Point Boro Returns To Al Saner for Week Five
Jim Rosa | October 4, 2018
Week five is here and with that, we have completed exactly one half of the Point Boro Football season! After four games, the Panthers are 2-2 on the season after suffering a 24-21 loss on the road at Neptune last Saturday. While it was certainly a tough game for Point Boro, they will have an opportunity to start the second half of the season with a win on home turf. This game features a Liberty Divison matchup with the Raritan Rockets.
This will be the second straight year that Point Boro has played Raritan. However, the last regular season meeting dates back to 2015 when the Panthers came away with a 33-27 win at home. The two programs have also met in the post season in both 2015 and 2017. In their most recent meeting, Point Boro defeated Raritan in the first round of the Central Jersey Group II playoffs last season.
The Rockets have had a solid 3-1 start to the season with their only loss coming to Manasquan in Week 3. Raritan and Point Boro both share wins over Monmouth Regional and Colts Neck. With that said, the Panthers find themselves in an almost must-win situation with a good Barnegat and Donovan Catholic team also on the schedule later this year. Every game should be treated like a playoff game. While Boro’s chances of winning the Liberty Divison are now quite slim, they know that qualifying and positioning themselves in the state tournament is of major importance.
“Practice has been tough this week. We all are working harder than ever because we know what we are capable of. All of us, players and coaches, have been laser focused this week with a sour taste in our mouth from last Saturday. We are just ready to get out on our home field Friday night. We want to put on a show in front of our home crowd,” Kyle Komantisky said when asked about the team preparing for this Friday’s game.
Lineman Austin Ormsby also talked about what will need to be accomplished in order to come away with the win. “We will definitely be trying to score more than 13 points at the half. We are known as a high scoring program and we haven’t really done that these past few weeks,” Ormsby said. In addition, he mentioned the importance of playing a clean game this week, limiting both penalties and turnovers. “Penalties and turnovers really hurt us against Neptune. If we keep those to a minimum we will be fine this week,” Ormsby added.
Christian Aurin added to this saying, ”We need to clean up the little mistakes this week, such as fumbling on important plays. We just need to work on our technique and be able to read whatever defense we are out against.”
New NJSIAA Playoff System
This is now a good time to mention the new playoff format that was put in place for the 2018 football season. Different from previous years, teams will make or miss the playoffs according to their UPR or United Power Ranking. For the entire regular season, public school teams will be split into a North and South section. The top 16 teams in each section will then qualify for the playoffs. So how does this work exactly?
Contrary to the PowerPoint format of previous years, the UPR is comprised of a percentage based calculation of both 40% of PowerPoints and 60% of a new ranking used this season called the Born Power Ranking. If the season were to end today, Point Boro would qualify for the playoffs as the 12th team coming out of the South Jersey Group II section. However, when it's all said and done at the end of the season, the top 16 teams from the South section will be split up to resemble two 8-team brackets in which a Central Jersey bracket will be created based on geographic location. Was last years’ power point system efficient? No. I like the fact that there is a new system in place. However, I do think it will take some time for everyone to understand it and most were open to trying something else out.
Jim Rosa is a 2013 graduate of Point Pleasant Borough High School, and a 2017 graduate of Georgian Court College. He began photographing and covering local high school athletics while he was pursuing a business degree at Georgian Court. Point Pleasant Borough remains a large part of his life, and you can often find him at different sporting events throughout the year … especially the football field.