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Sweet Revenge: Brick Memorial Avenges 2025 Loss with First Baseball Sectional Title

Matt Manley|June 5, 2026|Last Updated June 5, 2026

COLUMBUS — When the Brick Memorial Baseball team stepped off the bus at Northern Burlington High School Friday afternoon, very little was tangibly different from when it did the same thing one year earlier. Just like in 2025, the Mustangs were playing a Central Jersey Group III championship game on June 5 at the home of the Greyhounds on a sunny day in which the temperature crept toward 90 degrees.

For Brick Memorial senior starting pitcher Brody Moore, however, it felt nothing like last year. This year, Moore would have the ball in his hands and he had no plans of losing to the defending Group III champion again.

A year to the day after his team lost the 2025 Central Jersey Group III title game to Northern Burlington, Moore pitched a two-hit shutout with no walks and nine strikeouts against one of the state’s highest-scoring offenses and added a pair of RBI singles at the plate for good measure to lead Brick Memorial to a resounding 7-0 win that captures the program’s first ever NJSIAA sectional championship in baseball.

“I love pitching in big games,” Moore said. “I believe in myself and I believe in this team. We were ready for it. We were one hundred percent ready for it. The whole day, I was ready. I shot out of bed this morning.

“It feels amazing. I think most people would say we were the underdogs coming here and to come out on top and get our first one means so much to me and means so much to this program.”

In last year’s loss, Northern Burlington exploded for six runs in the bottom of the first inning on the way to an 8-4 victory over Brick Memorial. Two games later, the Greyhounds wrapped up the overall Group III championship.

“We were hoping for a home game in the sectional final, but once Northern Burlington won their game on Wednesday, we were excited about coming back here,” Brick Memorial coach Evan Rizzitello said. “There is no better way than to come back here after losing to them here last year and get it done.”

This time, there would be no offensive outburst in the first inning, or any inning, for Northern Burlington. Moore set down the first 10 batters he faced, took a not-hitter into the fifth inning and fired off a stretch in which he struck out eight out of 12 hitters to stand in against him. Moore needed only 82 pitches to finish his shutout against a Greyhounds team that entered play averaging 8.6 runs per game on the season.

“I think it was just confidence — throwing every pitch with full trust,” said Moore, who also closed out Brick Memorial’s semifinal win over Colts Neck Wednesday with a scoreless seventh inning. “Getting going early on offense got them quiet and I knew I had to stay locked in the whole game, because they are a tough lineup. I feel like every game, I get stronger just by seeing their swings and seeing what they like. Once I settled down, I was just cruising from there on out.”

“He has dominated quite a few lineups this year, but to pretty much dominate their lineup is impressive,” Rizzitello said. “He did very well against the top of that lineup and those top four hitters are pretty much all Division I commits. Not only only did he do the job; he shut them down.”

At the plate, meanwhile, Moore went 2-for-3 with a walk and a pair of RBI singles in back-to-back innings in the third and fourth. The two-hit game raised Moore’s season-long average to .433 and marked his 43rd and 44th hits on the season.

“I haven’t looked at the stats, but he might have set our school hit record, which everybody overlooks,” Rizzitello said. “They see him so much as a pitcher and he is surrounded by power guys in the lineup, but his offensive production this year is unbelievable. I’m at a loss, because you want a kid to go out and perform at the highest level like that, but it’s so hard to do. He actually went out and did it.”

“I expected this from him,” senior shortstop Tyler Garbooshian said of Moore’s performance. “That’s the thing about Brody. There are just certain guys who you know are going to out there and do something special when they get the chance and he is one of those guys. I said it the other day: when he is on the mound, I know we are going to win.

Garbooshian’s streak of four straight games with a home run ended Friday, but the senior reached base in all four of his trips to the plate. He ripped the first pitch of the game through the left side for a lead-off single, was hit by the first pitch of his second plate appearance, then drew two walks on the way to scoring a pair of runs.

“There’s a new standard here now: if you lose, it’s a failure,” Garbooshian said. “You’ve got to win. Everybody knows that and everybody has to play a part. At the beginning of the year, we were up and down and we knew eventually, we were going to click, but it had to be everybody. Every team has top guys, but the great teams get contributions from everyone.”

Moore and Northern Burlington starter Jordan Gilligo each faced the minimum six batters through two innings on fewer than 20 pitches apiece, but Brick Memorial broke up the pitcher’s duel with a five-run third inning. Senior second baseman Trevor Kish launched a solo home run over the leftfield fence to lead off the inning and after three straight batters reached — and Gilligo erased one with a successful pick-off at second base — Moore punched a single through the middle to score senior leftfielder Gavin McCue from second.

“I was looking for a fastball and to swing early in the count,” Kish said. “I just wanted to get a rally going and get us on the scoreboard. I saw a first pitch fastball, then saw another one, saw his curveball, fouled off a fastball and got to the 3-2 count. Then I got a fastball middle-in, took a whack at it and there it goes. It was a great opportunity to get us going today.”

“We expected one of those to happen at some point given the type of day it was and the field we were playing on,” Rizzitello said of Kish’s fly ball that carried over the fence in leftfield. “We didn’t know who it was going to be. Kish might have been down on the list given the guys who are on both teams, but he is more than capable. He has hit quite a few and he he two balls at Colts Neck the other day where, if that field is not 380 to center, he might have hit two out. When that went over today, that was a relief and we were able to tack on.”

Kish’s homer was his third of the season and all three have come in crucial situations for Brick Memorial. He hit a go-ahead three-run home run in the eighth inning of a road win over DePaul Catholic in mid-April, drilled a walk-off two-run home to beat Jackson on May 1, and added to his timely collection of long balls by going deep in a section final. It was not a late-inning home run, but it changed the game for Brick Memorial after Gilligo cruised through two innings.

“He has done that all year,” Garbooshian said of Kish. “I don’t know what his numbers are, but whatever they are, they do it justice how good he really is. He’s been one of our most clutch hitters. He is such a good team player and he can take over a game.”

Gilligo was one out from escaping the inning with his team within two runs, but sophomore third baseman Matt McGlynn delivered a back-breaking, bases-clearing double to left-center, just out of the reach of diving centerfielder Jake Bartlett.

McGlynn’s big hit also followed a pattern of clutch hitting by the sophomore this season. In the Ocean County Tournament championship vs. Toms River South, McGlynn broke a 0-0 tie with a two-out, two-run single in the top of the fifth inning and Toms River South rolled to a 15-1 win from there.

“He’s just clutch,” Moore said of Matt McGlynn. “We trust him whenever he is up there and he got it done.”

“That was a turning point in the game,” Rizzitello said of the three-run double in the fifth. “With two outs, runners are on the move and he (Bartlett) dove, so once the ball got by him, I knew Dan (Golembiewski) could score with his speed.”

Armed with a 5-0 lead, Moore bulldozed the bottom of the Northern Burlington order in the third, then roped another RBI single into centerfield in the top of the fourth to score Kish with two out and extend the Mustangs lead to 6-0.

“Honestly, I kept saying, ‘We need more, we need more,'” Moore said. “With their lineup and this field, it’s really small. Those five runs gave me all the confidence I needed and I knew I had them.”

Moore hit third baseman Cole Marchetti with a 3-2 fastball to issue his first base-runner of the game, but still struck out the side in the bottom of the fourth inning. Second baseman Brenner Pourghassen broke up Moore’s no-hit big with a clean single to centerfield with two out in the bottom of the fifth, to which Moore responded with his eighth strikeout to push the game into the sixth inning.

Senior first baseman Dan Golembiewski tacked on an insurance run with an RBI single through the right side for a 7-0 Brick Memorial lead and in the bottom of the inning, Moore bounced back from a one-out single by shortstop Brent Walulak by snaring a come-backer to the mound and starting the 1-6-3, inning-ending double-play.

Moore needed only five pitches to retire the middle of Northern Burlington’s lineup on three fly outs in the bottom of the seventh, with junior centerfielder Cayden Concepcion squeezing the final out.

With Friday’s win, Brick Memorial has now won four championships over the past two seasons: a Shore Conference Class A South championship and Shore Conference Tournament title in 2025, followed by Ocean County Tournament and NJSIAA Central Jersey Group III championships this season. Both the Shore Conference Tournament title and Friday’s sectional championship were program firsts.

“If you would have told me at some point in my career, we were going to win the Shore Conference Tournament, the Ocean County Tournament and a sectional championship in a span of two years, I would have been surprised,” Rizzitello said. “To get a sectional is really important. We got the A South championship along with the Shore Conference, missed out on the other two and to come back and get both of them this year is quite ironic.”

Now, there is just one more championship Brick Memorial has never won and the Mustangs will try to take one step closer toward it when they host South Jersey champion Delsea Monday in the Group III semifinals. The winner of Monday’s game advances to play for the overall Group III championship on June 14 at Rutgers University.

“It’s so hard to go out and win then you’re expected to win,” Rizzitello said. “I think it says everything about this group of seniors.”

 

Box Score

Brick Memorial 7, Northern Burlington 0

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 R H E
Brick Mem (24-7) 0 0 5 1 0 1 0 7 8 0
No. Burlington (24-4) 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 2

Pitching

Brick Memorial IP H R ER BB SO PC
Brody Moore (W, 8-0) 7 2 0 0 0 9 82
Northern Burlington IP H R ER BB SO PC
Jordan Gilligo (L, 5-1) 4 7 6 6 2 1 67
Liam Velit 3 2 1 1 5 3 64

Top Hitters

Brick Memorial Game Stats
Trevor Kish 2-3, HR, BB, 2 R, RBI, SB
Brody Moore 2-3, BB, 2 RBI
Matt McGlynn 1-3, 2B, BB, 3 RBI, SB
Tyler Garbooshian 1-1, 2 BB, HBP, 2 R, 2 SB
Dan Golembiewski 1-3, HBP, R, RBI
Will Montanye 1-3, BB, SB
Northern Burlington Game Stats
Brenner Pourghassen 1-2
Brent Walulak 1-3

 

 

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