Leading off today: There are always stories about athletes playing two sports in the same school season, but the situation at Holley, a small school west of Rochester, has a fun twist to it.
Whereas the typical two-sporter might play for a sectional champion in one of his or her sports, Lily Newman and Payton Preston played for not one but two Section 5 champions this fall. And their earned their championship patches on consecutive days.
On Oct. 31, Newman and Preston helped the Hawks' girls soccer squad to a 2-1 triumph vs. Canisteo-Greenwood in overtime in the Class C1 final. The following afternoon, the pair donned different uniforms and helped Holley to the Class C2 championship in the sectional Game Day Cheerleading tournament.
"I was like, 'So much just happened last night, but it's time to focus on today, because another championship could happen,' Newman told The Daily News in Batavia. "It was just really exciting (winning in soccer) and hard to focus on just cheer because of what had happened the night before."
Both seniors are veterans of the soccer program in a town where the sport is typically a big deal. But Game Day cheerleading was a new experience for them.
"Our cheer coach, she's really great. She's very flexible, along with our soccer coach, so they gave us the opportunity," Preston added. "We did want to just put ourselves out there because this was the last chance we were going to have to do something like that. So we thought it was a great opportunity."
Nassau County adds dual-meet championship for girls wrestling
As girls wrestling continues to grow steadily in New York, Section 8 will post a first for the sport by conducting a sectional dual-meet championship in January.
Bethpage, Glen Cove, Hicksville, Jericho, Long Beach, Roosevelt, Uniondale, and Valley Stream are fielding their own teams this winter, joining a pair of established programs.
"A great deal of time and effort went into making this a possibility for our girls," sectional girls wrestling coordinator Sean Severin told Newsday. "This doesn't happen without eight other school districts joining MacArthur High School of the Levittown School District in officially establishing girls wrestling teams."
Wrestling is the fastest growing girls sport in the country, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. The number of teams across the country has quadrupled over the past decade.
"There is an incredible amount of interest in girls wrestling," sectional Executive Director Pat Pizzarelli said. "We grew from one full team and a bunch of independent wrestlers to nine full teams."
Unusual rule leads to CHSFL playoff pairings revision
When St. Peter's defeated St. John the Baptist in Saturday's CHSFL AA-1 quarterfinals, it should have advanced the Eagles to a semifinal vs. defending champion St. Joseph by the Sea this weekend.
However, sixth-seeded Fordham Prep upset No. 3 St. Francis Prep on Sunday and No. 2 Xavier held serve vs. Kellenberg to change everything.
That's because the Catholic High School Football League has a rule that Xavier and Fordham Prep cannot play each other because they're already slated to meet in their traditional Turkey Bowl, one of the oldest traditions in all of New York scholastic sports.
So, Saturday's semifinals will match St. Peter's at Xavier and Fordham Prep at St. Joseph by the Sea.
Upon further review ...
The PSAL released its football playoff brackets on Monday and dispelled the concerns I had outlined in
the previous blog. But while they mostly got it right while seeding the brackets for the upcoming playoffs, they did create some questions.
First, here's what I got wrong:
The Conference 1A mess that I anticipated did not happen because I missed a key criteria; before the season started, the PSAL assigns every team in the conference one of two numerical ratings based on anticipated strength. As long as a team with the higher of the two ratings finishes in the top eight in power points, it will be seeded above teams with the lower rating regardless of the disparity in points. Thus, unbeaten Mott Haven and Petrides properly earned the top two seeds.
The only anomaly is that A-Tech (4-4, 314 power points) is seeded seventh and Adlai Stevenson (5-3, 399) is eighth because of how their strength of schedule was evaluated before the season.
The same sort of logic catapulted McKee/Staten Island Tech (4-4) into the No. 3 seed in Conference 3A over two other .500 teams.
It also explains why the order in Conference 2A was significantly different than what the power points earned this fall would have suggested. FDR (5-2, 541) is seeded fifth, two places behind the Springfield Gardens (5-3, 513) team it defeated 28-16. William C. Bryant (7-1, 789) is seeded fourth, two spots behind the Boys & Girls (5-3, 688) squad it beat 30-0.
By and large, the PSAL probably got the right 32 playoff teams. But abandoning power points in the latter stages of the seeding process and instead falling back on preseason strength of schedules numbers when head-to-head is more meaningful is unnecessarily confusing.
One team in particular to watch this weekend
The boys soccer regular season was getting quite old, and Guilderland was still winless (0-3-3) against a rugged schedule entering a Sept. 20 match against Mohonasen while adjusting to the graduation of seven seniors who led the team to a spot in the 2024 Section 2 finals.
A lot has happened since, because the Dutchmen will be playing Fairport on Saturday in the NYSPHSAA Class AAA semifinals in Middletown. Guilderland has only lost twice since the frustrating start to the season, but a recent string of harrowing encounters could easily have brought about a season-ending third loss.
Consider the team's most recent results:
• A 1-0 victory over Colonie in sudden death in the Section 2 quarterfinals.
• Advancing in penalty kicks over Shaker in the semifinals.
• Advancing over Shenendehowa in the final after a penalty-kick marathon that went 11 rounds.
• Dispatching Elmira 2-1 in double overtime in the state quarterfinals while finishing the match a man down.
"If there's a team that's gone four overtimes in a row, I've never heard of it," coach Mike Kinnally told The Times Union. "We feel like we're playing with house money now. Four overtime games are nuts. I've never seen anything like that. We've only gone to PKs once in my 22 years, and that was against Shen in the sectionals about 15 years ago."
Passings
• Lenny Wilkens, who rose from a schoolboy star at Boys High in Brooklyn in the late 1950s to a distinguished career as an NBA player and coach, died Nov. 9 at the age of 88.
• Paul Brodmerkel, a teacher and wrestling coach in the Lindenhurst School District as well as a former Section 11 chairman in the sport, died on Oct. 31 at the age of 76. Brodmerkel, also a former college coach, was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2009.
