August 29, 2001
Jack Neall was a prominent OC football booster
By TOM WILLIAMS
Sports Columnist
It could be said that the groundwork for Ocean City High School’s football success in the 1990s began
about 30 years before.
It was in the mid-1960s that the Ocean City Hawks youth football program was formed and the Monday
Morning Quarterback Club (re-named the Archie Harris Booster Club a year later) began.
Jack Neall, who died Aug. 19 at the age of 76, played a key role in both.
Neall joined with Bob French, Fred Tarves, Earl Shaw, Chet Wimberg, Don Tarves and others to create a
group that would promote and assist the Raider football team. Their wisdom and foresight is obvious in
retrospect as the club is still filling a similar role today.
The support to create and organize the Hawks, a program that has helped develop many of the athletes
who later played football for OCHS, was initiated by French, a successful realtor. But Neall, who was in
the heating oil business, was one of the first to join him. From there, Tarves, Shaw, Nick Palermo, GG
Mazzarella, Bob Wallace, Lou Taccarino, John Carey and Dick Fox came aboard.
The year the Harris Booster Club was formed and six years after the Hawks were started, Ocean City won
its first Cape-Atlantic League football championship in 17 years. There were more titles in the 70s, the first
South Jersey playoff title in the 80s and the overwhelming success of the 1990s.
Neall and his associates, most former high school athletes themselves, had permanently changed the face
of football in Ocean City.
They had given young athletes a place to develop their football talents. Incidentally, they used great
wisdom in choosing Fred Haack, former head coach of the high school team, as their first head coach of
the Hawks. That allowed the young players to get the fundamentals from a man well schooled in teaching
them.
Once these players reached high school and began playing for the Raiders, they now had a group that was
created to support them. The Archie Harris Club of the 1960s had weekly meetings where the coach would
talk about the last game and the next one, also recognizing some key players each week.
In later years, the Harris club would continue to develop under leadership similar to Neall, French and the
other pioneers who created it. The club now awards scholarships, creates the Raider football program book
for home games and provides financial and emotional support through a variety of events.
Before he took an active role in Ocean City football, Neall played the game himself with great success at
Episcopal Academy in Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania, where he was named All-East.
He later had the chance to watch his son, Jack, play football for OCHS and William & Mary. And his many
grandchildren playing various sports for Ocean City, Mainland and Washington Township.
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The CAL sports scene also lost Bill Robinson the same week.
Robinson was a longtime sportswriter in Cape May County who loved covering youth sports. Whether it
was a team like the Ocean City Hawks or a Wildwood High School state championship game, Robinson
was there and enjoying himself.
His enthusiasm for and dedication to sports in Cape May County added greatly to the experience for
players and coaches alike.
In the late 1980s, Robinson, who was a pastor in Dennisville for 16 years, got to see his son, Bill, score
more than 2,500 points for the Atlantic Christian School, then located in Ocean City.
Jack Neall (center) and OCHS coach John Cervino pose with a football in 1967 at the first meeting of what
would become the Archie Harris Booster Club. Bob French, another of the club’s founders, looks on at
left.
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