Mighty Oaks put inaugural football program before the public, introduce Accorsi as head coach, confirm seven games so far, first game at home in August vs. Hudson Valley
By Al Muskewitz
Riverview Sports News
CARNEYS POINT — Jay Accorsi had a vision. All he needed was to find someone who shared it.
In 30 years with the Rowan football program, the last 22 as its head coach, Accorsi landed his share of players to fill his rosters. But for all the ones he got there were plenty others who didn’t quite fit or went elsewhere to play or simply had no options and gave up hope of ever playing the game again.
As Accorsi looked across the South Jersey football landscape and just beyond the horizon all those years he always thought there was (or should be) a place for those players who either slipped away or slipped through the cracks. At the same time he wondered and researched why there was no junior college football in a state loaded with underserved players and two-year college options. He found a sympathetic ear in Salem Community College president Mike Gorman in June and they spent the next seven months putting together the pieces of a program. On Wednesday, the Mighty Oaks pushed the project over the goal line, formally launching the first football program in school history to start play in the fall — with Accorsi at the helm.
“In my wildest dreams I never could have imagined creating a junior college football program right here in Southern New Jersey,” Accorsi said. “In just the last several weeks while recruiting high schools in the area, so many coaches have remarked, ‘Coach, it is about time for South Jersey.’ That’s pretty much the response I thought it would be, but it’s just been that way,”
The college had explored the feasibility of sponsoring football once before, but decided the timing wasn’t right to launch. When Gorman first met with Accorsi he thought the retired coach had come to make a sales pitch; he quickly learned they were on to something entirely different.
When Gorman showed him a copy of the college’s initial study, Accorsi knew he had found his kindred spirit. When Gorman talked about “changing lives” of 80 to 100 new students, he was the one sold.
The timing this time was so right and was part of Accorsi’s 30-page analysis that Gorman called “very thorough, very deliberate and I dare say accurate because we checked it six ways from Sunday.” There was no junior college football in the area, two of the more established JUCO programs in the region were about to go NCAA Division II and there’s a move underway for JUCO years not to count towards a player’s NCAA eligibility clock.
“It was a perfect storm,” Accorsi said.
Then the president jumped in to call an audible.
“We’re going to call this ‘stars aligning’ rather than ‘a perfect storm,’” Gorman said. Someone else, keeping with the theme of the team, suggested acorns instead of stars.
Games, vision, reaction
The board of trustees green-lighted the program in November, Accorsi was installed as the interim head coach to get recruiting started, they hired one assistant coach, brought in eight interns throughout the athletics department and secured a much-needed piece of property in Carneys Point to serve as a practice facility.
“You don’t do something this extraordinary without a lot of people on the same page doing the right type of things,” Accorsi said. “There are a lot of pieces that go into something like this. You just don’t start a football program. There’s a lot that goes into it.”
Kingsway head coach Mark Hendricks, one of several high school coaches who attended the launch, welcomed the idea of JUCO football in the region and the way Accorsi’s approach to it.
“I think it will put South Jersey football on the map,” he said.
Schalick coach Kevin Leamy also was in the house and “excited to see where this football team goes.”
“So great for Salem County and South Jersey,” he said..
During a 30-minute pre-launch press conference, team officials confirmed seven games are lined up so far for the inaugural season – Erie CC, Hudson Valley CC, Nassau CC, Sussex CC (2), Army Prep and Thaddeus Stevens. The inaugural game will be in late August at home against Hudson Valley. Erie, Nassau and one of the Sussex games also will be at home, to be played at one of the county’s high schools.
Finding players isn’t expected to be a problem. The majority are expected to come from South Jersey, Southeastern Pennsylvania and Delaware — several of whom were in attendance at the launch — but Accorsi’s binders of “350 or 400” names also includes interested prospects from places like Akron, Ohio; Texas and Virginia.
If the goal of bringing football to campus is to increase enrollment, it’s working. Gorman reported the school has received more than 50 new applications for the second semester just from football alone – and that doesn’t count former football players already enrolled in school just as students.
“The word is starting to spread that we’re starting a program, so I’m not worried about getting the number,” Accorsi said. “I think if we get to 80, which I know we easily can, that I think would be good to start. We could easily fill 100 if we wanted to. I think 80 is that good number.”
Accorsi stood before the gathering in the school’s Davidow Theater to share his vision for the program and admitted he was “really nervous.”
“I told my wife I haven’t been this nervous since when we got married, and she’s like, ‘Well, that turned out OK, didn’t it?’” he said.
It was her way of telling him you’ve got this.
His vision for the team on the field is to be “pretty competitive early on” and the program as a whole to be well-regarded.
“This vision for our program is very simple,” he said. “I want us to create an environment where high school coaches want to send their players to us and on the back end I want college coaches to come and recruit our players.
“Our No. 1 goal is to help young men achieve not just athletically, but academically and socially. I want to be a program where everyone is proud of what we do, who we are and how we act in everything we do. I want a program that everybody here, in the county, South Jersey, New Jersey, the East Coast and nationally can say wow this a really great program.”
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