NVOT football wins NJSIAA Group 3 State Championship
OLD TAPPAN, N.J. — It may take years, even decades, to fully comprehend and appreciate the first state football title achieved by Northern Valley Old Tappan High School.
Championships of any kind are always special to the sports experience. But some crowns carry a bold-face, ALL-CAP relevance that goes far beyond final score or post-match coronation. There will always be only one Super Bowl I when the NFL’s Green Bay Packers destroyed the AFL’s Kansas City Chiefs in 1967. So it is with the 1972 undefeated Miami Dolphins or the 1980 U.S. Olympic men’s hockey team and “The Miracle on Ice.”
Then there is Argentina’s amazing World Cup soccer final victory over France last December that went beyond regulation and overtime before being dramatically resolved in penalty kicks.
And so it will be when one revisits the 2022 first statewide public Group 3 New Jersey high-school football playoffs and cherishes what makes Northern Valley Old Tappan’s championship run so memorable.
They won because of who they were and became—a complete team that not only believed in themselves but, week in and week out, delivered decisively. Not through luck or fate or false pretenses.
This was a team that had a losing record in the preceding two seasons and then burst onto the scene with six consecutive victories that included three shutouts in a row.
“We took it pretty personal that we had two losing records,” Jack Diggins, a senior linebacker and running back, recalled. “We really wanted to get our team back on track.”
In the state semifinal, they handled a West Morris team, 21-6, that had not lost all season. In the championship game, they beat another undefeated team (Delsea) that had swept 28 of their previous 29 games. And they won from every aspect of the game–on the ground and through the air offensively, an unrelenting defense, and even special teams en route to a final 12-1 record.
To lose your starting quarterback at halftime of a championship game with a painful ankle injury could have been a deflating game changer especially given Tommy Caracciolo’s season-long dominance at the position for the Golden Knights. But enter an unheralded sophomore, Alex Orecchio, whose brother had played at OT and who found enough confidence and big plays in his passing arm (despite earlier injuries during the season) to turn a 14-14 deadlock into a winning 24-14 margin.
But heroes came in all forms. Consider OT’s placekicking specialist, Nico Ottomanelli. A junior, Nico was a soccer player growing up in Harrington Park until he began kicking footballs in a field with his father, Gary, who had been a soccer player himself at OT in the 1980s.
Nico’s route to football gathered steam when he and an older brother carted old H-style goalposts from NVOT to their parents’ backyard in Old Tappan. Goalpost practices over the years paid off in the title game when Nico converted a career-best 46-yard field goal that broke a 14-14 fourth-quarter standoff.
The lead extended when Orecchio found junior wide receiver Ethan Brooks with a fourth down, 30-yard TD pass on a pattern that had not worked earlier in the game but was worth another down-and-distance long shot.
That teammates trusted Orecchio under such pressure was another indication of the relationships forged on the team from the time many players were first graders involved with Northern Valley age-group teams like the Eagles and Raiders.
“We have some sort of bond that other schools don’t have,” Diggins said, of the players’ faith in Orecchio and each other. “He has a tremendous arm and he’s accurate. And just having that bond, we all trusted him.”
Brian Dunn has seen various shades of that bond in his 23 years as NVOT’s head coach. Personal comfort zones “allow each of them to be themselves,” he says. “Once you’re able to embrace that, you coordinate that into the team.”
Dunn saw that bond emerge after the team lost its only game, 30-22, to Ramapo because, he said, “we got full of ourselves that week and it taught us a lesson.”
The lesson, of “not letting each other down,” became a mission for the remainder of the season, especially among the 12 seniors on the 42-person roster who had endured what Dunn described as “battle scars” during their varsity careers. It should also be noted that OT’s roster included one determined female, Sophi Espina, a junior wide receiver/defensive back, who will also write a piece of gender history as a championship team member.
But the authority, wisdom and instincts that have become Dunn’s requisites for survival and success sometimes may require further inspiration, never more so than in an all-or-nothing championship game.
And so it was as Dunn watched Ottomanelli’s long fourth-quarter field-goal attempt that would break the tense 14-14 deadlock. Initially, the ball seemed to be carrying comfortably on target before Dunn sensed that it was “being squeezed” and could fall short of clearing the goalposts.
At that moment, as he now fondly recalls, he felt as “as if something was working on our side.” The instinctive feeling, he said, somehow involved Tom Kaechele, as if Kaechele was “blowing that ball over the goalposts.”
Kaechele had been the active athletic director and supervisor of the physical education department at NVOT for nearly 25 years before passing away the preceding April at the age of 64.
“Wildest dreams,” Orecchio told Darren Cooper of North Jersey Record after the game. “It feels like a movie.”
Or divine intervention? The memory will linger long with Dunn and others. A title for the ages.
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