Thursday, Oct. 19, 2006
Money is very much on the minds of athletic directors according to a survey released Tuesday by the National Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association.    Some 36 percent of the schools responding to the survey cited a decrease in money budgeted by the school board, although 21 percent reported increases.    About 55 percent of schools reported increased revenue from booster clubs and half tacked on additional money from gate receipts. Also, 33 percent reported increased money from corporate sponsorships or similar business deals.    The NIAAA survey, based on data from the 2003-04 school year, showed schools offering an average of 10.58 boys sports and 10.19 girls sports. Check out the photo in David Filkins' Oct. 13 blog entry for The Times Union in Albany. I won't spoil it for you, but suffice to say it's a moooooving experience. You just don't get fun stuff like this happening at pro sports events. I'm guessing the rookie lacrosse coach at Mount Sinai will fit in just fine and win a few games this spring.    Newsday's Gregg Sarra did a nice feature last week on Joe Cuozzo, 68, who led Ward Melville to seven state championships, won 699 games (with 73 losses) in 38 seasons		and coached 49 All-Americans.    He's now at Mount Sinai after a well-documented awkward ending with Ward Melville. Having retired as a teacher in that school district, he ended up having to share coaching duties with Mike Hoppey last spring.    Cuozzo isn't exactly starting from scratch since Mount Sinai went 14-4 and was a Suffolk Class C finalist last spring. Is Tommy Gruenewald of Fayetteville-Manlius the greatest Section 3 distance runner ever? The Post-Standard made a pretty compelling case for him yesterday following his great performance at the Manhattan Invitational.    His clocking of 12:10.6 over 2.5 miles broke the Van Cortlandt Park record following a spring track season in which he won the 3,200 meters at the state meet. He has an 8:59.32 eight-lapper to his credit.    Gruenewald can practically pick any Division I college he wants to run for at this point. Earlier in the week, Guilderland's Brian Rhodes-Devey punched his own ticket to the University of Texas.    Rhodes-Devey is the defending state and federation cross country champion. He chose Texas over other top-notch programs including Oregon, Michigan, and Northern Arizona.

Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2006
From the department of irony: The online version of The Buffalo News' feature on Paul Hutzler, the sports historian who keeps numerous scrapbooks of articles cut out of newspapers, was chopped up into four pieces this morning due to a processing glitch.    Nevertheless, it was great reading. Paul has been a one-man department of records for Section 6, the New York State Sportswriters Association and numerous other organizations.    For instance, the state records in football found on this site and the game programs at NYSPHSAA playoff games are Paul's work. I made a couple of mistaken references this week to the Manhattanville Invitational, when I clearly meant to say "Manhattan Invitational." Thanks to reader Jim Rech for catching that. One of the big flaws of the blogosphere is the general lack of line editing to keep authors from messing up. I couldn't help but notice that The Times Union in Albany reported on an upcoming fundraising event for Mechanicville High sports the same day I was ranting against state Sen. Vincent Leibell for forking over $150,000 to help Mahopac's sports program.    Both school districts, of course, lost their sports funding this spring		when voters shot down the proposed school budgets. Mechanicville apparently lacks a local political with the (choose one: clout, chutzpah, arrogance) to dish out the dough.    Anyway, the booster club and Saratoga Peak Performance Athletic Training Center will host 20 four-person teams in a sports skills competition Saturday at 8 a.m. at the training center on Route 9. It certainly has been a busy month in Watkins Glen. Thursday's twist was the suspension of nine football players and seven other students for allegedly violating the school's alcohol policy.    It was announced the same day that football coach Mike Myers, who was suspended for one game after an altercation with a parent during a game on Sept. 22, resigned. Myers had also resigned after the incident in Lansing, then rescinded his letter and served the suspension.    And just to make things a bit crazier, The Ithaca Journal reported that Watkins Glen football players had around $2,600 of items stolen from their lockers during the Lansing game.    The Tompkins County Sheriffs Office is running the investigation, which happened during Lansing's 42-0 win. Watkins Glen officials apparently accidentally left the locker room unlocked.

Sunday, Oct. 15, 2006
So many questions and so little time . . .    (Q): how could the football game between East Poinsett County and Hughes high in Lepanto, Ark., have been tied at 66 after regulation?    (A):: There was plenty of bad defense involved.    (Q): How do I know that?    (A): I'm not positive, but that's my best guess why EPC entered with an 0-6 record and Hughes came in at 0-4.    (Q): Who was the star of the game?    (A): Well, Kenric Smith got the most noteriety for scoring 10 TDs for Hughes. His 10th came in overtime in the 73-72 loss, making it quite possibly the greatest wasted effort in prep football history.    (Q): Who didn't get his fair share of attention?    (A): How about QB Brett Hardin, who had 835 all-purpose yards for East Poinsett County?    Yes, sir, you gotta love the kind of entertainment you can get at a high school game by shelling out all of maybe $5 at the gate. Sure beats paying money to watch a bunch of college thugs indulge in a gang war at the Orange Bowl on Saturday night. Wow, that must have been quite the storm in Western New York late Thursday and early Friday. How else do you explain resident NYSSWA stats genious Paul Hutzler not getting out to the newsstand to pick up his out-of-town newspapers on Saturday?    Seriously, the freak storm that dumped two feet of snow on portions of the Buffalo area has disrupted sports schedules -- and life in		general -- at the tail end of the regular season.    Considering the carnage, it's likely that several schools could be closed until mid-week or later, and seeding some of the post-season tournaments could get complicated if teams play an unequal number of games. The Manhattan Invitational drew an incredible field Saturday at Van Cortlandt Park, and the times on the 2.5-mile course were sensational. .    On the girls side, Midlothian, Va., scored an upset in the Eastern States championship, defeating a field that included Saratoga (third place), Hilton (fourth), Fayetteville-Manlius (sixth), Greenwich (seventh) and Warwick Valley (10th). That looks an awful lot like the order of finish likely for New York schools at the Federation Meet in November.    Hilton skipped Feds last year because the Cadets felt (correctly) that they had their invitation to Nike Team Nationals locked up. No one will have that luxury this year because of the amazing depth of talent in the state and the region; you sit, you lose.    Dyestat.com reported that Hannah Davidson of Saratoga ran -- and won in 14:14.7 -- despite the deaths of two relatives last week. It says much about 'Toga's history that her time was the eighth-best in course history but only No. 3 in school history.    The state's most powerful boys teams were spread out among several races, though Shenendehowa made the day's best impression. Senior Steve Murdock clocked 12:15.5 to finish second in his race with one of the fastest times ever recorded at VCP.    Dyestat reported that 46 boys broke 13:00 (a 5:12 mile pace) on the day, making it the best speed day there ever.

Friday, Oct. 13, 2006
So much for the fundamental American principle of "no taxation without representation."    Every last one of us in New York got screwed this week so that state Sen. Vincent Leibell can keep his job for another two years.    Leibell, R-Patterson, is doling out big money at every twist and turn on the road to Election Day as he desperately tries to fend off the challenge of Michael Kaplowitz in the 40th Senate District.    And Leibell's latest budget-buster came Monday when he handed out $150,000 of my money and yours in the form of so-called "bullet aid" to help pay for the interscholastic sports program at Mahopac high school.    The taxpayers of Mahopac twice voted to reject the district's proposed school budget last spring, thereby causing sports funding to be axed. As a result, high school and middle school students are paying $408 to participate in each sport this year to make up the funding gap that active and hard-working sports boosters there have been working to close.    The voters spoke and Leibell didn't listen. Instead, he dipped into		Albany's bountiful pork trough, which Kaplowitz so accurately referred to as a "member-items Ponzi scheme," and pulled out "bullet aid," which is money that our elected officials are able to allocate very quickly and with minimal restrictions. That comes in handy during election season, and Albany's big shots dole it out to favored and/or endangered legislators.    It's also a nice card to play when you want to throw some money at the college your kids are attending. Leibell did just that, sending $75,000 Siena College's way.    That's your tax money at work, boys and girls. Most of us had no say in the Mahopac matter because we don't live there. But even the folks who did have a say -- voters in Mahopac -- had their wishes ignored.    Taxation without reprsentation? Hell, this was taxation with representation.    So now we're all paying for a sports budget that the voters in the Mohopac district twice rejected as part of a $99 million school proposal.    But at least Slick Vinnie keeps his job for another two years. And we all know that's all that matters.

Monday, Oct. 9, 2006
There was a saying in my days as an ink-stained wretch that there are no new ideas in the newspaper business, just ideas stolen from other newspapers.    Here's hoping nobody steals ideas from the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press, because one of their most recent ones was a real lemon.    It seems that P-P senior editor/sports Mike Bass came up with the idea of doing a fantasy football promotion based upon the stats of area high school players.    Coaches, ADs and administrators at several schools were unhappy that the newspaper would be connected to an activity so closely associated with both gambling -- admit it, your NFL fantasy league has an entry fee and season-ending prizes, right? -- and me-first behavior, so some teams stopped supplying stats to the paper in late September.    The paper gave up last week, and Bass wrote a somewhat whiny column on the subject that accused some folks of "Pleasantville sort of thinking from the high school community (that) smacked of naiveté if not hypocrisy."    Oh, puh-leeze. You had a bad idea, you got called on it and then you caved in to the pressure. Stop faulting your readers for having good taste. And the assumption here is that fantasy football was a financial failure; otherwise you can be pretty sure Bass et al would have dug in their heels.    People ask me from time to time whether this era of the Internet		and other new technologies will kill off newspapers in our lifetime. I used to respond with an emphatic "no."    Lately, though, the phrase "assisted suicide" has started coming to mind. There was some interesting reading about the issue of home-schooled students in athletics over the weekend in The Times-Union in Albany.    New York State Sen. Bill Larkin, R-Cornwall-on-Hudson, has drafted a bill that would allow home-school students to participate in interscholastic sports and other activities sponsored by their local school district. Duanesburg senior Nha Wright now holds the Section 2 career record for goals scored in girls soccer, having netted two against Berne-Knox-Westerlo over the weekend to bring her total to 171.    The old mark was 169 set in 1993 by Tamarac's Meghan Wurster. Wright has hit the back of the net 35 times in her first 14 games this fall.    By the way, file away Becky Kaplan's name for future reference along similar lines. The Oyster Bay junior, who has been playing varsity soccer since seventh grade, went over 100 career goals in late September and has since netted six and four goals in recent games.    Lest you think six in a game is excessive, Oyster Bay needed all of them Thursday. They blew a five-goal lead before rallying for a 6-5 win against Plainview JFK.