FEATURE 18
association called Hockey Nor th America. “We strikeout record in 1994 by sitting down 141 batters. Matthews later groomed Kenny Roder, a 2012 graduate who struck out 172 batters that year and pitched a perfect game. Like a big league team relying on its farm system, Matthews kept nurturing good baseball players. “I was always worried after good players graduated, but the talent kept arriving,” he said. Matthews said the relationships he had with his players were the most rewarding part of his coaching career. “It’s not the pros, but it’s more enjoyable,” he said about coaching high school players. “You’re coaching and developing and molding young men. Sports kept a lot of our kids interested in school, it helped them graduate, and seeing them come back and be successful in their fields has been rewarding.” The Team Siblings Roger and Erika Muller have ties to Hoboken going back 100 years, when their grandfather started
“We were the first team from New Jersey ever to win the national championship,”
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the Muller Insurance business that still operates on Ninth and Washington Streets. Their ties to hockey go back almost 25 years, when after attending several New Jersey Devils games, the Mullers decided to start their own team. “We got kind of bored sitting there watching the Devils play,” Roger Muller said. “We said, ‘boy, it’d be fun to play’.” However, Muller didn’t know how to ice skate. “A lot of people go to hockey games, and they wish they could play,” he said. “We didn’t know how to do anything.” So Muller star ted taking classes from an
figured out what we needed to buy, and then the next class was about how to put it on,” he said. “By the sixth or seventh session we started having scrimmages. I remember saying to my mother, ‘I’m getting better, I only fell down 20 times during the game’.” Muller joined a travel team called the New Jersey Rebels that unfor tunately won only one game in two seasons. He then decided to form his own team, the Hoboken Rockets, and find good players. “I made sure I made friends with A-level players,” Muller said. “We star ted doing really well after that.”
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