Thursday, Sept. 26, 2019: Lew-Port snaps Niagara Wheatfield golf streak

   Leading off today: Niagara Wheatfield had its 99-match winning streak in league action snapped Wednesday with a one-stroke loss at Niagara Frontier Golf Club.

   Anthony Dragone fired a 42 for nine holes to lead Lewiston-Porter to a 275-276 victory in Niagara Frontier League action. The medalist was Niagara Wheatfield's Anthony Delisanti with a 37.

   Niagara Wheatfield had last lost in 2014, when it finished second in the Niagara Frontier League Tournament. The last loss in a dual meet was in 2013.

   "I'm numb. I can't believe it," Lew-Port coach Scott Townsend said. "It's bittersweet though because they're always a really classy team and Tim (Codd, NW's coach) is a great guy and it's been great for our league and golf in our area. ... They've been a great story."

   Boys soccer: Owen Parsons converted a penalty kick with 1:51 to play to lift Horace Greeley to a 3-2 victory over Ossining, ranked eighth in the state in Class AA.

   Greeley improved to 4-1-2. Ossining, which had been riding a six-game winning streak, is 8-2.

   Kevon Evans chipped a ball over the head of the goalkeeper to give Ossining a 2-1 lead with 32:17 left, but Horace Greeley's Josh Tochner equalized when a shot deflected off the goalie with trickled over the line with 11:35 to go.

   "That was a very slow-motion moment," Tochner said.

   It's now a trend: For the second time in a week, a former high school coach has been accused of providing inside information to an upcoming football opponent. Last week's episode was in Arizona and the latest involves an Arkansas coach who was serving as dean of students.

   Randy Barnhill, 8-23 in the previous three seasons with Huntsville before being reassigned, is accused of sending detailed info to the coach for Elkins High in the days before that school's 35-0 win over Huntsville.

   Barnhill was tripped up by technology; the messages he sent to the Elkins coach were backed up to a Huntsville team iPad that Barnhill had previously used while coaching.

   Barnhill was seen being escorted off the campus by security on Tuesday.

   Haves vs. have-nots: I hadn't heard the topic mentioned in quite some time so I had no idea it might be gaining momentum, but Iowa is the latest state to investigate adding provisions to the way schools are classified so that those with high poverty levels can drop down to lower enrollment divisions.

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   Minnesota, Oregon and Colorado already have such provisions and Washington could be headed in that direction by next year. Discussions have picked up steam recently in Iowa, where Des Moines' five largest public schools are a combined 0-104 in football in the past decade against rivals with more affluent student bodies from the Polk County suburbs.

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   "On just about every Friday night, they outsize us, they outman us, and they outnumber us," Hoover High Principal Sherry Poole said. "Your heart just kind of stops whenever someone gets crunched."

   Aside from the raw number of players, suburban counterparts often have the advantage of better-organized youth programs, larger budgets for coaches and the ability to pay for the latest gadgets.

   As reported by Yahoo Sports, however, lumping poor schools into lesser divisions, separate from more affluent schools, rankles some educators based on the message it sends.

   "Our kids don't want to be classified as poor kids who have to play lower-level competition," said Mitchell Moore, a coach at Roosevelt High in Des Moines. "I'm a big believer that socio-eco- nomics has nothing to do with catching a football."

   Other opponents see it as a "medals for everyone" mentality that undermines lessons in resilience.

   An end to honors: A high school league in central Pennsylvania has opted to stop selecting its own postseason all-star teams, in part because administrators think that other organizations do a better job of it.

   Colonial League President Bryan Geist told a local newspaper that local media and sports medicine providers recognize student-athletes, adding that the league itself sometimes doesn't get it right.

   "We have devalued the subjective voting process that doesn't get the correct individuals honored when appropriate," he wrote in a statement.

   Geist also said announcing all-star selections while the postseason was in progress created rifts within teams.

   Week 4 football: Here's a look at the Week 4 schedule for ranked teams.