Brick Little League Wins 1st State Championship In 30 Years

BRICK, NJ — Two summers ago, George Cavanaugh was in a restaurant in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, with his son and some of the members of his son's Little League All-Star team.

Ten-year-old Taylor and his teammates had finished their all-star season with a loss in the semifinals of the Section 3 tournament, but Cavanaugh thought they would enjoy seeing the spectacle that is the Little League World Series. Thousands of people from all over the world, bright lights and lots and lots of baseball.

"There were Little League pins all over the walls and on the bar tops," Cavanaugh said Monday. The group ordered drinks while they waited to be seated, and as Cavanaugh set his down, he noticed something special.

"My 1990 Brick National Little League pin was there," he said. "Hundreds and hundreds of pins in the restaraunt and we sit where my pin was, it was crazy!"

Cavanaugh was on the Brick National Little League team that won the town's first New Jersey championship in 1990. Now, 30 years later, his son is a New Jersey State Little League champion as well, after the Brick All-Stars beat Englewood Cliffs 8-3 on Sunday to win the 2020 state championship.

The summer of 1990 was a special time, Cavanaugh said. The state championship sent Brick on to Bristol, Connecticut, for the East Region (now Mid-Atlantic) tournament.

"Going to Bristol was one of the best times of my life," Cavanaugh said. "All of my teammates from back then I'm still very friendly with. That was the best time of my childhood."

It was a place he had hoped Taylor and his teammates would get to experience this summer, a trip they had been working to achieve since that summer two years ago, when Cavanaugh found his 1990 pin. Instead, they are celebrating Brick's first state title since 1990 in a year that has been turned on its ear by the coronavirus pandemic.

"This is bittersweet," Cavanaugh said. "They would have been representing New Jersey in Bristol for the Mid-Atlantic Championship where I played as a 12-year-old. It would have been something absolutely amazing."

"We strongly believed we were going to Williamsport this year but life definitely threw a few curveballs this season," Cavanaugh said.

As the pandemic spread and sports at every level were being postponed or canceled, Little League officials across the country delayed the start of the season. Some shut down completely.

"We found out that Brick wasn't going to start its season until August," Cavanaugh said.

And on April 30, Little League International made the decision to cancel the regional tournaments and the World Series for 2020.

"This is a heartbreaking decision for everyone at Little League International, but more so for those millions of Little Leaguers who have dreamt of one day playing in one of our seven World Series events," Stephen D. Keener, Little League president and CEO, said at the time. But the uncertainty of what the pandemic would look like in the summer caused a great deal of concern.

Though the World Series and region tournaments were taken off the table, Cavanaugh said Little League officials in New Jersey worked hard to set up the district, section and state tournaments.

But local Little League officials weren't willing to completely give up on the season, and soon, Cavanaugh said, there were plans for district, section and the state tournament in New Jersey.

At the same time, the Brick All-Stars had been working hard, too.

The 10-year-olds, who won the District 18 championship, grew into 11-year-olds who won both the District 18 and Section 3 championships, and reached the state final before falling to a team from Madison in 2019.

"It was at that point once again that we knew we had to work even harder," Cavanaugh said. "We all went back to Williamsport for the Little League World Series and everybody had to go to the restaraunt to see the 1990 Brick State Championship pin. The boys could taste it and wanted to become the next Brick Little League champion."

"These boys were all working hard throughout the winter for the upcoming season," he said. "They looked stronger, bigger and were so fundamentally sound. I don't think anybody would have touched them."

Though the pandemic had taken Williamsport out of the picture, the team still had something to play for, and the focus became on winning the state championship.

But there was a catch: not only had the coronavirus disrupted the season, it altered the format of the section and state tournaments. Instead of double-elimination, where a bad day on the field could potentially be overcome, now the format was single elimination: One loss, and the team was done.

Brick never lost.

The team captured its third District 18 Championship, beating a strong team from Berkeley 8-5, Cavanaugh said. In the Section 3 tournament, they beat North Howell 6-4 to reach the final, where they drilled Clark, 15-6.

In the state tournament, Brick faced Somers Point in the semifinal. Because of the pandemic, teams were allowed to draw all-stars from surrounding towns when those towns' Little Leagues didn't play. Somers Point, a small league in Cape May County, had players from five towns.

Brick wasn't fazed. The team opened with first-inning home runs by Jake Rizzo and Dan Lubach, and "we never looked back from there," winning 5-3, Cavanaugh said. The other semifinal pitted Madison against Englewood Cliffs, with Englewood Cliffs coming out on top.

In the championship game, Brick won the coin flip.

"We chose to be the away team," Cavanaugh said. "That's not usually what a team would choose but somehow the entire all-star tournament we had the third-base dugout, and if we chose to be the home team, we would have been assigned the first-base dugout."

The team's explosive hitting also had set the tone in their previous games, and Cavanaugh said they wanted to continue to take advantage of that.

"We were confident the boys would put some runs up and put the pressure on Englewood, and that's what they did with another two-run bomb by Dan Lubach," Cavanaugh said.

"It was a harder season to get through sections, because we faced the other teams' No. 1 pitcher every game," he said. "Everyone was gunning for us. They knew we were the team to beat."

Instead, they won it all.

"This year will always be remembered as the season that could have been," Cavanaugh said. "But they are New Jersey State Little League Champions and I love all of them."

The members of the team and coaching staff of the Brick Little League All-Stars are:

Manager George Cavanaugh, Coach Nick Garbooshian, Coach Rich Hudak, Coach Derek Martin. Players: Jake Rizzo, Taylor Cavanaugh, James Martin, Tyler Garbooshian, Hank Mulligan, Zack Martin, Brayden Heatter, Tyler Hudak, Billy Linardakis, Matt Goodfellow, Ryan Tufaro, Zack Pirnik, Antonio Acevedo, Dan Lubach, and Michael Figner.

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