Garden City planted the seeds of victory a long time ago.
The impenetrable Trojans football team defeated Baldwin 31-0 in the quarterfinals, setting a New York state record with 63 consecutive wins, which dates back to 2020, after falling to Lindenhurst in the Long Island title game the year prior.
“To be at the top of New York State is something that the program deserves,” head coach Dave Ettinger, who has won the last nine Nassau County titles and five Long Island championships, told The Post.
“We don’t talk about [the streak] a lot, but we have spoken about it the last couple of weeks because I do think it’s important for the program to achieve that.”
Attention now shifts to winning game No. 64, a semifinal match against East Meadow, for reasons beyond simply maintaining the milestone.
“Our plan has always been one week at a time, so I don’t think that they’ve gotten ahead of themselves,” the coach said of winning Nassau title No. 10.
“We need a clean, focused game… trying to make them do some different things to beat us and executing on offense.”
The Trojans’ maturity is also something of a wonder as the bunch gets down to work each day without much typical high school sophomoric behavior or even team rituals.
“We’re pretty boring,” joked Ettinger. “We kind of just stick to the plan and try to put a good plan in each week.”
In football, Long Beach (7-2), a three seed, takes on No. 2 seed Mepham (7-1) in semifinal play at 10:30 a.m. Sunday at Hofstra University, and will play the winner of Garden City vs. East Meadow in the conference II finals.
Undefeated Massapequa (9-0), a one seed, plays No. 5 Syosset (5-4) in the conference I semifinals at Hofstra at 4 p.m. Friday.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
