Friday, Sept. 27, 2013: Dlugolonski retires after 536 wrestling wins

   George Dlugolonski, fourth on the all-time state list with 536 dual-meet victories, has retired as the wrestling coach at Chaminade but will otherwise remain involved in the sport.

   "After 40 years I just felt I couldn't give 100 percent, and that would be unfair to the students," he said in a recent email. "This decision was made about this time last year but I didn't tell anyone except my administration. I have been very fortunate with my career at Chaminade and the CHSAA."

   "Coach Dugo," who was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame last spring for lifetime achievement, plans to assist at Chaminade with the mountainous paperwork and preparation that goes along with having a wrestling program and will remain as the CHSAA state chairman for the upcoming season.

   "I can walk away knowing the program is in good hands and that I had the full support of the students, parents, coaches and administrators," he said.

   Meanwhile, Walt Stefani is not on the sidelines for the Orchard Park boys volleyball team for the first time in 31 years, though he's now assisting with the women’s volleyball team at Canisius College, The Buffalo News reported.

   Stefani led Orchard Park to a 559-159 record, 17 league championships, and nine Section 6 Class A titles. He retired from teaching at OP in 2012.

   “He brought Orchard Park volleyball from nothing to relevance, and from the best we can determine, probably the best Class A program in the state for over 20 years,” said Matt Lexner, who'd shared the varsity coaching job with Stefani since 2001.

   Attention-getting win: Little-known Blessed Virgin Mary defeated Utica Proctor 2-1 in a boys soccer stunner of the magnitude of Chaminade over Virginia in college basketball. The Saints are a Class D school with a BEDS enrollment figure of 62. Proctor, a defending sectional champion, is a Class AA school with the second-largest enrollment in Section 3 at 2,081.

   Nicholas Page and Carmen Futchi scored goals and Michael Simonton made five saves in the upset victory in Warners.

   “It was incredible,” winning coach Christian Melnick told The Post-Standard.

   Said Tom Rowe, athletic director of the private boarding school: "They had us running all over the place. We just didn’t quit. We just didn’t quit.”

   Melnick said Proctor has been playing BVM for at least eight years, during which time the relationship has developed into friendly competition.

   "It was a big win for them," said Proctor coach Nick Gailulo, whose team fell to 7-2-1. "We just got beat. They were big. They were physical. They played hard the whole time, not that we didn't. We had tons of opportunities and didn't put it in the back of the net, and that was that."

   Milestones: Davenport's Sarah Haight tallied four times during a 6-1 girls soccer win at Jefferson, giving her 101 goals in five varsity seasons. She is 33 goals shy of the school career record set in 2008 by her sister Chelsea, who went on to play at Hamilton College.

   Greene field hockey coach Sue Carlin won her 400th game Wednesday with a 3-0 decision over Deposit. The 27-year coaching veteran has won two NYSPHSAA titles at Maine-Endwell, where she coached from 1980-1993, and three at Greene, where she has been the coach since 2001.

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   “My family has been very supportive, they have picked up the slack,” Carlin told the Press & Sun-Bulletin. “My husband John has been my biggest fan, I’ve been blessed to have that support to do something I love to do."

   Season's over: Plattsburgh, 0-3 and outscored 128-12, has shut down its varsity football team for the season.

   Section 7 football coordinator Mark Farmer said he was notified Wednesday that the school was struggling with a too-small roster and decided not to continue. Plattsburgh was scheduled to host Saranac this week. Saranac Lake, Peru and Ticonderoga began looking to fill openings in weeks 5-7, and The Press-Republican reported Peru has already lined up a replacement.

   “All the coaches I’ve talked to are very interested in doing anything they can do to help Plattsburgh get back on its feet,” Farmer said.

   Just for fun: Some people collect coins. Others collect comic books. A few people I've worked with mostly collect dust. (Just kidding.)

   Ed Bemiss collects data on 642 high school football teams in New York, which not surprisingly helps him rank them from No. 1 to No. 642. His ratings are created by using margin of victory and strength of schedule with the most recent results given more weight.

   Want to project a winner and a margin of victory in a game? Calculate the difference of power ratings for the two teams. As noted by Bemiss, who began refining his system in 2010 with just Section 2 data, the rankings are geared towards projecting what will happen on the field if the teams met today; a team may be ranked below a team they may have beaten 3 or 4 weeks ago, but the loser may now be playing at a higher level.

   The general site is located here, and you can browse all of the Week 4 predictions on a single page.

   Speaking of Week 4, the schedule for teams ranked by the NYSSWA can be found here.

   College decision: Olean basketball star Wil Bathurst verbally committed to Cornell University, The Buffalo News and Time Warner Cable's YNN news channel reported late this afternoon.

   Bathurst, a 6-foot-4 forward who was a NYSSWA first-team all-stater in Class B, averaged 18.4 points per game while helping the Huskies to the 2013 state quarterfinals.