Judy Corker was the school nurse at St. Joe’s for twenty-two years, from 1993 through 2015, and is the mother of two SJR graduates, Michael ’76 and Jeffrey ’84. However, she is best known, and here tonight, for having earned two specific titles over the course of her SJR career: “Biggest SJR Fan” and “Voice of the Green Knights”. In that role, she received more on-line nominations than any other individual.
She was the play by play voice of the football team in the fall, called the action in the gym every winter for basketball and later for wrestling, and manned the press box to announce our home baseball games in the spring. In addition, starting in the late-1990s, she succeeded Brother William Cushing as the official SJR archivist, filing all of the hundreds of the annual press clippings for the athletic program, many of which were used to research information about tonight’s honorees.
Truth be told, Mrs. Corker a bit of a maverick when it came to her broadcast style.
While journalists today play to the particular biases of their networks, when Judy began her play-by-play career, objectivity was the order of the day. It was not necessarily her strong suit. There was never much doubt which team she was rooting for. She wore her heart on her sleeve, and called every SJR score with great passion and enthusiasm. And though she would announce the touchdowns, base hits and three pointers of our opponents, she did so grudgingly, dismissing them as minor irritations on the road to another SJR victory. She famously sided with our students each year in the student-faculty basketball game! And that, of course, is what endeared her to the St. Joe’s community over her long career.
Though she has many great memories of St. Joe’s and the hundreds of games she announced over the years, she said that the 2012 Green Knights over victory against Bergen Catholic, in which Mark Fossati stripped the ball from a Crusader quarterback and returned it 80 yards for a touchdown in a 38-37 overtime victory, was probably the most exciting game she ever had the opportunity to call.
