Somewhere in my apartment is stenographer’s notebook.
It may be seen as a relic of the past for most journalists — these days, you’re hard-pressed to find any reporter with a paper notebook, especially seeing as everyone has a mobile phone which has enough capacity and power to be the equivalent of tens of thousands of desktop PCs from the 80s.
This notebook has a label on it: “The MCT Record Book.” It’s an incomplete record of the games played in one of the eleven county tournaments which dot the New Jersey field hockey calendar.
These FA Cup-style single-elimination tournaments are meant to match field hockey programs which might not ordinarily meet each other. Some of these tournaments are league tournaments, such as the Greater Middlesex County, the Shore Conference Tournament, or the Cape-Atlantic League tournament. One tourney puts together a large section of northwestern New Jersey, the Hunterdon/Warren/Sussex Tournament.
Being that my coverage area when I was with the dailies encompassed the capital region of New Jersey, I was fixated on the Mercer County Tournament. In 1992, I witnessed an all-day, all-evening quadrupleheader at a temporary field hockey facility at Mercer County Park, with four close games, three of which went into extra time.
It was great hockey, with several future NCAA Division I players in the lineups of the eight sides. It was so good that when I was put on the beat full-time in 1993, I would tell my sports editor, “Don’t put me on football on Super Saturday.”
Yep, the quarterfinal round meant that much.
Back then, there were ten public schools, including one parochial school, playing field hockey in the public-school league, the Colonial Valley Conference. The MCT also had representation from six private schools. The teams were reasonably matched; you didn’t know who would win the Mercer County Tournament from year to year.
A number of changes occurred since the year 2000 when it came to the Mercer ranks. First off, one of its largest school districts, West Windsor-Plainsboro, split into two schools. Second, Allentown joined the CVC even though it is actually located in Monmouth County. In addition, a new high school in Robbinsville opened. Also, one of the long-time prep-school teams, Princeton (N.J.) Day School, attained membership in the NJSIAA and joined the CVC as of this year. A former field hockey school, Trenton Catholic Academy (which had dropped the sport before the first MCT in 1981), joined the Burlington County Scholastic League.
It’s a dizzying series of shifts in the scholastic sports landscape around the state capital.
And add this other change: as of this year, there is no more Mercer County Tournament in field hockey, or in many other sports contested at the high-school level.
Now, in the capital region, the rationale may have been a simple one: to allow someone other than Allentown or The Lawrenceville (N.J.) School to make the final. These two rossonieri sides were the dominant forces in county ranks for much of the last quarter-century.
Then again, for much of the last decade and a half, there have been so many elite scholastic sides in their respective county tournaments, you could go straight “chalk” to determine the winner — especially if you picked North Caldwell West Essex (N.J.) in the Essex County Tournament, West Long Branch Shore Regional (N.J.) in the Shore County Tournament, Summit Oak Knoll (N.J.) in the Union County Tournament, and Washington Warren Hills (N.J.) in the Hunterdon/Warren/Sussex Tournament.
But part of the lore and the romance of these kinds of competitions is what can happen when that one team with a coach that puts the belief into the players can go ahead and win a championship against the larger regional school up the road.
In 1995, the Mercer County Tournament had two Cinderella teams: Hamilton Nottingham (N.J.), a team which had never won a major trophy before, and Princeton Stuart Country Day School (N.J.), an all-girls’ school with a 9-12 enrollment of maybe 130.
Regrettably, we’re not going to see that kind of final anymore.
And that’s a shame.
