Unheralded Bergen County baseball program boasts two Division I commits

Everett Garber recently made a reference to the phrase so often applied to tough-minded athletes: “He’s got that ‘dog’ in him.”

Given the presence of Garber and classmate Rhys Bowie atop the pitching rotation, a similar saying could describe their Dwight-Englewood baseball team: “The ’dogs have got that Division I talent in ’em.”

Long an afterthought around North Jersey diamonds, Dwight-Englewood has become a regular Bergen County Tournament qualifier during the duo’s collective career.

Bowie, a 5-foot-10 lefthander committed to Wake Forest, has been with the Bulldog varsity since 2021. As a freshman, he helped the program earn its first county bid since 1994 and record its first-ever win (as a No. 24 seed) in the prestigious event.

Garber, a 6-3 righthander bound for Bucknell, joined the roster a year later. That helped propel the Bulldogs to the county quarterfinals as the No. 22 seed, and they went toe-to-toe with eventual champ Old Tappan before bowing.

“I knew after that sophomore year, that combo was going to be pretty special,” Bulldogs coach Frank Salvano Jr. said earlier this week. “Especially if you want to make a county tournament run, you need two good arms. And we have two good arms.”

Bowie and Garber were recognized in a special letter-of-intent signing ceremony Wednesday at the small private school.

Despite having one of the lower enrollment numbers among NJSIAA non-publics, Dwight-Englewood has been aligned in the large-school A bracket the past two seasons. But that just seems to play into the players’ mindset.

“We just don’t ever give in,” Garber said. “We’re ‘dogs,’ we’re out there to win. It doesn’t really faze us who we’re playing. We just go into states – and every other game – with the same mentality. We think we’re going to come out on top, and that’s how we approach things.”

Bowie and Garber have known each other since roughly age 8. Both lived in New York City when they first met, and they played youth baseball with senior third baseman J.D. Collins.

“Until I moved out to Jersey in sixth grade, we’d been on the same team for a while,” Bowie said. “The only time we didn’t play together was middle school. So being in high school wasn’t as much different than it was back then… it’s been a very easy connection on the field, and the chemistry is there.”

Since Dwight-Englewood has lower, middle and upper schools, Bowie transferred there from Riverdale Country School in the Bronx when his family moved to Haworth. That happened shortly after Salvano became the Bulldogs coach, and Bowie was a sixth-grader at the Englewood school when the varsity produced its first D-I player in recent memory, 2018 grad Lachlan Charles (Cornell).

“Even before [Bowie and Garber], we had some good guys,” Salvano said. “But we didn’t have a Wake Forest commit or a Bucknell commit… not guys who threw upper 80s, touched 90 with sliders and all that.”

Garber completed eighth grade at Rodeph Sholom School in Manhattan before coming to Dwight, but he did not play during the COVID-altered 2021 season due to family concerns about the pandemic.

That seems a distant memory now, as Dwight-Englewood has strung together three consecutive winning seasons for the first time since the mid-1990s. The baseball program played mainly independent schedules then, but after joining a league for the first time in 1996 (BCSL), things became tougher.

Charles led the Bulldogs to their first league title (NJIC Liberty) as a senior, and they have added two more banners in the last three years.

“When we came here, the school never really had a history in baseball,” Bowie said. “We’ve been good in our leagues. But for us, it was more about winning those county-tournament games and making big runs, because we knew we had the star power to do it.”

And they’re versatile stars at that. Garber hit eight home runs last year in being named an All-Bergen first-team outfielder, and Bowie made the first team at first base after batting .500.

Both have said they’ll focus on pitching in college. With Dwight-Englewood opening this season at 4-1-1, their high school careers are still rife with possibility.

“They really kind of put the program on their back and made us a team that people recognize,” said Salvano, a St. Joseph graduate and former Green Knights assistant for his father, Frank Sr.

“When I was at [St.] Joe’s all those years, I didn’t even hear of Dwight-Englewood [in baseball circles]. And then I got offered the interview here… I wanted to get some head coaching experience, and I saw it as a program to build. And having those two guys is a blessing – it built the program up.”

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Unheralded Bergen County baseball program boasts two Division I commits