Advance Robbinsville
December 2023 FREE
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RHS boys’ soccer team falls in state championship game Team thwarted by Garfield High School in its effort to repeat
BY RICH FISHER
Connor Hayes is best known as the Robbinsville High boys’ basketball coach, but the following statement came from Connor Hayes, the Pond Road Middle School boys’ soccer coach: “This is a special group of
players.If they stick together and stick with soccer, they can accomplish some great things at the next level.” Those words appeared in the December 2019 edition of the Robbinsville Advance. And wow, were they prophetic. The group Hayes was discussing went undefeated that fall and formed the Ravens varsity nucleus each of the past two years. All they did was go a combined 36-10-2, win con-
secutive NJSIAA Central Jersey Group III titles and become the first Mercer County team since Notre Dame in 1982-84 to reach back-to-back state finals. They were the first public school team to do it since Lawrence in 1975-78. That’s what is known as “accomplishing some great things at the next level.” Granted, RHS did not repeat its state championship run of 2022 but in some ways 2023 was See SOCCER, Page 6
Lenape’s importance to region on display at area exhibition BY DAN AUBREY
RHS senior Adhviklal Thoppe and Robbinsville Superintendent of Schools Brian J. Betze meet to discuss Thoppe’s pet project, a student volunteer website. See story on page 11.
The introductor y panel to the exhibition “Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories”—currently on view at the Michener Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania— states something remarkably important to the region. But it isn’t in the words. It is the image on which the text is written: an overhead view of the Abbott Marshlands at the estuar y where the Crosswicks
Creek meets the Delaware River. Much of Mercer County was first populated by the Lenape Indians, and the earliest inhabitants of the area that is now known as Robbinsville Township were the Lenape. The Abbott Marshlands (located in part of Trenton, Hamilton and Bordentown) is the site of what had been one of the largest Eastern settlements of Native American. There is documentation
of human activity there for 13,000 years, and it is roughly in the center of the land called Lenapehoking (Land of the Lenape). They are the indigenous people whose territor y included all of what is known today as New Jersey, New York Bay and Hudson Valley, the eastern section of Pennsylvania, and northern sections of Delaware. They are also the people See LENAPE, Page 13
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