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Phil Anastasia: South Jersey schools look to duck St. Joseph football team

When it came time for West Jersey Football League schools to vote on a potential merger with the Cape-Atlantic League, more than a few folks referred to St. Joseph of Hammonton as "the elephant in the room."

When it came time for West Jersey Football League schools to vote on a potential merger with the Cape-Atlantic League, more than a few folks referred to St. Joseph of Hammonton as "the elephant in the room."

That's funny, because Wildcats coach Paul Sacco figures his team is more like the mouse that scares the elephant in those old-time cartoons.

"The last thing I remember is that I'm allowed to put 11 on the field and you're allowed to put 11 on the field," Sacco said Thursday night after WJFL members voted overwhelmingly to deny the Cape-Atlantic League's efforts to merge with the 66-team superconference for the 2014 season.

The vote was 51-14, with one abstention. That's a landslide that WJFL president Bud Kowal of Ewing and Cape-Atlantic president Mike Gatley of Mainland both attributed to the "timing" - a desire by WJFL schools to go through a two-year scheduling cycle with new member Hammonton, which will leave the Cape-Atlantic to join the Tri-County Conference in 2014, before possible further expansion.

No doubt there's a lot of truth to that. But there's also a lot of truth to the notion that many WJFL schools - like many Cape-Atlantic schools - want no part of playing St. Joseph.

And that's too bad.

What happened to the concept of trying to get better in order to be able to compete against a stronger program?

When did the acceptable response to a team's dominance become to seek to remove that team from the schedule?

Where is the competitive urge to measure athletes, coaches, and teams against athletes, coaches, and teams that have set the bar for commitment, dedication, discipline?

Yeah, yeah. We've heard it all before: St. Joseph "recruits." St. Joseph lures top players from youth-league programs in Williamstown, Galloway, Mays Landing, and Egg Harbor. St. Joseph draws athletes from a far deeper pool than public schools do.

Guess what else St. Joseph does?

Work. Lift weights. Work some more. Lift weights some more.

Prepare. Produce scouting reports that run 10 pages for every game. Prepare some more.

Execute on game day. Block. Tackle. Stick with it for 48 minutes.

"I'm not going to make any excuses for how hard we work," said Sacco, who is 266-55-5 in 31 seasons. "Our philosophy at St. Joe's is that we're going to try to outwork people. We think we can win a lot of games in the offseason."

No program has a more intense offseason conditioning program than the Wildcats'. No program spends more time in the weight room.

That doesn't have anything to do with recruiting, with those youth-league players on the sidelines of the Wildcats games, with Sacco's speaking engagements at banquets.

Or maybe it does. Maybe the reason so many players are attracted to the Wildcats is because of how hard they work, how much they demand, how high they've raised the bar.

That's not cheating.

That's not a football team to avoid.

That's a program to emulate.

This past season, St. Joseph probably had one Division I player in its junior and senior classes: wide receiver Robert Thompson, an Old Dominion recruit who missed the last six games because of an injury.

The Wildcats had a 172-pound quarterback in Anthony Giagunto. They had a running back with two bum shoulders in Miles Pease. They had a bunch of lunch-pail linemen who never would have seen the field for some of Sacco's better teams in the past.

St. Joseph still went 10-1. The Wildcats still won the Cape-Atlantic American, the most loaded division in South Jersey football. They still won another state title.

Nobody wants to play them?

St. Joseph isn't the elephant in the room. St. Joseph is the mighty mouse, causing far too many elephants to jump on chairs.