Celebrating 10 Years in the NJSIAA

In the past 50 years, there has been a shift in collegiate athletics. What was once a meaningful component of a quality higher education experience has increasingly become a cornerstone of college business models. The developmental model for young athletes has evolved to become more compatible with this transformation. 

As part of this response we’ve seen high-performing select teams with professional coaches, companies that host manicured events with appropriate competition held at quality venues, and peripheral services including highlight video production, college coach communication platforms, and recruitment advisors for hire.

The changing landscape has been, in many ways, natural, necessary, and improved; yet, somewhere along the line some of the essential value that athletics provides was lost.  It’s rarer and rarer that we see schools emphasize character development and leadership, encourage coaches to play dual roles as teachers and mentors, and prioritize providing safe growth environments that embrace failure, meet athletes where they are, and inspire them to play with all of their unique creative energies.

Enter Rutgers Prep. As a school that lives its mission, RPS has never lost sight of what is truly important in facilitating the development of student-athletes. The values of perspective sharing, open-mindedness, psychological safety, and the joy that comes with hard work shine through in the members of each team who don an Argonaut uniform. Like learning, the formula has just as much art as it has science; a perfect mixture of intentionally attracting the right people and a culture of kindness and respect between the diverse members of the community who drive toward a common goal. 

The return on the investment for this recipe is hard to touch, yet the results are undeniable. This year marks the ten-year anniversary of the School’s joining the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association (NJSIAA) and a decade of what can only be described as pure athletic excellence. Ten state championships in ten years, ten sectional championships, eight county championships, and twenty-eight conference championships along the way.

As the calendar year comes to a close, the Argonauts capped an incredible run of success with not one, but two state championships days apart from each other with the girls soccer and volleyball teams capturing Non-Public B state titles. Rutgers Prep also received recognition from NJ.com—the state’s standard for NJ high school rankings and sports news—as the number one non-catholic school in the state for athletes. 

The School’s role as a counterbalance to the results-driven culture of the country’s athletic landscape seems to be the secret sauce. But this should not surprise us—after all, this is what good learning environments everywhere look like; a blend of rigorous, competitive, striving and understanding, collaborating, and reflecting. While others have overleveraged on the current zeitgeist of early specialization and professionalization of high school sports, RPS has stayed the course, and, while the results on the scoreboards at the end of the final whistle show a team that has dominated the independent school landscape of NJ athletics, the true story lies in the journey of each student-athlete who has felt the impact of a community that places growth above all else.

Here’s to another decade of success while never taking our eye off the ball when it comes to providing our students all the value athletics have to offer.