Saturday, Sept. 5, 2015: Maple Hill's Gillespie wins 600th soccer game

   Leading off today: Maple Hill opened its boys soccer season with a milestone victory. Friday's 5-0 win over Hudson gave Wildcats coach Dan Gillespie career triumph No. 600.

   Gillespie, who started coaching the varsity program in 1974, is 600-170-29 with 22 league championships, 18 Section 2 crowns and three NYSPHSAA titles.

   "If you stay around long enough, you'll get enough wins," Gillespie told The Daily Mail. "It's the 600th win for the program. It wasn't our main objective coming into the game today."

   Tyler Hall scored a pair of goals in the win.

   Who turned out the lights? An electrical issue left Somers' stadium in the dark, forcing the Tuskers' season-opener against Rye to be suspended Friday.

   The Garnets had just run for a short gain when the lights suddenly clicked off at 8:51 p.m., The Journal News reported. Some nearby lights, including the press box and scoreboard, were not affected, but the stadium lights could not be restored, sending the teams home.

   Rye was leading 14-6 with 40 seconds to play in the third quarter. The game will be resumes Saturday at 11 a.m.

   "The only thing I'm understanding is there was some type of flash across the street ... and there seems to be something in the (control) box that popped," Somers AD Romain Catalino said. "We tried to replace the fuse and couldn't do it. Nothing fit in there. It just got too close and I'm not going to take a chance and get somebody killed for a football game."

   More Friday highlights later: We'll be back later on Saturday to round up some more notes from Friday's high school sports action across New York, including a record-setting win for Maine-Endwell and the end of a very long football streak in Section 2.

   Wagner back to work: The Susan Wagner varsity and JV football programs have been given the OK to resume practice days after the program was suspended over allegations of hazing at a preseason camp.

   Attorney Richard Luthmann, who was representing parents of players on the team pro bono, walked out of the state Supreme Court building in St. George proclaiming victory Friday without having to file any actual paperwork seeking a resumption of football, The Advance reported.

   "Sometimes these things get decided on the steps," said Luthmann, who said he was able to get the city law department's corporation counsel and the city Department of Education to discuss a solution.

   Luthmann was prepared to file papers under Article 78 seeking the restoration of practice activities and games, contending the suspension of the season would damage innocent players' chance at landing scholarships at top colleges and could potentially cause the "loss of income over their lifetimes."

   Department of Education spokesman Jason Fink released a statement saying in part: "The investigation is continuing and if additional allegations are shared with the school administration, appropriate action will be taken. We take this matter seriously and two volunteer coaches have been suspended."

RoadToSyracuse.com football site

   A sure sign of autumn: If you weren't sure this was Week 1 of New York football, confirmation arrived in the form of the first 2015 issue of Mark Adair's weekly PDF-format newsletter covering Section 6 and the Monsignor Martin Association.

   You can check out the season debut issue here.

   Transgender contro-versy in S.D.: New York recently adopted a policy on transgender students that comes pretty close to empowering students to decide entirely for themselves whether they want to compete on boys or girls teams at their school. It's not too different from what the governing body of South Dakota high school sports adopted last year.

   Now, however, politicians are involved in South Dakota. And at least one elected official there believes requiring a visual inspection of an athlete's genitalia to determine which sex they should compete with is the way to go. State Rep. Roger Hunt said recently gender is determined at conception and that attempts to change that identity should be banned, including is sports.

   "This is South Dakota," Hunt told the Rapid City Journal. "We haven't adopted the East Coast culture. We haven't adopted the West Coast culture. We maintain our own culture."

   It appears the issue will be raised formally in the state's 2016 legislative session, though it's uncertain whether there is enough broad support to bring a bill to the floor for a vote in the house and senate.