaugh

RED BANK – Thanksgiving Day high school football games have always been a tradition and almost all of the schools have games that day.
One of the few schools that didn’t play on Thanksgiving was Red Bank Catholic, which has one of the Shore’s top football programs. RBC had a long Thanksgiving Day football rivalry with Rumson – Fair Haven Regional.
The series began in 1957 and continued every year with one exception (1989 when a snowstorm cancelled the game) until 2012 when Rumson suddenly ended the series and replaced RBC with another top rival, Shore Regional, which had a vacancy on Thanksgiving.
“We didn’t expect it,” said RBC athletic director Joe Montano. “Rumson’s athletic director called me and said that they were ending the series and had already scheduled Shore as a replacement.”
“We were very disappointed,” he said. “They just felt that with Shore available, it would be their best interest to play them and not us in football anymore.”
Thanksgiving games are unique beyond rivalry. They fall in the middle of the NJSIAA playoffs, a place familiar to both RBC and RFH. Because of the game’s ill timing, coaches of playoff-contending teams often elect to rest their starting players so they don’t suffer an injury during the team’s quest for a championship. It’s strategy.
However, the issue becomes convoluted when the Thanksgiving game is a rivalry that stood for over five decades. Coaches must decide what is more important: fulfilling a longstanding tradition or winning football games.
“The Thanksgiving Day game is more than a rivalry” Montano said. “It’s a tradition in which you have returning alumni and events like homecoming. Even if we found a school, it would be an out of area team like Paul VI (Haddonfield) and wouldn’t have the interest and tradition like we had with Rumson.”
As of now, RBC has not found a replacement school. Some consideration was given to a possible game with another big rival, St. John Vianney, which also didn’t have a Thanksgiving Day game, but it couldn’t be worked out because both teams had a full nine-game schedule. “We would play SJV or any other school if it made any sense,” said Montano.
The RBC-Rumson game was a very competitive, hard-fought series played in front of standing room only crowds, but RBC had won the last 10 meetings, most of them by one-sided scores. When Shore became available, it replaced RBC last year and has beaten Rumson in both meetings.
The change has resulted in a lose-lose situation for the Bulldogs, who, in the presumed interest of winning games, ended a 55-year tradition only to drop two consecutive games to the Blue Devils. However, seemingly unaffected by abandoning the rivalry, Rumson went on this year to win their third straight sectional championship.
While sectional titles are quickly becoming the new tradition at RFH, some wish the Thanksgiving rivalry never ended.
“[The rivalry] was pretty cool,” said Joe Spernal, a recent graduate from RFH. “We were pretty close the RBC community. I knew a ton of kids from the school, so it was always fun getting together and playing them or just coming back from college and hanging out.”
While Spernal was a baseball stand-out for the Bulldogs, the tradition runs deep in his family.
“My dad, uncle and brother played for Red Bank while the rest of my family went to Rumson,” he said. “It was a fun little family rivalry. I was mad they ended it, but a lot of those years we didn’t even play our starters.” Red Bank Catholic will open the 2016 football season at home against Middletown South.

RED BANK CATHOLIC 2016 Football Schedule: Dates and Times TBA

WEEK ONE: Middletown South

WEEK TWO: at Middletown North

WEEK THREE: Ocean

WEEK FOUR: Colonia

WEEK FIVE: at Wall

WEEK SIX: at Long Branch

WEEK SEVEN: at St. John Vianney

WEEK EIGHT: Red Bank

WEEK NINE: Manasquan