Sayreville’s Ziyan Jones makes a move against South Plainfield in a GMC Red National Division game on January 3, 2026. (Source: @sayrevillehoops on Instagram)
In their first meeting less than a month ago, the East Brunswick and Sayreville boys’ basketball teams played a tight game from wire to tire, won by the Bears, 58-53.
If that one is any indication, Round Two between the GMC Red National Division rivals should be very much the same.
They will meet with a lot on the line Saturday afternoon – in a game you can hear on Central Jersey Sports Radio – with an East Brunswick win giving them the inside track at the division title, with still a lot of basketball to be played.
A Bombers’ win would split the season series, and leave the two tied for first place.
With the GMC’s new divisional alignments come the tossing out of an age-old rule that division winners were guaranteed to get the top eight seeds (back when there were four divisions), or a top 12 seed when the league had five divisions, as it did the last couple of years. Teams can only get seeded, however, based on order of finish in their division, which puts even more importance on the game; the winner of the Red National Division will be the first team out of that division to be seeded in the GMCT.
You can hear Saturday’s game live with Mike Pavlichko on the play-by-play, starting with pregame at 12:45 and tip-off at 1 pm. Click here to listen.
The teams are actually pretty similar. While seventh-ranked East Brunswick is 10-1 overall, and Sayreville 7-3, each has two big scorers surrounded by more-than-capable supporting casts.
For the Bears, it’s Cam Vick, who just joined the 1,000-point club with 22 points Thursday night in a 72-40 rout of Monroe. The senior is averaging 16.9 points per game on the season, second only to fellow senior Matt Mikulka, and has scored in double figures in all eleven games this season.
Mikulka is the school’s all-time leading boys’ basketball scorer, with 1,585 points, and he leads the team at 21.1 points per game, and 27 treys. He set the program record last year, passing Rob Ukuwuba, who ironically played on the last Bears team to get off to this good a start. Current head coach Mark Motusesky was the top assistant on that team in the mid-2010s, working under legendary boys’ coach Bo Henning.
For the Bombers, senior forward Chidi Chukwurah is the top scorer at 21.7 points per game, and he has a team-best 40 assists, while senior guard Sam Jones is No. 2 at 19.8 points per game, including a team-best 22 triples.
For both squads, it’s been a slow, but steady, climb to where they are now. This East Brunswick program has had ups and downs – part of the cyclical nature of public school high school sports – but this group has played together for years, now seeing their hard work pay off.
Sayreville has been rebuilding in the program’s second stint under John Wojcik, now in his sixth year on his second go-round. He coached the Bombers for nine years before leaving after the 2017-18 season to be an assistant at Ramapo College, his alma mater, returning to the Parlin school two years later.
Click below to hear previews of the game with both head coaches and Central Jersey Sports Radio’s Mike Pavlichko:
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