A hitter getting respect from an opponent usually means not seeing many fastballs and getting a steady diet of breaking stuff on the outer half of the plate. A team getting respect means having to frequently face opponents' No. 1 pitchers, who are often lined up specifically to face a challenging lineup...

WALL TOWNSHIP - First-year St. Rose baseball coach Rich Lanko doesn't want to get too ahead of himself in the early going, but he has to admit that the group he inherited reminds him an awful lot of some other special Purple Roses teams. Lanko was an assistant under former coach Jim Agnello when St...

It was the Shore Conference baseball equivalent of witnessing Halley's Comet streak across the sky or seeing lightning strike the same spot twice. Even after Shore Regional senior second baseman Michael Jelliff achieved a feat on Opening Day that probably hasn't been done in generations in the Shore, if ever, it still did't register...

Fifteen years ago, Mike McGarrell had a vision for a local high school baseball all-star game featuring top underclassmen and a charity component, but then life got in the way. McGarrell, a 1980 graduate of what was then St. Joseph's and is now Donovan Catholic, was diagnosed in 2005 with multiple myeloma, an incurable cancer of the blood and bones...

After putting up dazzling numbers as a junior, Manasquan left-hander Tommy Sheehan heads into his senior season with a simple goal. The same dominant performances, just more often. "A big reason for why my stats weren't as good as I thought they could be last year was an injury and an illness during the season,'' Sheehan said...

*Click here for a photo gallery of the boys Senior All-Star Game by Ray Richardson* TOMS RIVER - It's the Super Team That Never Was. Two years ago, Central Regional's boys basketball team featured a stellar sophomore class that included guard Maks Gruszecki, center Elijah Barnes, swingman Jaden Rhoden and rugged forward Denis Corbin under former coach Steve Zengel...

*Click here for a photo gallery of the girls Senior All-Star Game by Paula Lopez* TOMS RIVER - While the stakes weren't as high as the last time she stepped on her home court, Thursday night's Shore Basketball Coaches Association Senior All-Star Game offered Toms River North's Ashley Tutzauer a chance to walk off with a smile and a victory...

*Click here to check out the spring training photo gallery of Brad Brach by Mark Brown/B51 Photography* Baltimore Orioles reliever Brad Brach, a former star at Freehold Township and Monmouth University, is the ultimate underdog success story from the Shore Conference...

FREEHOLD TOWNSHIP - With a 12-point lead late in the third quarter in front of a raucous home crowd on Tuesday night, it looked like this would finally be the season that Freehold Township erased the memories of agonizing losses in the championship game and captured its first NJSIAA sectional title...

ATLANTIC CITY - For nearly three months, the knowledge gained by Howell junior Kyle Slendorn in his lone loss of the season had been sitting in his memory bank, waiting to be withdrawn for the biggest match of his career. Standing between Slendorn and the first trip to a state final for a Howell wrestler in nine years at the NJSIAA Championships on Saturday was Paulsboro's Anthony Duca, who major-

Usually the natural progression is for wrestlers to switch to mixed martial arts after their careers on the mat have come to an end. Manasquan junior Francis Marshall is part of a new generation showing that athletes can start in the octagon and transition to having their hands raised in victory on a wrestling mat...

After raising two boys who played baseball and seeing the type of gloves young players were often stuck using, Jeff Bradley spent years trying to come up with a better option. Bradley, 53, a Manasquan resident and former sportswriter for ESPN the Magazine, has realized that vision with his new company, Bradley Baseball Gloves, which sells 21 different models of gloves for players primarily ages 8