Last week marked the official start of preseason football practice for high school teams throughout New Jersey. At Harrison High School however, there were no jerseys given out, no drills being held.
This spring, Harrison made the difficult decision to not field a varsity football team in 2024, citing low participation numbers.
The lack of potential players prevented the idea of co-opting with another program from being a feasible option as well.
While such a decision felt inevitable for a long time,it didn’t make it any less disappointing for those involved.
“It’s a shame,” Harrison athletic director Sean Dolaghan said. “I loved going to the games, the Friday Night Lights, all of that. But this was something coming down the line.
“This has been going on, I think, for years. We knew it was coming literally this year.”
While low numbers have been an issue at Harrison for most of the last two decades, the lack of players reached a critical stage on multiple occasions in recent years.
A year ago, Dolaghan and the Blue Tide faced this same dilemma of whether or not to have a football season until late August. While Harrison was able to have a season last fall, there were less than 20 kids on the roster, the majority of them seniors, as the Blue Tide went 0-5 in the regular season and opted out of the NJIC’s end of season crossover games.
“You couldn’t really practice much because of who got dinged up from the game before,” said Dolaghan. “They couldn’t practice on Tuesday, Wednesday. Then, all of a sudden, you got another game again. It was just hard and it was tough to watch for safety reasons.”
Before that, Harrison was on the brink of shutting down when then head coach Jonathan Jackson head coach resigned in early August of 2021. Days later, former New York Jets quarterback and Harrison legend Ray Lucas agreed to take the head coaching job, a move that sent a jolt into participation totals and gave the program quite a bit of media attention.
With Lucas’ arrival, numbers went from the single digits to more than 30 when the Blue Tide defeated Emerson Boro, in his coaching debut on Sept. 17.
It turned out to be the last win the Blue Tide football team would enjoy and with that 2021 team being senior heavy, numbers started to dwindle again.
“Ray did a great job. I was in the school system when Ray was hired and it brought about excitement,” Dolaghan said. “In that first year, the majority of those seniors that played did because of Ray.
“Ray, Nick (Landy), they all worked hard. All our coaching staff did everything they could. It’s just literally, there’s just not many kids in our school, if any, that played football. It’s not there (right now).”
This is the first time an Observer-area team has not had a varsity football season since Kearny forfeited its varsity schedule in 2003 and elected to play as junior varsity.
Despite the current struggles, there is a hope that eventually, football will return to Harrison High School. There are reasons for optimism, including an increased participation in the Harrison/East Newark Pop Warner program has gone up the last few years and Dolaghan said he’s been working with them to help continue that program’s revival in hopes of eventually bringing it back to the high school.
“I would love (for football) to come back,” said Dolaghan. “Our numbers are pretty decent down there. I’m going to try everything I can to bring it back. I’ve been working with the Pop Warner program, giving them what they need to boost their numbers up. (Rec President) Mike Camara and myself are always talking. They know whatever they need, I’m there for them.
“The goal is bring (varsity) back eventually. Just this year, it wasn’t possible.”
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Jason Bernstein | Observer Sports Writer
Jason Bernstein joined The Observer as its sports writer in March 2022, following the retirement of Jim Hague. He has a wealth of sports-writing experience, including for NJ Advance Media (nj.com, The Jersey Journal, The Star-Ledger.)