New Pingry football coach Rick Mantz (Source: Pingry Athletics)
He says his golf game isn’t going so well, and he misses coaching football.
But really, anyone who knows Rick Mantz couldn’t have expected him to be gone from the sidelines for very long.
Mantz – who had perhaps his greatest success as the head coach of Hillsborough, but also turned around South Brunswick’s program and coached for a spell at Passaic – will be back on the sidelines after spending three years at Rutgers as high school relations coordinator, hired earlier this week as the new head coach at Pingry.
The Big Blue have been playing a mostly prep school schedule since 2017, when it left the now-defunct football version of the Skyland Conference.
And while Mantz says there’s no immediate plans to change that, he also believes there’s no reason Pingry – with what he says are top notch facilities and academics – can’t compete with schools like Morris Catholic, St. Joseph-Metuchen, Bishop Ahr and Immaculata, its nearest non-public competitors, geographically-speaking.
Click below to hear Rick Mantz talk about his plans for the Big Blue with Central Jersey Sports Radio’s Mike Pavlichko: