First-year football coach Salvatore DeGennaro was facing his first crisis.

His team had lost its opening game, bringing its losing streak to 11. The guy he was counting on to play quarterback before the season started wasn’t eligible. His starter went down with a dislocated shoulder. The back-up wasn’t ready. He needed a quarterback.

“We were in a coaches meeting; our offensive coordinator, A.J. Scoppa says ‘Why don’t we try Shane?,'” DeGennaro said. “He’s our best overall athlete, our best football player and he’s a student of the game. So I figured, ‘why not?'”

So Shane Armstrong, a wide receiver/cornerback, who’s 5-foot-5 and might be stretching it to say he’s 152 pounds became the field general for the Palisades Park/Leonia co-op program. Five weeks later, he’s the North Jersey Male Athlete of the Week, presented by HSS

“From the minute he joined the program as a freshman, he had that competitive spirit,” said DeGennaro, an assistant coach for the last three years before taking the head job this year. “He wasn’t too big or too athletic as a freshman. But he showed up and did whatever was necessary to do the job.”

Catch passes. Play defense. Run back kicks. “But he wasn’t on our radar as a quarterback.”

Maybe they should have asked Armstrong earlier.

“When I started playing football in Pee-wees (for a combined Palisades Park/Ridgefield team), I was a quarterback in fourth grade,” Armstrong said. “I was pretty good but we had another guy from Ridgefield to play quarterback too. I had pretty good hands, so they switched me to wide receiver in fifth grade. Then I played wide receiver and cornerback the next three years and then in high school.”

“I had a feeling after the first game they might ask me to play quarterback,” said Armstrong, who attends Palisades Park. “When we were going to watch film after we played Secaucus (on opening day), Coach says to me, ‘how do you feel about playing quarterback?’ When I came home from practice and told my dad I was going to be the starter, he thought I was lying.”

But Shane’s dad also instilled in his son from the first day he played football in fourth grade that he never should fear being a little small. “It’s size of the heart, not the size of the person, he always tells me that,” Shane said.

Things didn’t go real well at first. On his first snap against Garfield, he called a routine handoff play in the pistol alignment, and the ball slipped through his hands. “I figured I’d better go jump on the ball,” he said with a laugh.

The Tigers lost three straight games with Armstrong at the helm, scoring just one touchdown. But they beat Elmwood Park, 26-12, snapping a 14-game losing streak, then rallied from a 20-0 deficit to beat Lodi, 26-20.

“Lodi smoked us last year, 35-0, which made us even more motivated after the first win but we might have been too excited in the first half,” Armstrong said. “But I’ve gotten comfortable in the position week by week. And we just never stopped fighting.”

Armstrong still forgets he’s in charge at times. The Tigers relay their plays with a quick discussion at the sideline after plays and “Three times last week I forgot I was the quarterback for a minute,” he said.

But with their first winning streak in three years in the books, the Tigers have something to look forward to for the rest of the year and the future.

Armstrong wouldn’t mind keeping the job next year.

“It gives me more of a say into what happens on the field,” he said. “I like the running aspect of being a quarterback.”

Shane Armstrong

Sport: Football

School: Palisades Park

Class: Junior. Age: 16

Accomplishment: Armstrong led his team to back-to-back wins for the first time in two years on the strength of 188 rushing yards, three touchdowns, 51 passing yards and seven tackles.