Central Jersey Sports Radio’s basketball coverage set to start, as 2025-26 could be one of the more interesting in years

We’re just three days away from the opening of the 2025-26 high school basketball season in New Jersey, and while only a handful of teams will play on Monday, Opening Night, we’re tipping off our coverage this weekend.

We’ll get it going with previews of some of the top boys’ and girls’ teams in the area starting Saturday, December 6th, and running through next weekend, when many teams start getting underway.

We’ll have our preseason Bellamy & Son Paving Top Ten rankings out the day after, on Sunday, and reveal our 2025-26 broadcast schedule on Monday afternoon. That will be a slate of around a dozen or so regular season games split between the boys and girls in both the Greater Middlesex Conference and the Somerset County portion of the Skyland Conference.

Of course, Central Jersey Sports Radio will be there for the GMC and Somerset County Tournaments in February, as well as the NJSIAA State Tournament as far as our local teams will go.

Season outlook…

The season proves to be an interesting one, notably on the boys’ side in the GMC, where there’s been much off-season upheaval. Colonia took its fourth straight North 2, Group 4 title, and won its second straight GMC Tournament with Aiden Derkack as MVP, but he announced over the summer a transfer to Spire Academy in Ohio.

Then, this week, R.J. Wortman signed on for a football scholarship at Rutgers, where he’ll be enrolling early in January, taking him out of the equation. That and the springtime hire and return of Mark Taylor as St. Joseph-Metuchen head coach, with a slew of newcomers, leaves things more up in the air than usual.

And don’t count Piscataway in its second year with Bob Turco at the helm, as well as St. Thomas Aquinas, whose new head coach Tom Weiler is a former Turco assistant.

On the girls’ side, the heavy favorite to win the GMC is St. Thomas Aquinas, which has won the last six county tournaments.

Over in Somerset County, the Rutgers Prep girls will look to make it back to the Somerset County Tournament final after missing it last year for the first time since 2014, snapping a streak of nine straight appearances, of which they had won seven, including four straight until last year. (There was also no tournament in the COVID-shortened season of 2020.) Gill St. Bernards won the SCT for the first time since 2014, beating Hillsborough, which knocked Rutgers Prep out in the semis. And while the Lady Raiders were the NJSIAA state Group 4 champions, they lose a ton, including all-time leading scorer Francesca Schiro, who’s leading Siena in scoring as a freshman. Gill also took some key losses, so the county could get quite interesting.

On the boys’ side, the big three still are Montgomery, Gill St. Bernard’s and Rutgers Prep until someone else makes a move. The Knights topped the Argonauts in another battle for the SCT title, while Montgomery made it all the way to the Group 4 final, falling to Plainfield at Rutgers on the final day of the season. All three should be stacked again, and it could be a play here, a play there, or some x-factor newcomer who will make the biggest difference this season.