The superintendent who canceled the 2014 season wants it to be known: Winning will never be everything here again.
Sayreville has an important football game on Saturday, and for so many reasons, Richard Labbe wants the team to win.
He wants it for the players, including the juniors and seniors who lived through the awful hazing scandal that thrust this town into the national spotlight for all the wrong reasons. He wants it for the coaches, including the new leader of the program who put aside his concerns about taking the job because he believed in the people who lived in his hometown.
Labbe, the superintendent of the school district, wants it for that town, too, because he understands how much the team matters here. "This is still a football-centric community and they love their Sayreville Bombers football team," he said this week from his office.
But make no mistake: Labbe understands that the result on the scoreboard is not the important thing here, and he has made it his mission over the past two years to make sure all of the coaches in this blue-collar town understand that, too.
"What we want most is for these kids to be safe, to treat each other with a tremendous amount of respect and adoration, and to be good citizens of the school and the community," Labbe said. "That attitude has transcended into the school and into the (athletic) programs."
He paused briefly, because he knew what question was coming next. He asks it himself.
"Has that attitude made its way into the community? I don't know," he said. "I think the vast majority of the people in the community understand that and believe fully in that. I also believe that there's a pretty loud minority of people in the community that felt differently."
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Labbe found himself pitted against that loud minority in early October 2014. He was dealing with the unthinkable acts that were alleged to have taken place in the Sayreville locker room.
He had, in his words, found "incidents of harassment, intimidation and bullying," and that it was on a "wide-scale level" within the football team, and that it was "tolerated and in general accepted" by the players.
He reached the only possible decision given the nature of the alleged crimes and the young people that were impacted. He canceled the remainder of the 2014 football season, leading to a backlash from many in the town.
"This is football season, and this is in our blood in this town!" one parent said the night of the school board meeting to announce the decision, a meeting the likes of which he had never experienced before and hopes he'll never experience again. He was putting the health and safety of the children ahead of a Friday night extracurricular activity, a decision, he said, that would make again today without any hesitation.
He hopes the people who were furious then have come to understand, if not accept, the motivation for his decision. And he hopes they'll celebrate the success of the current team, now 9-2 as it prepares to play Middletown North in the North 2, Group 4 championship on Saturday, while appreciating how they've gone about their business even more.
This is a team that, head coach Chris Beagan said, with players that "felt like they were part of something bigger" as they worked to restore pride in a team that Beagan, a standout linebacker, was a part of in the late 1980s.
He had called Sayreville his "dream job" when he left Monroe High to take over the program, but he said this week that he made the move with some reservations given all that had happened in the town. He wondered: What about his own family? Was it a risk worth taking?
"I felt really strongly about the core values that I knew still remained here," he said. "I know the people in town really well. I believed in what we were going to do together."
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He didn't have any message for the players when he took over, but he knew the team faced a long healing process.
"I can't speak to what went on," he said. "I don't know that there's ever been a clear conclusion to it. Not one that I've read anyhow. There was a lot of bitterness with some of the seniors who had just left prior to me coming in and they were good friends with some of the kids who remained. Yeah, there was definitely a lot of healing that had to go on, and part of that was just getting back to a normal routine."
So Beagan went back to the basics. Sayreville had won three straight sectional titles from 2010-12, but Labbe made it clear that the priorities went beyond adding trophies to the lobby display.
That this team is in a position to do so, and to do so this quickly, "is absolutely incredible," said David Milewski. He played for the Bombers before he moving onto Rutgers, and he felt the sting of having to answer questions about a scandal that bruised his hometown's image.
"It put Sayreville on the national stage in a negative light," Milewski said. "Two years removed from that, after canceling so many games and going through all that turmoil, for these kids who were freshmen and sophomores when it was happening to rise up and overcome that is amazing."
Milewski will be at High Point Solutions Stadium on Saturday, and with a town where he said "everyone bleeds blue for the Bombers," he expects hundreds of others to make the same trip. If they win, it will be an especially satisfying moment for the players who were there when the scandal canceled their season.
But Labbe will make it clear that the victory isn't the important part. "I'm proud of these kids on so many levels," he said, "but most importantly that they treat each other with a great amount of respect."
Steve Politi may be reached at spoliti@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @StevePoliti. Find NJ.com on Facebook.