Behind three players in double figures - led by Donald Nwaigwe tying a career high with 25 points - No. 4 Piscataway got its first win over Colonia in 13 years with a 75-73 double-overtime win against the 8th-ranked Patriots. Click below to listen to Mike Pavlichko and Alec Crouthamel call all the play-by-play from Colonia High School on December 22, 2025.

It was almost 13 years to the day - 13 years and two days, to be exact - so it seemed to make some cosmic sense that this would would take an extra eight minutes. No. 4 Piscataway would need two overtimes, but the Chiefs topped No. 8 Colonia on the road Monday night, 75-73, for their first win over the Patriots since December 20, 2012 - in a contest heard live on Central Jersey Sports Radio - ending an eleven-game losing streak in the series.

On paper, it's a rematch, featuring the two teams that reached last year's GMC final, with the victorious team having won its second straight. But looked at another way on paper, it's not quite. Colonia is missing several key contributors to that game against Piscataway, with Aidan Derkack now at Spire Academy in Ohio, R.J. Wortman leaving high school early to enroll at Rutgers, where he'll play football on scholarship, defensive specialist Nick Smith graduated, and Julien Jones and Colin Kroner not suiting up this year.

A week after regaining the top position in the Bellamy & Son Paving Girls' Basketball Top Ten, Rutgers Prep remains at the top, while two new teams join the rankings: unbeatens Colonia and Bound Brook. Overall, the top six teams remain in the same place as a week ago. Rutgers Prep (3-0) had a light week, but won both games. First, …

The first full week of play in high school basketball didn't have anything in the way of seismic upsets, but there is a new No. 1 team in the Bellamy & Son Paving rankings - with a very fine line and little room for error among the top five teams, which are a combined 17-2 following this weekend's action - as well as two new teams joining the bottom half of the rankings.

The Ridge boys' basketball team was shorthanded again Saturday - down some key players - but they hung in tight against an unbeaten Delbarton team in the opener of the Rose City Classic up at FDU-Madison Sunday afternoon. Despite a career high from junior Gabe Kielb - who had 22 points, including a pair of treys - Ridge dropped to 0-4 on the season with a 50-47 loss that came right down to the wire at the Ferguson Recreation Center.

With all due respect to those who returned, the full effect of off-season losses for defending GMC Tournament champion Colonia were on display Saturday afternoon in Metuchen. That's where No. 6 St. Joseph went on a 14-7 third quarter run to top the fifth-ranked Patriots, 58-40 in a GMC Red American Division game that will undoubtedly shake up at least the middle of the Bellamy & Son Paving Top Ten when the Week Two rankings come out Monday.

The New Jersey Football Coaches Association has come out with the 2025 edition of its "Super 100" All-State team, with nearly two dozen Big Central Conference standouts being honored. The NJFCA Super 100 is chosen by coaches among its members, and 25 are recognized in each of four sections - Central, South, North 1 and North 2 - with non-publics included as well.

New divisional alignments and no guaranteed seeds in the GMC Tournament may give this year's event a different look and feel, and while we've barely gotten the first week of play in the books in high school basketball for 2025-26, there are some games with big implications this weekend on the boys' side. Starting this season, the GMC abandoned the traditional Red, White, Blue, Gold and sometimes Silver Divisions for a National and American Division in the Red White and Blue - still with six divisions - plus mandatory crossovers to help scheduling.

Senior Kaylee Lauber scored a career high 30 points - and hit eleven straight free throws in crunch time in the fourth quarter - to power sixth-ranked Somerville to a 52-41 win at in-town rival Immaculata in a Skyland Conference Mountain Division game. Click below to listen to Mike Pavlichko call all the play-by-play from Immaculata High School in Somerville on December 18, 2025.

Scoring 1,000 points in a career is a milestone. Reaching a new career high is another great accomplishment. But in a game where neither team could seed to hit a free throw late - Immaculata to get closer or Somerville to pull away - senior Kaylee Lauber took over, and hit 11 of 12 free throws down the stretch, including 11 in a row, to give the No.

There's not much you can say for the old standbys, and this is when they get particularly challenged. Just barely a week into high school basketball season, Rutgers Prep is 2-0, Gill St. Bernard's is 1-0, and heavy GMC favorite St. Thomas Aquinas is 2-1. They'll all load up plenty more wins as the season goes on, and maybe even a few losses as they fan out to showcases on weekends, bookending their conference slates.

The season is not even a week old yet, but many teams have already played two or three games, and some are off to better starts than others. Sure, division play hasn't really kicked in yet for some, and the schedule will get more difficult for many, but many teams won their opening games and some are 2-0 already. JP Stevens grabs a couple wins early...

Bob Turco is the latest member of the "400 win" club in New Jersey. The veteran skipper picked up his 400th win Wednesday night in Piscataway, where his Chiefs were 94-73 winners over West Orange in an early-season non-conference tilt. Turco is now 400-127 in his 20th year of coaching, giving him an average of 21 wins a year at a mix of both public and private schools.

Any sport, any level, Somerville-Immaculata is one of the great rivalries in Central Jersey. So, when their two girls' basketball teams step on the floor Thursday evening in just the second game of the year for both schools - and their first of two scheduled meetings this year - expect another tight game full of physicality and emotion. The Pioneers have won eight straight in the series and ten of the last eleven, with seven of the eight victories in that streak coming by ten or fewer points.

Senior Sophia Georgiades joined the 1,000-point club with 24 points as No.1 Rutgers Prep overcame an early deficit and beat No. 7 Franklin, 82-62, to improve to 2-0 on the season. Click below to listen to Alec Crouthamel call all the play-by-play from Rutgers Preparatory School in Somerset, NJ, on December 15, 2025.

No doubt defending Non-Public B State Champion Morris Catholic took a heavy graduation hit when twins Mia and Mya Pauldo got their diplomas last spring, but Rutgers Prep's win over the Crusaders Sunday in the NJBCA Tip-Off Classic - handing them their first loss to a New Jersey school since 2023 - has put the Lady Argonauts back to the top of the Bellamy & Son Paving Girls' Basketball Top Ten for Week One.

There weren't a lot of games on Opening Weekend across high school basketball, even though teams could have begun play as early as Monday, as St. Joseph-Metuchen did. The upshot was there was little movement in the Week 1 Bellamy & Son Paving Top Ten, as the first five teams stayed in the very same spots, with just three of them in action.

Piscataway had four players in double figures, led by Isaiah Fowler with 14, while Josh Lima, Donald Nwaigwe and Landon Pernall each had 10 - en route to a season-opening 77-20 win over McKee/Staten Island Tech (NY) in the inaugural Outerbridge Crossing Challenge. Click below to listen to Mike Pavlichko and Alec Crouthamel call all the play-by-play from Edison High School on December 13, 2025.

Junior Vibert Reynolds scored a career-high 26 points - 15 in the first half - while Dheeraj Sampraraboyina added 19 - to give Edison a win in its season opener, 77-62 over Petrides (NY) in the inaugural Outerbridge Crossing Challenge. Click below to listen to Mike Pavlichko and Alec Crouthamel call all the play-by-play from Edison High School on December 13, 2025.

For a team that went to the Group 4 final in 2025 to have its top scorer limited to five first half points might be a disaster for most teams in their opening game of the season. Montgomery's Ethan Lin didn't score much in the first half, but he didn't have to, as No. 2 Montgomery - ranked No. 9 in the state - knocked off state No.

About the only thing that didn't go right for Piscataway in what head coach Bob Turco hopes is the first of many Outerbridge Crossing Challenge season-opening showcases is that it wasn't on his own home court. Flood damage from a fall rainstorm led to the floor and bleachers needing to be replaced, and the work still has another week to go before it's finished.

Heading into his team's 2025-26 season opener, Edison head coach Charlie Mohr reflected on the season gone by, in which they were 13-14, second place in the GMC Blue Division, by characterizing it as "up and down." And on Saturday against Petrides (NY) in the Outerbridge Crossing Challenge, it was much of the same. The Eagles led by 17 on several occasions, but in the second half saw that shrink to as little as three before upping the aggressiveness, getting steals and converting buckets.

When you're coaching at the same school for more than two decades - 23, in the case of Edison's Charlie Mohr - you've seen the cyclical nature of high school sports (at public schools anyway) - more than you probably care to count. Consider Edison, which came out of the COVID-shortened 2021 season with a .500 record to go 19-9 in 2021-22.

It won't be easy, it never is. But if it were, would it be as fun? Bob Turco has made multiple coaching stops in his career, three of which have come in the Greater Middlesex Conference, where he's the only coach to bring that many different schools to a GMC Tournament final. But last year, when he brought the third of those teams to the championship game, may have been the most fun he's had.