High School on the Decline?

They have come from every corner of the country to pay homage to Will Hill.

The Florida-bound quarterback/strong safety for St. Peter's Prep has landed at the top of the charts on every high school football expert's list of the best recruits in the country.

Yet, in a state that prides itself on being one of the treasure chests of football talent, Hill has barely any company.

A year after New Jersey produced three of the top recruits in the country in quarterback Matt Simms (Louisville), offensive lineman Anthony Davis (Rutgers) and linebacker Justin Trattou (Florida), a scan of the various top 100 lists suggests the well has nearly gone dry. New Jersey has just two players in Rivals.com's list of top 100 recruits and two in ESPN's top 150.

Even the national team rankings, which regularly gave props to traditional powerhouses such as Don Bosco in Ramsey, Bergen Catholic in Oradell and Hill's St. Peter's Prep team in Jersey City, have largely snubbed the Garden State. USA Today has Don Bosco ranked 19th in the country, but it's the lone New Jersey school among the Super 25.

Has the sun set on the football tradition of New Jersey?

"Not at all, and I know because I've driven 60,000 miles the past year seeing every kid I could," said Tom Lemming, a leading high school football analyst for College Sports Television. "The problem with a lot of these rankings is that if USC, Florida or Notre Dame doesn't go for a kid then he gets bum-rapped."

While there may be only one Will Hill, a 6-3, 210-pound star with speed and a desire to hit anything that moves, analysts say there are plenty of other solid prospects here. By the time the dust clears in February, when players sign their letters of intent, recruiting experts expect 40 to 60 athletes from New Jersey to earn Division 1-A scholarships, which is right about where the state usually ends up.

But no one is suggesting New Jersey comes close anymore to the talent hotbeds of Florida, Texas and California, where year-round football is producing the country's top talent.

"The southern states now have major advantages," said Warren Wolf, who is in his 50th season coaching at Brick Township High. "New Jersey is no slouch to anybody, but it doesn't have the depth the Southern states have."

Within the inexact world of rating the potential of 17-year-old athletes, kids get overlooked for all sorts of reasons. Name a flaw in the system and experts can throw out three or four names of New Jersey kids who exemplify it.

# Kid plays for a small school recruiters don't usually look at -- J.B Fitzgerald of West Windsor-Plainsboro South.

# Kid playing a new position -- Piscataway's Marvin Booker or Bergen Catholic's Billy Schautz.

# Kid is a late bloomer -- St. Augustine's Jack Crawford.

"It's an off year in the sense that we don't have the linemen," said Dennis McCarthy, whose McCarthy Report is a leading recruitment guide for college coaches. "But it's the year of the receiver. There are plenty of tall, athletic kids who can run and catch the football."

Trouble is, analysts have to look in places where they aren't used to finding them.

"This is an average year in New Jersey with some good depth," said Brian Martin, who trains many of the state's top players at TEST Sports Club in Bridgewater.

Consider DeJuan Miller. Miller is a 6-6, 207-pound receiver who can run like a deer. But he's only knocking on the door of the player ranking lists, and experts say that's because he plays for Metuchen, which has never been anyone's idea of a football power.

"He's the type of player that the guys at Don Bosco, Bergen Catholic and St. Joe's are kicking themselves for missing," said John Otterstedt, publisher of NJVarsity.com, a Web site devoted to New Jersey high school sports.

Meanwhile, Fitzgerald, the standout linebacker from West Windsor-Plainsboro South High, is 6-4, 235 pounds and can run the 40-yard dash in 4.7 seconds. ESPN rates him the 137th best recruit.

"A lot of people outside the state might not even realize there is a school called West Windsor-Plainsboro (South) with a football team," said Chris Melvin, an analyst for EliteRecruits.com, which focuses on the Mid-Atlantic region. "He's one of the guys on teams that don't get a lot of notoriety."

Other top athletes have fallen victim to a game where their size or talent dictated they should play a position at the high school level they would never play for a top college.

Piscataway's Booker, who is 6-2 and 210 pounds, played on the defensive line until this year, when he switched to linebacker, the position he hopes to play at Rutgers next year.

But while the scholarship offers are still coming, the dearth of nationally known prospects has hurt New Jersey's schools in the even more inexact world of ranking teams on a national basis.

No one actually sees all the top high school teams in the country, so those doing the rankings essentially look to see how many top-ranked recruits are playing for traditional football powerhouses.

Don Bosco of Ramsey, for instance, lost Matt Simms and Trattou last year, and has only recently appeared in the national rankings after several wins against out-of-state schools. Last year, with Matt Simms and Trattou, Don Bosco finished the season ranked seventh by USA Today. In 2005, state champ St. Peter's finished the season ranked 25th.

"It's fun and it sells papers, but it's completely impossible to say this team in New Jersey is better or worse than this team in Texas," said Elizabeth head coach Chet Parlavecchio, who played college football at Penn State.

"I promise you, though, I have seen the best teams in places like Texas and Pennsylvania. Bosco and New Jersey's top teams can still play with any of them."