Hornet Heaven: Holmdel Wins Its First State Title in History With a 41-20 Victory over Seneca
HOLMDEL – Seven years ago, it was a group of fourth- and fifth-graders idly imagining that maybe one day they would be the ones to do what had never been done at Holmdel.
Three years ago, it was Holmdel football alumni and program supporters thinking maybe this freshmen group is unlike any other that has put on the blue and white.
Last year, it was a coaching staff seeing a team pushing up against the ceiling, falling just one win short of reaching a sectional final.
The unthinkable had become the possible.
When senior quarterback Jack Cannon unleashed a bomb to senior wide receiver James Murphy for a 70-yard touchdown on the second play from scrimmage against Seneca on Friday night, it became the inevitable.
Top-seeded Holmdel started fast and never trailed on its way to a 41-20 win over the third-seeded Golden Eagles (9-3) at Bob Roggy Memorial Field to capture its first state sectional title in the program’s 53-year history by taking home the NJSIAA Central Jersey Group 3 championship.
“This is probably one of the greatest nights of my life,” Cannon said. “We manifested this our whole lives pretty much, and we got it done.”
Hold it up high! Jack Cannon and Holmdel celebrate winning the program’s first state sectional title. (Photo by Tom Smith/tspimages.com)
“This has been our goal since we were in fifth grade to finally prove the haters wrong saying that Holmdel could never do it,” Murphy said. “Now we did it, so they can’t say anything now. It’s been a 10-year goal. The delayed gratification of this achievement has made it so much sweeter.”
Cannon continued his record-setting senior season with 187 yards and two touchdowns passing, plus 114 yards and two touchdowns rushing against a Seneca defense that had not allowed more than 21 points in a game all season. He also had an interception on defense and recovered an onside kick.
The Golden Eagles were allowing just 11.5 points per game before the Hornets (9-2), ranked No. 3 in the Shore Sports Insider Top 12, hung 41 on them and never punted once. It shows how explosive Holmdel’s offense has become that it rolled up 415 yards despite the Hornets committing 12 penalties for 110 yards, dropping two passes and fumbling a punt in their first appearance in a sectional final since 1991.
“We knew that we could achieve this,” Murphy said. “We knew how good we were, but I don’t think everyone else did. That first win against Donovan (Catholic) and that second win against RFH, that put us on the map.”
Murphy finished with four catches for 129 yards and a touchdown, all in the first half, and junior running back Matt Scheinman had 64 yards rushing and a touchdown on 10 carries and caught an eight-yard touchdown pass.
This isn’t the final chapter of the best season in Holmdel history, as the Hornets will host the winner of Saturday’s South Jersey Group 3 final between Mainland and Cedar Creek on Nov. 21 in the Group 3 semifinals.
Holmdel Starts Off Hot and Never Looks Back
The Hornets gave the West Jersey Football League squad an immediate taste of what Shore Conference defenses have been dealing with all season when they stung the Golden Eagles on the second play from scrimmage in the game.
Murphy, who has 889 yards receiving on an average of 24.7 yards per catch, ran a post route. Cannon hit him in stride for a 70-yard score and a 7-0 lead only 21 seconds into the game.
Holmdel senior WR James Murphy had four catches for 129 yards and a touchdown in the win. (Photo by Tom Smith/tspimages.com)
“I knew Murph is one of the top-five fastest guys in the Shore,” Cannon said. “He just dusted the kid, and I gave him a chance because he makes great plays.”
“I feel like (the touchdown) was super important because this (Seneca) defense is good,” Murphy said. “They give up an average of 11 points, and the highest points they’ve ever given up was 21, so to come out of the gate on the second play and already score six, it felt amazing.”
Seneca answered with a 10-play, 60-yard drive that culminated in an eight-yard touchdown pass from junior quarterback Anthony Tirico to senior tight end Colin Smith. Holmdel senior defensive lineman Luke Schiess blocked the extra point to keep the Hornets ahead 7-6 with 5:13 left in the first quarter.
Hornets Extend the Lead
Holmdel came right back with a nine-play, 75-yard drive that ended with an 11-yard touchdown run by Scheinman off a pitch from Cannon for a 14-6 advantage with 2:03 left in the first quarter.
A Hornets defense that gave up 42 points to Neptune in the semifinals and entered allowing 27.7 points per game then showed things were going to be different this week. Scheinman made a tackle for no gain on third down at the Seneca 45-yard line and then sacked Tirico for an eight-yard loss when the Golden Eagles went for it on 4th-and-3 with 10:35 left in the half.
“It was huge,” Scheinman said. “We knew what our offense can do. On defense, we just needed to know that we could get stops. Me getting that sack just created a whole lot of momentum.”
Both defenses got stops on downs before Holmdel pushed the lead to 20-6 at the half with a six-play, 61-yard drive. Sophomore wide receiver Anthony Serini took a jet sweep 13 yards to the house to cap the drive. Another significant development was that Seneca literally suffered a big loss when 6-foot-4, 305-pound defensive tackle Pat Degnan, a Villanova recruit, was ejected for a late hit out of bounds on Cannon.
Holmdel Brings It Home
The Hornets’ defense showed some mettle to start the second half by forcing a three-and-out and then digging in after Holmdel muffed the ensuing punt and it was recovered by Seneca at the Hornets’ 38-yard line. The defense then forced an incompletion on fourth down to give the ball back to the Shore Conference’s highest-scoring offense.
A huge key was stopping the Golden Eagles’ vaunted run game. A Seneca offense that rolled up 353 yards on the ground in a semifinal win over Matawan was limited to 60 yards rushing on 27 carries, and 28 of those yards came on Seneca’s lone scoring drive of the first half.
“The defense played exceptional today,” Cannon said. “I can’t thank them enough for just playing lights-out when we needed them the most. We got (Seneca) to what we wanted them to do, and that was to make them pass the ball.”
Holmdel senior quarterback Jack Cannon had 301 yards of offense and four total touchdowns in the historic win. (Photo by Tom Smith/tspimages.com)
Five plays after getting the ball back, the Hornets came out in what they call their “ninja” formation, where only the center and left guard are lined up in front of Cannon and the rest of the offensive linemen are split wide near the sidelines.
Cannon took the snap and knifed his way through the thinned-out middle of the defense for a 65-yard touchdown and a 27-6 lead with 5:50 left in the third quarter.
“They don’t know what they’re looking at, and you hit them with a counter or outside zone or slant,” Cannon said. “There’s a bunch of stuff. Coach ‘Kav’ (Noel Kavanagh) draws plays up in his sleep sometimes. He’s just such a great coach. He just gets us open every time.”
Holmdel senior linebacker Peter Berardi recovered a fumble at Seneca’s 23-yard line on the Golden Eagles’ ensuing drive, and the offense then effectively put the game away. Cannon plowed in from a yard out to complete an eight-play drive and balloon the lead to 34-6 with 11:56 left in the game.
Seneca scored on a 1-yard keeper by Tirico, recovered an onside kick and then made it 34-20 with a two-yard touchdown run by Tirico with 8:54 left in the game, but it was too little, too late. Cannon recovered the ensuing onside kick, and a 15-yard penalty put the ball at Seneca’s 22-yard line. Six plays later, the Dartmouth recruit hit Scheinman for an eight-yard touchdown pass to put the exclamation point on the 41-20 victory.
“It just means so much,” Cannon said. “Shutting down all the doubters who doubted us at the beginning of the season. Here at Holmdel, we have started to just trust the process in the weight room, in the film, during the summer, and that paid off as you can see this season with the first sectional championship in school history.”
Savoring History
Cannon has had one of the prolific offensive seasons of any player in the state with 2,549 yards and 28 touchdowns passing and 1,521 yards and 30 touchdowns rushing. He owns seemingly all of Holmdel’s offensive records, but there was only one stat he cared about most: a “1” next to the number of state championships for the Hornets.
“My records here at Holmdel are going to be broken,” he said. “There’s going to be a freak that comes along and breaks my records, but nobody can take this from me. And that’s what we said all week long. Nobody can take this from us. We’re going down in Holmdel history.”
Kavanagh took the Hornets to the promised land in just his second season as head coach. He was an assistant on the first Freehold team to ever win a state title, and also has been part of a state championship team at Neptune, both under Mark Ciccotelli. Now he has led a team of his own to a place few thought it could ever reach.
“It’s awesome that all these players trusted me so much and bought into our program,” Kavanagh said. “When I first got hired here a lot of people were like, ‘Who are these guys?’ But now I think everyone has a good respect for these guys because they do a phenomenal job. No one’s bigger than the team here. Everyone understands that we’re doing this together. It’s not about one person.”
Ciccotelli, who is now the head coach at Linden, was there to congratulate Kavanagh in person.
“I got a text from Cicc this week, and he said, ‘Coach, don’t worry about the end result. Focus on the process,’” Kavanagh said. “And I said that to the kids. If we focus on the process and the little things we need to do to get to that moment and get to that point, we’re going to be fine. Don’t worry about the end result now.”
The Hornets will now try to ride the wave all the way to Rutgers or MetLife Stadium to the Group 3 final. There’s a chance they will face Mainland in the Group 3 semifinals, one season after the Mustangs wiped them out 48-13 in the sectional semifinals.
“We need to play better than we did this week,” Cannon said. “We play either Mainland or Cedar Creek, and those are both exceptional teams, so we just got to execute at a really high level. We ran into a buzzsaw in Mainland last year, and we realized there was a different level of football. And they’re still exceptional this year, so we just got to play our best.”
“Say Mainland wins, the only thing greater than this accomplishment is revenge,” Murphy said.
No matter what happens next week, this year’s Hornets have achieved immortality at Holmdel.
“It’s the greatest feeling in the world,” Scheinman said. “Fifty-three years.”
“This hasn’t been a precedent in Holmdel,” Murphy said before smiling. “But we’re not the average Holmdel team.”
Box Score
Holmdel 41, Seneca 20
| H | S | |
| First downs | 19 | 13 |
| Rushes-yards | 32-216 | 27-60 |
| Passing | 11-18-0 | 14-23-2 |
| Passing yards | 199 | 188 |
| Fumbles-lost | 1-1 | 2-2 |
| Penalties-yards | 12-110 | 6-74 |
| Seneca (9-3) | 6 | 0 | 0 | 14 | 20 |
| Holmdel (9-2) | 14 | 6 | 7 | 14 | 41 |
Scoring Summary
H: Murphy 70-yard pass from Cannon (Mueller kick).
S: Smith 8-yard pass from Tirico (kick blocked).
H: Scheinman 11-yard run (Mueller kick).
H: Serini 13-yard run (kick blocked).
H: Cannon 65-yard run (Mueller kick).
H: Cannon 1-yard run (Mueller kick).
S: Tirico 1-yard run (Hood kick).
S: Tirico 2-yard run (Hood kick).
H: Scheinman 8-yard pass from Cannon (Mueller kick).
Individual Statistics
RUSHING — H: Cannon 19-114, Serini 3-38, Scheiman 10-64. S: Tirico 25-63, Horner 2-(-3).
PASSING — H: Cannon 10-17-0 187, Serini 1-1-0 12. S: Tirico 14-23-2 188.
RECEIVING — H: Murphy 4-129, Serini 2-31, Scheinman 3-21, Cannon 1-12, Todisco 1-6. S: Horner 3-12, Smith 4-33, Atz 4-69, Williams 1-5, Sauerwald 2-69.
INTERCEPTIONS — H: Pescatore 1-6, Cannon 1-33.
