By Bob Nuse, Sports Editor
In addition to both being first-time head coaches, Pat Noone and Steve Hennessey also have something else in common — excitement about what they can accomplish at Princeton High School.
Noone is the new boys basketball coach for the Little Tigers, taking over for Mark Shelley, while Hennessey steps in to lead the girls program, taking over for Dan Van Hise.
“I am extremely excited,” said Noone, who spent the last three years as the head coach at Lincoln High in Jersey City. “It has been going well. The kids are great and I have had great support from the administration. It has been a good transition for me and I am really happy to be here.
“I was a head coach up there. But an opportunity like Princeton doesn’t come along often. It is a great community with great people. When I saw there was an opening I thought I would throw my hat in and see what happened and I was lucky the opportunity came along.”
Noone takes over a team that returns nine seniors to the roster, which is an unusual situation for a first-year head coach. roster Zahrion Blue, Alex Filion, Andrew Goldsmith, Bo List, Justin Marciano, Teddy Marttila, Sam Serxner, Cristobal Silva and Spencer Zullo all have varsity experience and give Noone a solid group to work with. The rest of the roster includes Tommy Doran, Mike Frost, Sam Tartar, Isaac Webb and Jaylen Johnson.
“There are all really good kids,” said Noone, who is a physical education teacher at Princeton High. “We have nine seniors returning which could be a challenge because you are changing the program from what they are used to. But the kids have been awesome. They are buying in and willing to learn. We have a lot of competitors. We have some kids from the soccer program and they bring that winning mentality that Coach (Wayne) Sutcliffe has with his program.”
Noone, who played his high school basketball at St. Rose in Belmar, is new to Mercer County basketball. But he does have a good feel for the program from his stint as an assistant coach at Rutgers-Newark, where he spent time before coaching at Lincoln.
“When I was at Rutgers-Newark in the NJAC we recruited heavily throughout New Jersey, so I had a small background of the CVC,” Noone said. “The minute I got the job at Princeton I was digging up as much film as I could to see what to expect and the style of play to get accustom to the CVC.”
Noone and the Little Tigers will open the season tonight, Friday, against West Windsor-Plainsboro South.
The Pirates will also be the opening night opponent for the Princeton girls, who have a new head coach in Hennessey, who had been an assistant coach in the program. This will be his first head coaching job, although he has plenty of coaching experience over his career.
“I probably have 30 seasons of experience between Princeton, John Witherspoon and a little at Notre Dame and a few other local schools way back,” said Hennessey, a physical education teacher at Johnson Park School. “I’ve coached everything from track, to basketball to lacrosse and soccer. Coaching basketball has always been one of my favorite sports. I played my entire life sandwiched between soccer and track.”
Hennessey got the nod to be the new head coach late in the process, but he’s jumped right in and is excited about that the Little Tigers can accomplish this season and beyond.
“I am an optimistic kind of guy,” he said. “I feel like we were expected to be down this year with all the young girls we’ll have playing. But I think we’ll hold our own. We won seven last year and one of our goals is to not drop off from that.”
Hennessey has a pair of new assistant coaches in Tannya Hemingway, who played at PHS, and Anne Klein. The roster includes seniors Ines Arroyo, Sydney Dubin, Zoe Tesone and Jamaica Ponder, juniors Olivia Harrison, Zoe Alcott and Taylor Stone, and sophomores Erin Devine, Catherine Dyvitch, Anna Intartaglia and Olivia Intartaglia.
“We have Ines, Zoe and Jamaica as our three main senior staters back,” Hennessey said. “We also have Sydney, who is in her second varsity season. The seniors give us good experience. And I think the sophomore class is really going to be a big part of the team.”
