Things haven’t been good for New Brunswick high school football for a while, but there was a time they were great.

Going back to the mid-2000s, when the Zebras were churning out players like Dwayne Jarrett, Jonathan Casillas under John Quinn, who brought two championships to the Hub City. And even as recently as 2015 when they went 9-2 under Don Sofilkanich, who was a coordinator on Quinn’s state title teams in 2003 and 2006, their only championships in the playoff era.

But since that 2015 campaign, in nine years, New Brunswick is just 16-66 under three different coaches, having lost 23 straight. The last 20 of those have seen them fail to score more than eight points in a game, with 12 shutouts in that span.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is, there’s a new head coach in Geoffrey Chrisman, who has been an assistant at multiples schools – including New Brunswick – and was the head coach at West Windsor-Plainsboro South in 2015 and 2016. (The school now plays as a co-op with West Windsor-Plainsboro North.)

He’s also been teaching in New Brunswick for a year now.

One of his goals is increasing the numbers around the Group 5 program, a large high school but with lower turnout for football than in those glory days of the 2000s. With 18 seniors coming back, Chrisman has a good nucleus to start from who’ve at least been through the wars. And he’s got a freshman class of 20.

His goal is to create at atmosphere that’s fun “beyond Fridays” and to build a real community around the team, including their families and friends, while also creating a sense of ownership in the program.

Highland Park turned things around after its long losing streak going 6-3 last season, and JP Stevens broke its own skid with two wins last year. Maybe this is New Brunswick’s turn?

Click below to hear from New Brunswick head coach Geoffrey Chrisman, along with seniors Jeffren Paulino (OL/DL) and Jabril Bright (WR/DB) at Big Central Media Day with Central Jersey Sports Radio’s Mike Pavlichko: