Honoring High School Football’s Best

I’m sure many of you are aware that this daily segment is just a small part of what I do at Townsquare Media.

I won’t bore you with details but much of my focus is on our Shore Sports Network which primarily covers the 48 high school sports in Ocean and Monmouth County that make up the Shore Conference.

Our coverage of the football season is now complete with the release of our All-Shore teams with some 100 young men earning first, second or third team honors.

It’s a painstaking process that is largely the work of Bob Badders, our Managing Editor who spends countless hours on the football beat from the heat of summer to the chill of winter.  (I know that’s pretty corny but I’ve been called worse before).

Those All-Shore teams along with special award winners are now available at shoresportsnetwork.com.  As you might expected Wall and Donovan Catholic dominate our post-season recognition as they were clearly the top two teams in what was a shortened and challenging season.  The top-ranked Crimson Knights boast six first-team selections in Casey Larkin, Logan Peters, Grant Puharic, Charlie Sasso, Blake Rezk and Colin Riley while the #2 Griffins are well represented by five players on first team…Jhadir Loftland, Quamire Green, Dominick Nocero, Cam McNair and Jayon Farrar.  Special awards were earned by Larkin, Sasso and Loftland while Donovan’s Dan Curcione was honored as our Coach of the Year.

We do not take the responsibility of putting together All-Shore teams lightly and to be honest it’s almost a necessary evil.  Coaches are not always the best judges of talent outside their own team and will always lobby for their players which I guess is what you want them to do.

However Bob with help from me and others knows how to navigate the choppy waters when it comes to this and has been doing it for many years.  I’ll put our teams up against any other media selections.

For those interested our post-season football and boys soccer honor roll is also available in a special print edition of the Shore Sports Network Journal.  This 40-page free issue will be available over the weekend at most Super Wawa’s (ones with gas stations) in Monmouth and Ocean County as well as many Jersey Mike’s Sub and Surf Taco locations as well.

For us the fall sports season is now officially over. Time to get ready for winter.