POINT PLEASANT BEACH — For some, fantasy football drafts are a solo mission, with those in the league individually and scientifically making the most methodical picks possible. However, each year, one group of some 20 college buddies makes the trek to Point Pleasant Beach, using the Shore as a backdrop to their draft weekend.
For more than 20 years, Greg Schneider, Chris Boghigian, Joe Iannucci and friends — most of them graduates of Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York — have held a yearly fantasy football league, wherein participants “draft” actual football players to use on virtual teams that they manage for a season.
Now, nearly two decades after college graduation, most of the guys are leading separate lives in different parts of the country, coming from as far as California and Georgia for the annual tradition they started as students: their fantasy football draft weekend. Schneider, who now resides in Woodland Hills, California, told The Ocean Star about the annual tradition and how it came to the Shore around eight years ago.
“This is our 20th anniversary of our league, and we go to Point Pleasant Beach every summer to have the draft and hang out,” said Schneider. “It’s like fantasy football is the thing that brings us together, but it’s our excuse for us all to spend the weekend at the beach and barbecue.”
“A lot of us are in Jersey — I’m actually in California, we have one guy in Georgia — and we all come back to Point Pleasant for the weekend to have the draft and see everyone,” he said. “A lot of people are married now, and have multiple kids. So, it’s kind of a sacred weekend; everyone has to be here.”
He explained how a lot of the guys had met in college, where different friend groups intermingling led to the formation of the league.
“I’m from Long Island originally, and work brought me out west,” Schneider said. “All the guys I grew up with, everyone is from either Long Island or New Jersey. Two of my best friends went to Marist College with a couple of the guys. Two of them are from Jersey, and they kind of brought all of us together and I ended up becoming really close friends with everyone who was at Marist through my friends.”
“My one friend Chris (Boghigian), we were roommates in Hoboken for a while,” he said. “He’s been going down to Manasquan and Point Pleasant Beach his whole life, pretty much. Eventually, after college, we heard that he bought a place down there…Now, one of my other good friends has a summer house in Point as well, so it’s become this perfect spot for us to all come back to and spend the weekend.”
Boghigian, the reigning league champ and a Point Beach resident, explained how he came to live at the Shore.
“We moved there in 2019,” he said, “which, looking back, turned out to be a good decision; we kind of got ahead of the prices before they got out of control; but I grew up in Randolph, New Jersey.”
He said he thinks their tradition has been one of the binding ties of the friend group, as it is the get-together of the year which goes virtually unmissed by any of them.
“It’s been almost 20 years; I turned 40 this year,” said Boghigian. “For me personally, it’s really the only time that this group of friends is able to get together. I feel like, without this tradition, many of us would have gone years…without (seeing each other).”
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