New Canaan has knocked off Staples to claim the top spot in the final Bill Gonillo 5 media poll 2009, and is the Fairfield County Team of the Year.

Staples, the FCIAC champion, finished with eight of the fifteen first place voted, while New Canaan, the CIAC Class MM champion, had seven first place votes. But New Canaan picked up some steam with five second-place votes to Staples’ two.

St. Joseph, the Class SS champion, received four second place votes. Pomperaug, the SWC champion, had two first-place votes, and Bridgeport Central had one.

New Canaan is the repeat champion, and had led the poll through the first seven weeks of the season. Staples took the lead after New Canaan lost to Bridgeport Central 42-7 in Week 8, and had held it since.

“This really is an honor, considering we got beat as bad as we got beat that night against Bridgeport Central,” New Canaan head coach Lou Marinelli said. “We were out of sync for two weeks after it. But to put it all together the way we did, it’s great to see people still believe we’re still a team of that caliber. It’s quite a surprise and honor that the media voted the way it did.”

The poll is named in honor of Bill Gonillo, the former News 12 sports anchor who died in September 2007 from complications related to diabetes. The poll also supports the American Diabetes Association’s mission to find a cure for and raise awareness of the disease, which affects 23.6 million children and adults in the United States, or 7.8% of the population.

Tickets to the Bill Gonillo Memorial Double-Header basketball game between Sacred Heart and Fairfield University to raise awareness of the disease will be played this Sunday, Dec. 13 at Harbor Yard. You may purchase special $10 tickets through the FCIAC Football Blog by clicking on this link.

Dropped out: Greenwich (5)

Also receiving votes: Bethel Wildcats 10, Greenwich Cardinals 10, King Vikings 8, Masuk Panthers 4, Ridgefield Tigers 1.

Voters: Damian Andrew (News12), Dave Stewart (New Canaan Advertiser), Eliot Schickler (Westport News), Jason Intrieri (freelancer), John Nash (Stamford Times/Wilton Villager), Matt Levine (WSTC-AM/WNLK-AM), Matt Norlander (New Canaan News-Review/Darien News), Michael Suppe (Hersam-Acorn Newspapers), Nick Fox (WGCH-AM), Pat Pickens (Fairfield Citizen), Paul Silverfarb (Greenwich Post), Rob Adams (WGCH-AM), Tim Parry (FCIAC Football Blog), Tom Renner (Examiner.com), Zachary Eastright (WSTC-AM/WNLK-AM).

The Bill Gonillo 5 poll is a media ranking of the top teams in Fairfield County. All FCIAC and SWC schools, plus FAA, CSC and SCC teams based in Fairfield County, are on the ballot for consideration.

Ballots are totaled on a 10-8-6-4-2-1 formula.

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Does one game make a rivalry? New Canaan head coach Lou Marinelli asked East Lyme head coach Paul Teneglia that question from the podium during the CIAC media luncheon on Wednesday.

For Marinelli, the CIAC Class MM semifinal game against East Lyme in 2005 was its last state playoff loss. Marinelli said he remembered that day as the one New Canaan lost at home when a kid kicked a couple of 52-yard field goals.

It was actually a 49-yarder and a 51-yarder by Pedro Belinchon, who had not attempted a field goal all season. But Teneglia, then an assistant coach under Andy Dousis, ordered the field goal attempts.

“That first one was a cannon shot,” Teneglia said. “Andy turned to me and asked what we wanted to do. We didn’t have a great punt team so I figured if we missed a field goal, New Canaan would have the ball at its 20. All the sudden it was three points and everyone was in shock. When we had a chance again, we decided to kick it again.”

But it was running back Tim Allen, with an 84-yard touchdown run late in the game, who gave East Lyme the 20-12 upset win.

“It was a great game, and hopefully it will be a great game this weekend,” Marinelli said.

Rams senior captain Cole Duncan watched the game from the stands, while his brother, Kyle, was suited up for New Canaan.

“I looked at all the seniors on the sidelines and I couldn’t imagine being one of those guys. I don’t want that to happen to me,” Duncan said.

Duncan did get a call Tuesday night from his brother, who is a lineman at Bowdoin College, with one request: Avenge the loss.

“There’s a kid on my brother’s college team from East Lyme, so my brother wants me to win this game so he’ll stop talking smack,” Duncan said.

Tenaglia said he would not allow his kids to say the words “New Canaan” all season, since it may have got them to look ahead and stumble during the regular season. Tenaglia and his staff did get to see New Canaan play on Thanksgiving day, and said he was impressed with New Canaan’s passing attack, led by quarterback Turner Baty and receivers Kevin Macari and Cody Newton.

“Their whole offensive scheme, it’s like a small college the way they run that offense. You can understand why they have won three state championships in a row,” Tenaglia said. “My hat goes off to him, and the job he’s done over there.”

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New Canaan head coach Lou Marinelli was inducted into the Connecticut High School Coaches Association Hall of Fame last night.

“I accept this on behalf of New Canaan, the school system and all my players,” Marinelli said during his induction speech at the Aqua Turf Club in Southington. “It’s a tremendous honor.”

Marinelli’s next win will be his 250th career victory. He has 230 since coming to New Canaan in 1981.

Though Marinelli knew for quite some time that he, Harding basketball coach Charlie Bentley and Notre Dame-Fairfield ice hockey coach Marty Roos would be among the nine inductees, he had no idea his entire team would be in attendance.

As the dinner began, the New Canaan football team entered the banquet hall in single file, wearing their red game jerseys over shirts and ties.

“If you don’t think I’m the luckiest guy in the world, all you have to do is look out there and look at my players, because I had no idea they were going to be here,” Marinelli said during his speech. “When they walked in, it brought me to tears.”

Though Marinelli told me before the dinner that he didn’t have a prepared speech ready, he’s had plenty of practice at the podium, having been honored in the past by the Frank McGuire Foundation and the Walter Camp Football Foundation, to name a few.

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A limited number of tickets remain for the 5th Anniversary Sports Night dinner on Monday at the Hyatt in Greenwich, so if you are planning to attend, make your plans now.

The evening is highlighted by one of the area’s best array of sports and other unique memorabilia for the silent auction, and a chance at the live auction to bid on a great trip to Notre Dame to see UConn meet the Irish for the first time ever on the gridiron in November.

The six new Fairfield County Sports Hall of Famers and 15 local sports persons of the year from the communities the Commission serves (including New Canaan head coach Lou Marinelli) will be recognized.

New members of the Hall of Fame will be honored as well. They are: Jennifer Rizzotti and Charles Smith in the Jackie Robinson Professional Wing, the late Pete Demmerle and Dick Siderowf in the James O’Rourke Amateur Wing and Joe Benanto and Terry Lowe in the J. Walter Kennedy Community Service Wing.

Also to be recognized are James Hilaire, the Chelsea Cohen Courage Award winner, and Mark Kurimai, the Special Olympics award recipient. George Albano of The Hour will also receive the Bill Gonillo media award.

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Thanks to everyone out there who took part in and/or sonated to yesterday’s Step Out: Walk to Fight Diabetes in New Canaan. It was such a fantastic event, both from the entertainment and educational point of view. Gerri Brown of the American Diabetes Association said the move to New Canaan helped bring out a greater number of walkers, but the ADA still fell short of its goal. So… we’ll keep trying to help out. Maybe as a sponsor, I can make more of an impact to help raise awareness of the disease beyond just the bill Gonillo 5 poll.

The New Canaan Rams football team walked again this year (you can still make a donation to their walk team). This time, they didn’t sprint. And they also had head coach Lou Marinelli walk as a part of its team. So of course the sports reporters on my team – Rob Adams of WGCH-AM and Jim Fuller of the New Haven Register (Matt Levine of WSTC/WNLK-AM ran the 3-mile course, cause he’s in shape!) – seized the opportunity to grill Marinelli on everything and anything.

Okay, really, we didn’t grill Marinelli. And he escaped us at the turn-around. But we did give him our two cents about the FCIAC’s scheduling, which has become complicated since the Fairfield school split a few years back gave the league an odd number of schools.

Fuller told Marinelli how it’s done in the 20-team Southern Connecticut Conference, where they break it down to four divisions based on size and strength. Then every two years, the out-of-division match-ups change takes place based on a team’s prior two seasons’ results.

So if you finish first in your division over a two-year period, you would play your four division rivals, and the other three first-place finishers and I think three of the teams from your crossover division.

Why did we bring it up? Basicly there’s some unfair contests on the FCIAC schedules that really don’t do anyone any good. The Greenwich-Harding game on Saturday comes to mind. Greenwich won 41-0 (on its homecoming).

Greenwich has a big clash up in Danbury this Friday that it would have been better preparing for. If you’re Greenwich, how do you get your team motivated to play Harding? And if you’re Harding, how do you pick your team back up after it takes part in that sort of game?

I’m not trying to sound mean, I’m just saying there needs to be some competitive balance here. Maybe instead of basing the schedules on size alone, strength needs to be put into consideration.

Then of course you’ll have some coaches say they have no chance to make the CIAC playoffs because they have to play too tough a schedule, and a string of 5-5 seasons could create a lack of interest in football.

What do you think? As the FCIAC football schedule good, bad, or somewhere in the middle?

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How humble is New Canaan head coach Lou Marinelli? I saw on the New Canaan Patch earlier this week that Marinelli is going to be inducted into the CHASC Hall of Fame on Nov. 19.

I grabbed dinner with Marinelli last week, and he didn’t mention word one about the Hall of Fame nod. Instead, he wanted to know about my father’s upcoming induction into Western Connecticut State University’s Hall of Fame because he wanted to be there for his former colleague.

When I asked Marinelli today at the Staples-Trinity Catholic game if he’s being honored (I only saw it on New Canaan Patch, not even on the CHSCA site), his answer was something to the effect of “Yeah, but so is Charlie Bentley (Harding basketball) and Marty Roos (Notre Dame-Fairfield ice hockey)…” Ever the assistant coaches who were at the game with Marinelli didn’t seem to know.

Marinelli has won seven CIAC state championships while recording 241 career victories at New Canaan High School and two high schools in New York, and is in his 29th season with the Rams. His teams have won four FCIAC titles and he has been selected as an FCIAC Coach of the Year six times. He was named CHSCA Coach of the Year in 2002 and was a national finalist for the honor in 2007. In 2008, he was named Walter Camp Football Foundation Connecticut Coach of the Year.

The ceremony is Nov. 19 at Aqua Tuft in Southington. Tickets for the dinner are available in advance by contacting the CHSCA office at P.O. Box 632, Southington, CT 06487 or by calling 860-628-4122 or e-mailing John Fontana at jfontana01@snet.net.

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Dave Ruden got a hold of New Canaan Rams head coach Lou Marinelli about the new quarterback controversy between first-year senior starter Willie Ouelette and newcomer Tucker Baty, who enrolled at New Canaan High School on Friday. Ruden included the conversation between him at Marinelli here in his blog.

Long story short, Marinelli told Ruden he’s going to go with the quarterback that makes the most sense. That being said, Ouelette will be the starter against Bassick this Thursday, but Baty, who has an offer from Stanford and is among the nation’s top prospects at the position, will get his chance.

Chemistry could be an issue: Rumors are floating around that the players will make like miserable for Baty, and no kid deserves anything like that to happen. Let’s keep in mind that this isn’t the NFL: It’s not like Baty signed a free agent contract to quarterback the New Canaan Rams. And if you’re a teammate, you need to show Baty the same respect you would anyone else who wears the red and black.

Give us your vote on who should start for New Canaan, then leave your comments on The Board (link below)

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New Canaan got quite a surprise today when Turner Baty, a senior quarterback who has a few Division I offers, enrolled at the school today.

Baty is the 56th-ranked quarterback in the Class of 2010, according to ESPN. Baty passed for 1,800 yards at Menlo-Atherton High School in Northern California last season, and transferred this year to St. Thomas Aquinis in Miami, which is the No. 1-ranked team in the nation. Baty did appear in St. Thomas Aquinis’s only game of the season on August 29, in a game played on national television.

According to several Websites, Baty has an offer from Stanford, and is receiving considerable interest from Tennessee, Ole Miss and Miami.

Baty, son of former NFL tight end Greg Baty, was not in a football uniform tonight when New Canaan took on Mount St. Michael of New York in its final scrimmage of the preseason.

Willie Ouelette, the senior captain for the Rams, took all the snaps today, and threw a pair of touchdown passes. Ouelette also threw an interception.

Of course the transfer of Baty to New Canaan puts a lot of pressure on head coach Lou Marinelli. Do you play the D-1 recruit who just moved to town and will have a scholarship no matter what happens this season? Or do you stick with Ouelette, the captain who took the bull by the horns and guided your team through passing leagues, spring football and summer camp?

Plus, Baty is a pro-set quarterback, and New Canaan runs the spread. Not a whole heck of a lot of difference, except that Baty has been taking snaps from under center, not from the shotgun formation.

Stay tuned, folks, things just got a bit interesting.

And now for some video of Baty.

Baty last season received a Player of the Week program similar to our. And here’s video of Baty receiving his award:

Here we have Baty’s junior-season highlight reel:

A look at some of Baty’s footwork (he’s the one in the blue cap):

And Baty again in the cap:

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Rams head football coach Lou Marinelli was named New Canaan’s Sportsperson of the Year by the Fairfield County Sports Commission, and will be honored along with 14 other recipients October 19 at the commission’s 5th Annual Sports Night awards dinner, Monday, Oct. 19 at the Hyatt Regency Greenwich.

Marinelli led the New Canaan football team to a 13-0 record and the FCIAC and CIAC Class MM Championships, as well as the No. 1 rankings in the state writers and coaches polls.

Also on Oct. 19, Pete Demmerle will be inducted posthumously into The Fairfield County Sports Hall of Fame’s amateur wing. Demmerle was a record-setting split end for New Canaan in 1969 and 1970 and went on to become a two-time All-America selection at Notre Dame.

In 1999, Demmerle was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and passed away in May 2007.

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Sure, why not, let’s try to do it again, New Canaan head coach Lou Marinelli said.

Seems to be an interesting similarity with this year’s team compared to the Rams team that won the FCIAC and CIAC Class MM championships, and was voted the number-one team in Connecticut in all polls.

It has to do with the number of players returning on both sides of the ball. We’re talking the same exact numbers, but who knows for sure if that’s going to mean anything until the games are played.

The conditioning week practice today was all business. No yelling, no fighting, just seemed to be business-as-usual. With the exception of an interruption from the media: High school sports Website CoachesAid.com has launched a Connecticut page, and content coordinator Bob Birge (an alum of the Connecticut Post) was on hand to interview quarterback Willie Ouellette and junior blue chip offensive lineman Conor Hanratty for a future article.

But the biggest news of the day was Marinelli’s cell phone. He got a call from one of last season’s captains, fullback-linebacker-punter Chris Sciarretta, who was excited to tell Marinelli how practice has gone so far for him as a walk-on at University of Utah.

And Marinelli was excited to hand me the phone, too.

Sciarretta told me practice there has been intense. First he lifts with the team, then it’s two-a-days. He doesn’t have a position yet with the Utes, and has been throwing himself on the field – anywhere – as often as he can to make an impression on the coaching staff.

Here’s Marinelli’s answer to the question, “How do you follow up a 13-0 season?”:

And some bonus footage that I never posted last season: Chris Sciarretta’s postgame comments after the Rams defeated Darien for the Class MM title:

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Conditioning Week is still a few weeks away, but MaxPreps already has a video preview of Connecticut high school football on its site. The video can’t be embedded, but it can be accessed here.

Of course the video, hosted by MaxPrep’s Steve Montoya, leads off with New Canaan, the defending FCIAC and Class MM champion and the state’s top-ranked team. The interesting thing though is Montoya doesn’t mention any returning players, only that Lou Marinelli’s teams reload.

Now you have to wonder about the added pressure for New Canaan to reload when you have the state’s biggest target on your back. There’s not going to be a lot of love for the Rams this season. Remember when Ansonia lost to Crosby last season, or when Greenwich lost its first game of the season to Darien? That’s the kind of shot-heard-around-Connecticut you’ll hear when (and if) New Canaan loses its first game of 2009.

Other teams mentioned in the video are Hamden, Glastonbury, Seymour and… Stamford. Montoya does not give the Black Knights claim to the FCIAC throne. But he does talk about linebacker Khairi Fortt, who will soon decide which top Division I program will have his services starting in 2010.

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Here’s what we’ve got on tap today for FCIAC Football Blog Live, with Jason Intrieri and Tim Parry:

The One and Only Phil Soto-Ortiz will talk with us about the FCIAC championship game.

New Canaan head coach Lou Marinelli will talk about the Class MM bracket.

Retiring Danbury head coach Rick Davis will talk about his plans for the future.

Listen live at 9 a.m. at http://blogtalkradio.com/fciacfootballblog or go there later to here the replay.

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