Leading off today: Massapequa and Garden City put on a memorable performance in Monday's Nassau County football showdown. It was an event that literally will be talked about for years to come.
Two powerful football programs that otherwise would normally never meet got together because the section's coaches dared to challenge the status quo by carving out a week for divisional crossover games.
Everyone knew that all eyes would be on Massapequa vs. Garden City. Having 6,000 fans show up confirmed the interest. The action on the field justified it all. Still, the game was just one of multiple crossovers created by this experiment, and games between teams with 68- and 25-game winning streaks aren't ever going to be commonplace.
So, where does Nassau County football go from here?
There certainly are options. Several in fact. At the very least, however, continuing to have teams play one crossover game is a natural even if the squads in the marquee game aren't riding long winning streaks.
Gregg Sarra at Newsday points out that five of Friday's 12 crossovers were decided by one point and another by two, so matching up by preseason seedings looks like it works.
Other ideas have sprouted on social media, with some inspired by a feeling that perhaps the season-ending Long Island Championships pairing the champions of Sections 8 and 11 are growing long of tooth.
Hand in hand with that is the suggestion that its time to join the state tournament. Realistically, that necessitates Suffolk County being on the same page, and enthusiasm in either section hasn't reached critical mass.
Similarly, the idea of a second crossover game for Section 8 teams so that they could match up in the regular season vs. Suffolk opponents would require Section 11's embrace of the idea. That also potentially messes with the reliability of sectional tournament seedings.
On the other hand, Nassau County OK'ing a second crossover game opens the door to contests against PSAL opponents, NYSPHSAA teams north of New York City, or even -- gasp! -- CHSFL foes like St. Anthony's and Monsignor Farrell.
Regardless, of what proponents of the various potential steps forward are advocating, Nassau County coaches and administrators need not leap immediately into a decision.
You just got done hitting a home run, folks. Kick back and relax a bit while pondering what you'd like to do next.
About that state tournament scenario ...
As I noted, social media chatter about Sections 8 and 11 needing to come onboard for the New York State Public High School Athletic Association is running a little hotter these days.
The bad news is bringing in two more sections makes things a bit more complicated. The good news is that Steve Grandin (the actual brains of the NYSSWA) worked out a scenario several years ago that still holds up today.
I'll let Steve lay it out in the next blog.
News from sport committee meetings
The start of the school year brings with it the resumption of meetings for the various sport committees in the NYSPHSAA. September's schedule is typically packed with winter and spring sports updates.
A few quick highlights from recent meeting minutes:
• The National Federation has not settled on a definitive rule thus far for when to introduce the ghost runner into extra innings. The NYSPHSAA committee favors starting all half-innings after the seventh inning with a runner on second base for the upcoming season. They would track the data throughout the season and determine whether it should be a permanent rule beginning in 2028.
• Hudson Valley Community College is on track for another three-year contract (beginning in 2028) to continue hosting the girls basketball championship weekend. The committee voted 8-1 for HVCC over SRC Arena at Onondaga Community College, and the NYSPHSAA office staff concurred.
The Championship Advisory Committee will chime in next week, followed by likely approval from the Executive Committee at its quarterly meeting on Oct. 21.
• Greenlight Networks Grand Slam Park in Section 4 is on a similar timeline for approval to continue hosting the state softball tournament through 2030.
• While LECOM Harborcenter in Buffalo is in the driver's seat for another three-year contract to host the boys hockey championships, Section 3 (Utica's Aud/Nexus Center) and Section 5 (Rochester Ice Center) also submitted bids for the next contract.
The Harborcenter garnered six of the eight committee votes (Rochester got the other two) as well as the nod from the office staff. The Section 5 bid theoretically has at least a puncher's chance of prevailing with the Executive Committee next month based on a lower facility cost, cheaper hotel rooms, and travel considerations for eastern sections, but the Buffalo venue has become entrenched at this point.
In other hockey business, Section 7 will take the place of Section 9 in the Division I tournament bracket following the disclosure that Monroe-Woodbury will not have a team in the upcoming season.
An interesting read
A report last week in
The New York Post was on the mark for as far as it went, but I would suggest that the paper may have missed half the story when it suggested "they're gaming the system."
The story was a follow-up to the Varsity Blues scandal from several years ago in which families with resources were bribing coaches at elite colleges to "recruit" their unqualified teen athletes (some of whom weren't even athletes), thus greasing the wheels for the admission process.
According to the paper, the new questionable path into top schools is for parents to introduce their offspring to niche sports such as squash, fencing, crew, sailing, and skiing at a young age. The premise is that they can overcome borderline grades by showing at least equally borderline skill (largely developed from expensive coaching) in sports in which there aren't deep pools of recruits.
Chris Rim, founder and CEO of Command Education, said clients put their kids on the specialization track in the more obscure sports as early as third grade. A study of almost 400,000 NCAA athletes found that the sports with the most disproportionate representation of participants from top-1% income zip codes were squash, sailing, fencing, water polo, crew, and lacrosse.
The same study showed more than half of athletes from Ivy League and similar academic schools came from private high schools.
It was an interesting read for as far as it went, but the paper shouldn't have stopped there. They needed to note the attrition rate in some of the sports cited. Remember, the goal of the parents is to get their kids into top schools. Once enrolled, however, there is literally nothing stopping the student from dropping athletics during or after that first year on campus.
I haven't collected any data of my own, but I still follow fencing a bit as a result of all the top U.S. women's foil competitors training in Rochester in the 1990s. All you need to do is to look at fencing rosters in consecutive years to see how few competitors listed on the roster as freshmen are still there as sophomores.
Naturally, some simply can't cut it on the field or in the classroom, and others get injured. But so many of the other one-and-dones are simply following the plan.
