This year, the 2024 NJSIAA ice hockey state tournaments will be undergoing major changes. For boys, public schools will have their first round of the tournament on Feb. 20 and girls will start on Feb. 22.
In past years, the state tournament for public schools has consisted of three different groups: Public A, Public B and Public C. However, according to njsiaa.org, the Public A and Public B schools will combine to form the “Public Group” while Public C will remain unchanged. For girls, the state championship game will combine the winner of the public schools and non-public schools.
Within the Public Group, there will be a North and South division. Only the top 20 teams from the North division and the top 20 teams from the South division will qualify for the state tournament. These new divisions are now unrelated to school size but rather related to school proximity and location. Head coach of the boys ice hockey team, Joseph Bertucci, said, “There’s more teams and one more game to win. Our sectional championship last year would have been our final championship, but this year, there’s one extra game to win.
One of the main reasons why this change was necessary was because of the conflicts surrounding sharing ice time. Normally, the NJSIAA state championship games were played at the Prudential Center on one day. These games included the boys Public A championship, the boys Public B championship, the boys Public C championship, the boys Non-Public championship and the girls championship.
Senior goalie Andrew Raber said, “All of the championship games, five of them, were played the exact same day on one Monday at the Prudential Center. Last year in the Public C game, which was the first game of Governor Livingston vs. Colonia, the game went into five overtimes. So, all the games started late, and people were there until 11:30 going into midnight because of how late the games ran.”
Also, the hockey tournament change is “more respectable,” according to Raber, as the former Public A and Public B teams will be facing greater competition with the mixing of their two groups. Because there are less teams that will receive a state title this year, it will make the wins feel more rewarding to the players.
Despite all of the positives to come from the tournaments’ changes, the impact this tournament will have on the Blue Devils chances of winning leans more towards the negative. The Blue Devils will be in the South division bracket for this tournament. “There’s five, six, very good teams on both sides of things. A couple of them we have seen already. We’re up for the challenge,” said Bertucci.
Senior captain Alex Ebel said, “It makes winning a state championship a little bit harder, but we’re not new to adversity, so I think that it’s just gonna be just another obstacle to get through.”
