Leading off today: The Florida High School Athletic Association board of directors voted Tuesday to move ahead with a variation of a concept recently contemplated -- but cast aside -- in New York.
The FHSAA will create an eight-team Open Division for 11 sports in the upcoming school year. The board of directors voted 10-0 to move forward in football, volleyball, boys and girls basketball, boys and girls soccer, baseball, softball, boys and girls lacrosse.
In effect, it's a tournament for the best of the best, likely blending public and private schools in the same bracket.
The approval came despite concerns that the elite tournament might make the rest of the postseason feel less significant.
Participants will be determined at the close of the regular season based upon rankings from MaxPreps.
A somewhat similar concept was briefly floated during the latest round of discussions about separate public and private school playoffs in the New York State Public High School Athletic Association. With concerns about there being too few private and charter schools to form meaningful playoffs, there was a suggestion to explore forming an open division consisting of those schools as well as public schools desiring to play above Class AA in football or AAA in basketball.
The idea never gained traction, and the NYSPHSAA instead moved toward an annual evaluation of non-public schools meeting certain criteria to determine if they should be moved to a higher class.
Gatorade honors two diamond stars
Derek Yormack and Ava Papaleo are Gatorade's New York players of the year in baseball and softball, respectively.
Yormack, a junior at Bellmore JFK, which plays Cornwall in Friday's NYSPHSAA Class AA semifinals, is a right-handed pitcher and first baseman who has committed to Vanderbilt University.
He entered the state tournament with a 6-0 record, 0.42 ERA and 65 strikeouts in 33.2 innings. He was also hitting .439 with eight home runs and a .955 slugging percentage.
Papaleo, a senior centerfielder for Ursuline and University of Virginia recruit, was a force after missing last season following elbow surgery. She batted .548 with eight homers, a 1.177 slugging percentage and 37 runs scored for the Koalas.
Following up on Fayetteville-Manlius
Nearly 100 supporters of Bill Aris attended the Fayetteville-Manlius school board meeting on Monday, with about a dozen speakers asking members to reinstate the veteran cross country and track coach.
They included current and former runners, former athletic director Richard Roy, and parents of runners, Syracuse.com reported.
Aris, who has led the district's cross country teams to multiple state and national championships, has been on paid suspension since early last month while the district investigates allegations that his coaching practices were harmful to runners. Some past and current runners and parents said Aris pushed athletes to run injured, berated them, and ignored eating disorders.
However, the speakers at the board meeting told a different story.
Sophomore Dahlia Saada spoke about how Aris always checked on her at practice during Ramadan to make sure she was OK because she was fasting. He offered her a modified training plan to make sure she could both observe the fast and keep training.
"It showed care for athletes, not just as runners, but as individuals with different experiences," she said.
• A GoFundMe page started by John Aris to defray his father's legal costs, has raised $44,000 as of Tuesday evening. An update to the page says Aris has legal counsel retained through Harris Beach Murtha, a heavyweight law firm with 17 offices across the Northeast.
More on the Bill Aris situation
Hours before the Fayetteville-Manlius school board meeting, Syracuse.com published a deeper look at what
supporters and detractors had to say about Bill Aris, one of the most accomplished high school coaches in any sport in the country.
Two things from the story stood out to me:
(1) The website reported Aris' total coaching stipend was $62,716 last school year. which made him the region's highest-paid high school coach by far.
Granted, Aris coaches three sports (cross country, indoor track, outdoor track) and has been doing it a long time, but the figure is nevertheless astounding if accurate. Assuming a schedule of 25 hours a week for 45 weeks, that's $55/hour. Of course, in that capacity he is ultimately responsible for supervising dozens of athletes at all times.
(2) I read Marc Bloom's thoroughly researched 2019 book about the F-M cross country dynasty, and a phrase garnering attention then and now -- "Pain is the purifier" -- is being misused by Aris' critics.
Central to success in distance running is the fact that high weekly mileage through the first half of the season typically translates into peak meet performance. While LSD ("long, slow distances") is a staple of training, some stretches of meet prep are done at 85 to 90% of max speed toward a figurative wall. At some point, the effort is no longer sustainable, but every stride between the pain of exertion kicking in and finally relenting adds to the runner's base and the capacity to excel in meets.
And that's where some of the critics are wrong about Aris (and many peers, for that matter). While some runners and parents are alleging athletes have been pushed to run while injured, others are conflating injury with pain. They're entirely different.
"Pain is the purifier" makes for a neat headline. As with references to a "cult" that have been pervasive over the years, it has no place in the current conversation.
Major coaching milestone
The Mamaroneck baseball season came to an end Saturday with an 8-5 loss to Monroe-Woodbury in the NYSPHSAA Class AAA quarterfinals. One game before that, coach Mike Chiapparelli hit a big round number.
By beating Roy C. Ketcham 2-0 in the Section 1 final, the Tigers presented him with his 700th victory in 41 seasons in the dugout.
He's the seventh coach in NYSPHSAA history to reach 700 wins.
Central NY tandem conquering lacrosse in Texas
Mike Centra, 38, and Pasquali Praino, 40, who played their high school lacrosse at Jamesville-DeWitt and Cicero-North Syracuse, respectively, have been coaching at The Kinkaid School in the Houston suburb of Piney Point Village, Texas.
The team just completed its third state Class A championship season in four years. Playing primarily private schools, the Falcons went 16-6 and finished ninth out of 92 Texas teams according to LaxNumbers.com.
Much of the roster consists of athletes whose year consists primarily of football and weight training, but the coaches have made the most of the three months a year that the focus turns to lacrosse.
"I know when I first got down here and I was playing other teams, you'd see a lot of coaches where they'd find that big athletic kid and they just tell them to run by everybody and go score," said Centra, who just completed his 11th season. "And so they really weren't learning how to share the ball or read the defenses.
"It wasn't about that because I knew that as they got older, kids would start to be the same size and they couldn't run through guys anymore. And then they wouldn't understand that you need to share the ball, you need to pass it and things like that. So I started working a lot on the passing, the catching, understand how to read defenses."
