Accorsi named to lead Salem Community College football debut

CARNEYS POINT — South Jersey has a junior college football team.

Salem Community College launched its football program with a presentation where it announced the naming of Jay Accorsi as the Mighty Oaks' coach for its inaugural season next fall.

Accorsi is a well-known and respected figure in South Jersey football circles after serving as Rowan University coach from 2002-2023. Accorsi compiled a 143-78 record while guiding the Profs to the highest reaches of NCAA Division 3 football.

"I've thought about this personally since the early 90s, when I first moved into New Jersey," Accorsi said. "K.C. (Keeler) my old boss, who's now at Temple, and I would talk about it quite often. Why isn't there a junior college that has football in New Jersey? Why do we see these New Jersey students going to Kansas, California, Texas, Midwest, all over the place. Why isn't there an opportunity for them on the east? I think the climate has changed."

Accorsi retired from Rowan after the 2023 season. He began compiling a blueprint for starting a junior college program.

After dropping competitive sports in 2014, Salem reinstated its athletic programs in 2019. The Mighty Oaks had explored the feasibility of starting a football program.

Accorsi and Salem became a perfect fit. Accorsi had a thick folder at the ready when he met with Salem CC president Dr. Michael Gordon.

"I presented the idea in our first meeting, within the first 15 to 20 minutes, he showed me the proposal that the previous athletic director had done, I knew that it was something that he had thought about seriously. You don't go that far, if you're not serious about doing it."

The wheels immediately set into motion.

"I was sold at that moment," Accorsi said. "A lot of schools say they care about student athletes and don't. I knew in the first few minutes of our conversation that that's truly what he cared about. That's what I want to be a part of — helping young men and students grow and develop and enhance themselves. Not just through the sport football, but through the other areas of their life."

Salem has seven games on its schedule, which begin the last weekend of August. Four of those games will be home games. Those games will be played at Salem County high schools, Pennsville, Schalick, Penns Grove, Woodstown and Salem. The school recently acquired land, which will serve as a practice field at the former Twins Field in Carney's Point.

For now, the Oaks' schedule will remain close to home and includes Erie, Hudson Valley and Nassau community colleges. They'll play Sussex Community College for a pair of home-and-home games, plus Thaddeus Stevens Tech and the Military Academy Prep School.

The players will be made up primarily of South Jersey players.

"I've already hit every high school in South Jersey from the tip of Cape May all the way up just below Mercer County," Accorsi said. "Because of my contacts, and getting on the road, I knew that would be the big part we will be able to sell. I think if we get to 80 (players), which I know we easily can, I think would be good to start."

The magic number of 80 might seem to be a big ask. According to Gordon, it's not. Prospective football players have already transferred to the school for the spring semester. Applications began appearing long before the program was officially approved.

"We have 50-plus applications for the fall already for football," Gordon said. "Again, that's before there was any formality to it. I think a third of them are Salem County, Gloucester County, Cumberland, a couple from Burlington. We even have one from Harrisburg or Scranton, somewhere up there. We're seeing that the application pool, and that's before anything's really established."

The successful relaunch of the athletic programs at Salem, are a guideline for the school's next venture.

"I'm encouraged that 80 has been our operating number for the math related to this," Gordon said. "If we have 80 ball players, I'm happy.

"When we started athletics back in 2019, we brought in about 80 athletes at that point in time, but our enrollment grew by about 150. There's this momentum that you get from athletic enrollment that just enhances where you are and what's going on. We're looking for the same thing here."

The Mighty Oaks are coming. Success on the field is certainly a goal. It's not the measure.

"I'm looking for how many students we retain," Gordon said. "If we have an 80-man roster, understanding that half of that roster is going to graduate, but of those who are eligible to come back, how many did we retain? I'm looking at that. Our retention rate on campus is really pretty good. Our retention rate is 70 percent, which in the collegiate environment is very good. If we can be above that, that's good. Graduation rate is another thing I'll be looking at as well, the number of students that come in that are going to be eligible to graduate in May."

There will be on-the-field goals as well. Of course.

Of those goals, wins are a lot farther down the list for Accorsi than one might expect.

"My (benchmark) is going to be the competitiveness," Accorsi said. "I want us to be able to compete from the beginning. I think we can.

"I want this to be a program where high school coaches want to send their players here. I want it to be a program where the college coaches want to recruit the players that are here. II think that starts with running a good college program."

Tom Rimback grew up reading the Burlington County Times and Courier Post sports sections and began writing for the BCT in 1996. He has covered everything from Super Bowls and Final Fours to Tri-County Swimming but he’s happiest on a sideline interviewing South Jersey scholastic athletes. Follow him on twitter @Rimbacksports. Email him with story ideas at [email protected] and, most importantly, support local journalism with a subscription to the Courier-Post.

This article originally appeared on Cherry Hill Courier-Post: Salem Community College unveils football program with Accorsi as coach