St. Peters wins North

By Fred Siegle

SOUTH BRUNSWICK - St. Peters' seniors crammed most of their final-year highlights into one day.

The Marauders won the NJSIAA North section championship, beating Hudson County rival Bayonne 25-17, 25-20 in a match that started at 5 p.m. Wednesday at South Brunswick High School. Then the seniors rushed back to their school in Jersey City for their high school graduation at 8 p.m.
"That's a pretty nice cap to our senior year, doing all this in one day is great,'' said senior Matt Whitford, who finished with 7 kills, 3 blocks and an ace.

It was aggressive serving that helped St. Peters get an edge over the Bees to even their record at 2-2 in matches against Bayonne. The Marauders advance to the state championship match against East Brunswick on Friday at South Brunswick.
While Whitford had just the one ace, his jump serve kept Bayonne's offense at bay. He had a streak of four service points in the first game, and also served two points in the second. And it was a nice counterpoint to the rest of the Marauders' float serves.

"We knew we had to step up our serving to beat them,'' Whitford said. "We've been working on it for the past couple weeks.''

"We had our floats working well,'' said setter Gil Estupinan, who had 2 kills, 15 assists and an ace. "And Matt was on with his jump serve.''

The Marauders also changed up their offense and blocking schemes from their previous meeting with Bayonne, a loss in the county final. Outside hitter Jerry Santer led the team with 8 kills, while middles Nick DeBenedictis and Miles McCann each had 4 kills each. But those were mostly on 1 balls, rather than the back slides they had run effectively in the past.

"We watched tape of the previous games, and saw that 75 percent of the time, their middles stayed with our middles,'' Estupinan said. "So we tried to set away from that so they'd only have one blocker.''

Bayonne meanwhile, had probably its worst offensive day. Middle Danny Kochanski had 6 kills and a block, while Justin Beaumont had 4 kills and 7 digs. Coco Ostorga had 2 kills and four digs, Pat Rujznica had 2 kills, 3 digs and 2 blocks, and Krzyzstof Bogdan had 4 kills, 2 digs and 1 block.

The Bees, who finish with a 30-5 record, had a particularly rough first game, with 10 hitting errors.

"Everything we did, Prep had an answer for it,'' Bees' coach Pat Longo said. "We're disappointed, but we also had a fabulous year, I'm very proud of these kids. Nobody thought we'd be here. We had a great run.''

After the flurry of errors in the first game, Bayonne settled down a bit in the second and trailed 21-20 before the Marauders finished with a flurry. DeBenedictis had a kill, Peter Jimenez had an ace, Whitford had a kill after a dig by Jimenez, and DeBenedictis closed out the win with a block in the middle.

Prep now gets set to face East Brunswick, which handed Southern Regional its first loss of the season in the South/Central final that followed their victory, which the St. Peters' seniors weren't able to watch because they were on their way to graduation.

"We just have to get ready for Southern or East Brunswick now,'' Estupinan said before leaving.