The Bishop George Ahr High School football team is staying positive after a 35-12 loss to South River High School.
Head coach Joseph Vigilante was pleased, for the most part, with his team, which he admits, still has some learning to do after the defeat at South River on Sept. 23.
“The positives are that we’re very young up front,” Vigilante said. “We want to get back to what is Bishop Ahr football, and that’s a strong ground game. We did that for a half. We’re playing a lot of sophomores and juniors, and we’re totally aware that we’re going to go through some growing pains. But they flash brilliance; they just have to learn how to do it for four quarters.”
Vigilante still wants to see more from his young team.
“We need to get better all-around,” Vigilante said. “There’s times in the game that I feel that we look like a very, very good football team. Then we go on five-minute periods of the game where we look very, very mediocre and average. So we just have to get consistent. That’s the name of the game. When you’re playing young guys, that’s the biggest thing you harp on.”
Despite the team’s youth, Vigilante states that his team isn’t ready to concede or back down to anyone.
“I expect us to be competitive in every game we play,” Vigilante said. “Obviously, we didn’t get the result that we would have liked here. We have another tough opponent [in Shore Regional High School] next week as well. But there isn’t anybody that if we actually show up and play a full four-quarter game, there’s not a team that we play that we don’t think will be a game.”
Vigilante still has some veteran playmakers to lean on as well. Senior running back and cornerback Joshua Minick and senior cornerback and receiver Toure Simon both feel that the Trojans’ effort in the first half of the game is something that the team can take with it and build upon.
“I feel like when we started off in the first half, we had a lot of intensity,” Minick said. “We were getting our assignments done. We were moving off the ball. We were pushing them back, and we were able to open some holes up. Eventually, our intensity started to dwindle down, but we still had to keep going. That’s what we have to do the entire game.”
“I agree that the first half was good,” Simon said. “We have a couple young guys up front — a couple freshmen, a couple sophomores, I think one junior — and they just brought it the first half. We were really good at opening up some holes. The intensity was really high. They came out ready to play. [South River] got a couple of big plays while we were on defense. Once that happened, it took them down, and we just never bounced back.”
Both Simon and Minick want to see the team learn how to finish games.
“One thing I want us to get better at is securing tackles better,” Simon said. “We need to work on that a lot. We need to just finish the game. We need to finish better. We start well, but we don’t finish well.”
“We definitely need to finish more,” Minick said. “We need to learn how to push through the adversity and push through our fatigue so we can finish the game right. We need to make sure we know exactly what to do so we do it all throughout the game. We also need to minimize our mistakes.”
The two want to see their young team get better.
“We’re trying to be more connected as a team,” Minick said. “We need to connect more. We need to learn to help each other more and bring each other up. [We need to] pick up people’s mistakes and help them get better. We also have to bring that intensity to practice so that we’re more prepared for the games.”
The Trojans, which hold a 1-2 record, will play next at home in Edison against Shore Regional High School on Sept. 29 at 7 p.m.