Dan Engelhardt - First Base
Dan Engelhardt also started on the basketball team which also won the State Championship that year. He is the only athlete in school history be a starter on 2 teams in different sports that won the State Championship. Dan said that year was amazing. He credits the coaches - Vaughan Stapleton in Basketball and Norm Hewitt in Baseball. He said that the lessons that they taught the kids went beyond sports and applied to life.
Dan recalls that there was one game the year before the championship season where the team was no-hit by Piscataway. Coach Hewitt used this low point to rally the troops. He met with the players in the locker room and explained how they were much better than that. Going forward they needed to be dedicated and take each practice and game seriously for they could do great things. After that the guys gave 100%.
Another lesson that Dan recalls of Coach Hewitt is that he set the bar high telling the kids not to be satisfied with just a "good" season, but make it a "great" season. Dan had played baseball with several members of the team since age 7 as Bob Collins, Mike Winchock, and Gsell all lived in Bradley Gardens. He went on to play Westchester in Pa. Today Dan is a State Trooper - a position he has now held for 20 years. He still occasionally stops by a baseball practice held by coach Hewitt.