New Long Island vs. New York City high school football all-star game at Hofstra replaces Empire Challenge
The National Football Foundation All-Star Classic will showcase Long Island vs. NYC this summer. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
Long Island’s top high school football players again will have a chance to line up against New York City’s best in an all-star showcase.
The event will be called the National Football Foundation All-Star Classic and be played at Hofstra University on Saturday, June 21, at 1 p.m.
The game replaces the Empire Challenge, an event that was organized, funded and run by the Boomer Esiason Foundation, which is dedicated to helping to find a cure for cystic fibrosis. The Empire Challenge was played for 24 years but was canceled in 2020 because of COVID and never resumed.
The new event, which will be funded by the National Football Foundation and College Football Hall of Fame’s New York City chapter, will be modeled after the Empire Challenge.
“The leadership has changed but we mimicked the professional standards that Boomer Esiason set for his all-star games,” Marc Hudak, the president of the National Football Foundation’s New York City chapter, told Newsday on Thursday. “We want the student-athletes to get the same treatment as they did with Boomer. We’d like to name the game MVP in honor of Boomer Esiason out of respect for all he’s done for the game . . . The All-Star game is back and everyone is excited.”
Esiason has no involvement in the event but was happy to hear about the new version of the game.
“This is great news,” he told Newsday on Friday. “I’m glad they were able to get it back. I hope it goes well.”
Garden City’s David Ettinger will coach the Long Island team. Long Island’s roster selection is scheduled to take place on Monday, and the New York City team will be picked the following day.
Hudak tapped Pete Blieberg, the assistant executive director at Section XI, which governs Suffolk’s scholastic sports, to coordinate the game. Blieberg was the Empire Challenge coordinator for 24 years.
“We had a template in place that worked, and we’ll use the same footprint,” Blieberg said. “The communication is vital to the success of the event. The Boomer Esiason Foundation had just about the entire staff involved in one way or another making that game a great success.”
Hudak, who lives in Glen Cove, graduated from Ithaca College in 1990. He grew up in Orchard Park as a Buffalo Bills fan and played center on Ithaca’s 1988 NCAA Division III national championship team.
Hudak has experience in big-game productions. He arranged the two most highly attended games in D-III history when he contracted the Cortaca Jug to be played at MetLife Stadium in 2019 and Yankee Stadium in 2022.
The Cortaca Jug, pitting upstate rivals Cortland and Ithaca, set an all-time D-III attendance record of 45,161 in 2019. The game drew 42,302 at Yankee Stadium in 2022.
“Blieberg’s expertise and experience make him the perfect executive director for this game,” Hudak said. “We’re underwriting the game . . . We have sponsorship from Riddell and the Jets and Giants.”
Blieberg said Hudak will outfit the teams with the exact replicas of some of college football’s greatest rivalries.
“The players will keep their uniforms as mementos as we grow the game,” Hudak said. “This year Long Island will wear the away uniform for Ohio State and the New York City team will wear the home uniform for Michigan.”
Gregg Sarra is Newsday's high school sports editor and has been on the beat since the mid-1980s.
