March 30, 2023 — Harvey Yavener, 1929-2023

It’s by some means becoming that Harvey Yavener handed from this earth throughout March. School sports activities, particularly basketball, was his ardour and his vocation, having written for The Trenton Occasions for many years.

His Yaveast weekly school basketball rankings had been a must-read throughout the season. He additionally had a selected knack for selecting precisely which groups would make the faculty basketball postseason after the bracket was expanded to 64 in 1985. He would even have a knack for selecting which groups can be taking part in a selected first- and second-round web site. On a couple of event, the Occasions would publish a small blutb with the headline “Yav will get 63 proper; committee will get one flawed.”

It’s one thing I’ve achieved the previous couple of years with attempting to select the Division I area hockey and girls’s lacrosse brackets. And I’ve gotten fairly good at doing these, particularly the sector hockey match, the place you’ve 18 or 19 variables as a substitute of 64 or 68.

Harvey Yavener was school sports activities, via and thru. There have been 4 faculties in our county: a neighborhood school, a Division III state college, a small Division I college, and a significant Ivy League establishment. Every of those locations has their very own tales, their very own legends.

Yav handled them just about equally. He might let you know tales of Madison Sq. Backyard and Invoice Bradley and nationwide champions junior school street journeys and legendary coaches like Charlie Inverso and Dr. June Walker, Sharon Pfluger and Pete Carril. Certainly, Carril and Yavener had been small, stocky individuals who you won’t be capable to inform aside save for Yav’s omnipresent mustache. Each had gruff exteriors however would typically get the perfect end result.

For Yavener, this meant bellowing out expletives when one thing didn’t go proper with both the pc system or the cellphone or the TRS-80 pc used to ship tales into our system. His dialog and banter with colleagues would have been a unbelievable actuality collection.

His stone-faced exterior additionally impressed somebody in our newsroom to pen new lyrics to the 1985 Bob Seger ballad “Like A Rock.” The title, “Like A Yav,” match him completely. He was the rock of the information room. He was a rock star. He stood arrow-straight in opposition to the tides that modified our newspaper — the information enterprise — irrevocably.

And he’ll be missed.