Thursday, July 19, 2018: All-state baseball team announced

   Leading off today: A quintet of seniors has garnered player of the year honors on the all-state baseball team announced Thursday morning.

   The players of the year are:

• Class AA: Pitcher Leury Tejada of Walton in the PSAL.
• Class A: Pitcher Lenny Torres, Beacon.
• Class B: Pitcher/outfielder Liam Pulsipher of Center Moriches.
• Class C: Pitcher/shortstop Maxx Countryman of Avon.
• Class D: Third baseman/pitcher Darren Shaver of Deposit/Hancock.

   The full all-state team can be found here.

   College decision: Highland rising senior Brianna Rozzi said this week that she will play her college basketball at Loyola (Md.) beginning in the fall of 2019.

   Rozzi was second-team all-state in Class B as a junior after averaging 19 points and six assists a game for the Section 9 champions.

   Rozzi visited the Loyola campus last month.

   SU coach departs: Chris Fox, who built the men's cross country program at Syracuse University into a national power in no small part with the help of in-state recruits, announced his retirement for college coaching on Thursday.

   Fox served as the head coach of the men's and women's cross country and track and field programs at Syracuse since 2005. The men's squad won the NCAA Division I championship in cross country in 2015 and has won eight straight conference titles.

   Associate head coach Brien Bell will serve as interim head coach pending a national search for a replacement, the school announced.

   Retired PSAL coach dies: Stuart "Ace" Adler, football coach at Lafayette High in the PSAL for 21 seasons beginning in the late 1950s, died Friday in Boynton Beach, Fla. He was 88.

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   Remembering the ESGs: As Greg Brownell noted this week, this is the time of year that reporters from around the state used to be gearing up to cover the Empire State Games, which was New York's version of the Olympics.

   "This was an assignment of mixed blessings," Brownell wrote. "As it was for the other sportswriters in attendance, it meant a five-day stretch of 15-hour days, rushing from one venue to the next, over to the media center, out to another venue, back to the media center, and ... has anybody seen the swimming results?

   "We constantly griped about the workload, the editors back in the office, the weather, the missing results and just about everything else. But we loved every minute of it."

   The summer ESGs were canceled in 2009 due to state budget cuts. They made a comeback in 2010 in Buffalo, but they were dropped from the following year's budget and went away forever despite an effort to revive the event in Rochester a few years later.

   "We were never given an opportunity to make it work," ESG director Fred Smith told Brownell this week. "I told anybody and everybody who would listen, I would work with the agency to make sure the Games came out right. To go from a program that had one of its more successful years to totally being eliminated from the budget was a blow to everybody."

   You can read the full column here.

   Extra points: After some uncertainty this spring and summer, Aquinas and McQuaid have been confirmed for Class AA football this fall by Section 5.