ATHLETE OF THE WEEK
Paul Schwartz
Kobe St. Hilaire
Sport: Football
School: New Milford
Class: Senior
Accomplishment: Rushed for a school-record 428 yards in 23 carries and scored five touchdowns in New Milford’s 47-14 win over Hawthorne which clinched a tie for the division title.
It’s said that the best things come to those who wait.
Kobe St. Hilaire had to wait nearly three years and go through a trio of schools before he finally got a chance to carry the football in a varsity game. And to prove the ancient proverb, he finally got on the field against Hawthorne on Sept. 26, 2025, and on his first carry, went 30 yards for a touchdown.
And the New Milford star hasn’t looked back. In 14 games since he became eligible a year ago, St. Hilaire has rushed for 2,864 yards and 31 touchdowns, capping that sensational run with one of the best high school rushing performances in North Jersey history.
He had scoring runs of 68, 52, 34, 51 and 31 yards and averaged more than 10 yards a carry on his other 18 attempts on Oct. 9 to lead the Knights to a share of the NJIC Meadowlands title and earn this week’s North Jersey Male Athlete of the Week, presented by HSS.
The 428 total yards in just 23 carries is a school record and the largest single-game total in New Jersey this year. And in two games in two years against Hawthorne, he has rung up 657 yards on 42 carries with nine touchdowns.
Yet the play New Milford head coach Bill Straub wanted to talk about was his key block that sprung Peter Psarianos early in the second quarter that broke a scoreless tie and propelled the Knights to an easy victory.
“It takes 11 guys to do the job, and making the key block on that play means I’m doing my job,” said the 5-9 190-pound St. Hilaire. “Coach told me to put that on my highlight reel and I did.”
It was a long and winding road for St. Hilaire to come back and play for his hometown team after stints at Don Bosco and St. Joseph Regional didn’t work out.
“We went undefeated as freshmen and I got called up at the end of the year to sit on the bench for the playoffs,” said St. Hilaire, who realized that Don Bosco wasn’t the right fit at the end of the school year. He was torn between coming back to New Milford as a sophomore, but his former junior football coach in town had returned to coach at SJR so St. Hilaire followed him there.
“I had an ankle injury for most of the year and I tried to play on the junior varsity, but I wasn’t right,” said St. Hilaire, who finally returned home in August 2025. “I was happy to get back and play with a lot of guys I’d played junior ball with.”
“He has great work ethic and he’s a workhorse,” says Straub. “We have a closeness in our senior class with a large group of 12 contributing, and he stepped right in when he came back. He has great vision, and when he commits to a hole, he hits it hard and has great breakaway speed. He’s a great student who is 100% ready to play somewhere at the next level.”
And St. Hilaire is appreciative of his teammates. “Last year my dad and I got Chick Fil-A sandwiches for the whole team after the season, and I got my linemen wearable chains with their numbers on them,” he says. “They’ve done so much for me.”
St. Hilaire is also remarkably mature about his future football chances, a trait he inherited from a supportive family that includes mom and dad and older brothers Elijah and Malik, both of whom played football and ran track at Palisades Park before the family moved to New Milford.
“I want to go to a program as interesting to me as I am to them,” says Kobe. “Academics comes first, and I want to go to a great school, not just a great football school.”
His return to New Milford has been a blessing because building connections that will last seems easier in his hometown than in places like the Non-Public schools where there might not be as many hometown players.
“When you’re with guys every day that you’ve been around since fifth grade, it makes it a lot easier to develop those life-long connections that I want,” says St. Hilaire.
There’s another saying, popularized by the late author Thomas Wolfe − “You Can’t Go Home Again”.
Kobe St. Hilaire has proven that not all proverbs are accurate.
