Off the top of my head, $1.5 million is a bit much to ask in the way of justice for Joe Bennett. On the other hand, though, winning that amount in court would certainly send quite the message to his school district.

   Bennett filed a lawsuit seeking damages in that amount on Friday against the North Colonie School District, which fired him as Shaker High boys lacrosse coach the day before practice began this month. He alleges his rights were violated when the district let him go after a labor dispute involving his work as a teacher's aide and as president of a school union, not because of his performance as a coach.

   The district's allegations against him include insubordination, improper use of a school phone and incorrectly filling out time cards. They placed him on paid leave on Jan. 22.

   Bennett has been president of the North Colonie Central School District Aides Unit for one year and a lacrosse coach for 11 seasons, during which time he's won a pair of Section 2 championships. The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court says Bennett is being punished for attempting to represent a union employee in a dispute with the district.

   North Colonie's superintendent had no comment on the suit.

   It says here that the school district had better have some dandy examples of insubordination documented, because winning the phone and time cards issues aren't going to turn the tide of public opinion in their favor.

   My prediction is that Bennett comes away with $20,000 and his rightful spot on the lacrosse sideline in time for the 2008 season.

   A satisfactory solution at Onteora: The Onteora board of education relented a couple of weeks ago and reinstated Mike Boms in time for a 28th season as head boys track coach.

   Boms, who retired from teaching in June, learned last month that assistant coach Joe Cahill was being recommended for the post by the AD and principal. Boms and Cahill guided the team to league and Section 9 championships last spring.

   Students and the community rallied around Boms, and new superintendent Dr. Leslie Ford stepped in to support Boms in front of the school board.

   Extra points: Plan on a long Thanksgiving weekend in Syracuse next fall. The NYSPHSAA finals will be played on Friday and Sunday instead of consecutive weekend days because Syracuse University will be need the Carrier Dome for a home football game on Saturday. . . . It happens every November and March, so why should this week have been any different? The debate about public vs. private schools in the NYSPHSAA tournaments resurfaced for about the 200th time in the Syracuse.com forums. And, once again, some of the combatants based their entire argument on the fact that the governing body is the New York State Public High School Atheltic Association. Grow up.

   The New York State Basketball Hall of Fame will add eight members Saturday morning during a ceremony at Glens Falls Civic Center.

   The eight new inductees being recognized by the Basketball Coaches Association of New York are:

• Jack Agostino, Amityville boys coach with four state championships and 16 consecutive league titles.
• Martha Altmire, Olean girls coach with nearly 500 wins in 35 seasons.
• Harold Bradley, who began coaching at Norwich High in the 1940s and went on to roles at Hartwick College, Duke and Texas.
• Al Knapp, who has rolled up more than 500 wins in 29 seasons with the Vernon-Verona-Sherrill boys.
• George Mardigan, who won more than 500 games directing Watervliet's boys.
• Dave Powers, who coached three schools to Section 9 girls championships.
• Jack Ringel, who had three PSAL and one Federation championship en route to more than 450 wins at Grady.
• Mickey Crowley, a high school and college referee and administrator.

   Life comes full circle: I couldn't help but note the irony this morning as I opened up my newspaper and saw that the Democrat and Chronicle has resumed selecting all-area teams in sports beyond just the big three of football, basketball and soccer.

   The paper announced its All-Greater Rochester hockey team today and will also be rolling out wrestling selections soon.

   It takes me back to the good ol' days -- make that the great ol' days -- of the early 1980s when Gary Fallesen covered high school sports for the D&C, vastly expanding the scope of what the newspaper did. Gary maintained the staples such as game coverage and doing weekly polls, but he also raised the ante by writing compelling features and then venturing into column writing -- pieces he wrote about Fairport lacrosse coach Randy Garrett and slain Charlotte basketball player Chris Tuck are still vivid in my mind nearly two decades later.

   Gary was a friend and mentor, and it was an honor for me to succeed him as the high school editor in 1986 when he moved up a notch into a new assignment. I was never the writer or reporter that Gary was, but I continued picking AGR teams in the lesser sports until we got to the point when management decided that we needed to invest resources in other projects.

   Well, I'm following in Gary's footsteps once again. Gary called it a career in December, retiring from the D&C in order to focus on Climbing For Christ, an ambitious and innovative ministry.

   I visited Human Resources at Gannett's former flagship newspaper at 1 p.m. today to discuss my formal departure later this spring. I recently celebrated the fifth anniversary of my 39th birthday, so I'm too young to retire and will eventually rejoin the workforce somewhere, someday.

   For now, though, I've left the daily grind in order to care for my mother, who has been in declining health and needs more attention than I was able to provide while holding a full-time job.

   New on the web: Nice work recently by The Buffalo News and the New York Daily News to freshen up the look and functionality of their web sites.

   The Buff News joined the 21st century by moving its daily posting time up by two hours to 7 a.m. and adding RSS feeds.

   The NYDN now has a dedicated high school sports home page.

   It's a nice improvement for both, and I offer my congratulations. I went through more than a few redesigns in my days with the D&C, so I know how exhausting they can be.

   Money, money, money: The NYSPHSAA has certainly been blessed this school year. First, Auburn brings a massive crowd to the Carrier Dome for the state football finals to offset the cost of the weekend rental expense all by itself. Then, Albany Maginn and Glens Falls make it to the state finals in boys basketball, driving weekend attendance for the event to a near-record.

   At the other extreme, Section 5 is beginning to feel the pain financially. The Executive Committee met Wednesday and voted to begin charging dues to the member schools -- $600 per school district and $10 per varsity sport. The basketball tournament is no longer the money machine it used to be, with Blue Cross Arena costing somewhere between $8,000 and $10,000 per night, and wrestling and a couple of other sports lose substantial money.

   Congratulations to Joe Cuozzo, the rookie boys lacrosse coach at Mount Sinai, for picking up his 700th career victory last night in the form of a 15-3 win against Harborfields.

   Cuozzo was the most successful lacrosse couach in the country while at Ward Melville, rolling up a 699-72 record with 22 sectional and seven state championships. The Cuozzo era there ended awkwardly as he was nudged out of the job after retiring as a teacher, but he's got a new challenge now.

   Cuozzo, 69, has the opportunity to bring stability to Mount Sinai, which has gone through a string of coaches since starting the sport in 2002. In contrast, he was at Ward Melville for 38 straight seasons.

   Good intentions, but . . . : New York City's first-of-its-kind bill prohibiting the use of metal bats in high school baseball games is a reasonable act to protect young athletes from wicked line drives, but don't expect it to be a cure-all.

   Toeing the rubber against hitters using wood bats encourages pitchers to throw inside more often because there's less risk of excuse-me check swings getting through the infield.

   That has potential consequences, including broken arms, wrists and fingers for hitters who get jammed.

   City Council passed the bill last week by a 40-6 margin, which appears to make it veto-proof when it arrives on Mayor Michael Bloomberg's desk. The bill's legality may face challenges from sporting goods manufacturers.

   Ban supporters say balls hit with aluminum of composite bats have a greater velocity, giving players less time to react.

   Large-school games on tape: MSG will show the Federation basketball tournament Class AA finals on tape on Sunday morning.

   The girls game between Rush-Henrietta and the St. John the Baptist/Murry Bergtraum winner airs at 9 a.m. It will be followed at 11 by Lincoln's boys vs. Rice or Mount Vernon.

   More for your viewing pleasure: If you haven't dropped in on the reference section of our site recently, then please do. We've added about 30 files in the last week and will be trying to average one addition per day to this recource through mid-August.

   There's lots of info about past state championships and awards on the Internet, but it's scattered across so many sites. We'd like to build the best single library for New York high school sports on the web.

   PSAL officials certainly have a mess on their hands now that Sunday's riot has quite possibly gotten the organization thrown out of Madison Square Garden.

   Already, New York City's Department of Education has announced that PSAL basketball teams will not play any night games in 2007-08. It's going to be a tough proposition finding any venue willing to host games -- day or night -- next winter, and the PSAL may have to settle for 2,000-seat college gyms for some of its biggest games. Not a good situation when you consider nearly 14,000 showed up for Sunday's contest.

   They had better start negotiating a TV deal for the PSAL playoffs, or it could end up being labeled "The best tournament hardly anyone saw."

   The critical stats from Sunday night's fracas, which started inside Madison Square Garden and spilled onto the streets while Lincoln was beating Boys & Girls, 77-50.

• 21 arrests
• Fighting spread out over an eight-block area
• At least six shots fired
• 73 knives confiscated

   The melee quickly drew comparisons to March 17, 1964, at the Garden as fans at the Lincoln-Benjamin Franklin playoff game smashed whiskey bottles in a bloody brawl. The episode caused Garden management to pass on hosting high school basketball for 25 years.

   CBS buys MaxPreps: CBS Corp. announced Tuesday that it is buying the MaxPreps online high school sports network.

   It's believed CBS will integrate MaxPreps into its College Sports Television division.

   Daily newspapers have owned the high school sports audience for decades because they have the resources to

cover numerous events and can devote space.

   Now, it's likely CBS-affiliated TV stations across the country will be able to leverage MaxPreps' strengths -- information contributed by an army of unpaid coaches and team managers -- and help shore up some of the weaknesses.

   MaxPreps claims its network of coaches across the 50 states numbers 10,000 and that its photographers upload 400,000 images per year.

   Intrigue in Middle Village: I don't have sources on the Christ The King campus, so I'm as in the dark as most with respect to what was happening inside the girls basketball team the last two weeks.

   But Sky Lindsay's abrupt departure was probably the most public bump in the road for the powerful program since Nicole Kaczmarski's famous here-I-am, there-I-go transfer tango in the late 1990s.

   More than anything, I'm curious as to what caused the friction -- I'm assuming the story about her back injury was just that, a story -- between Lindsay, who has a scholarship waiting for her at St. John's, and coach Bob Mackey.

   A close second on the intrigue scale is whether she would have been back in the lineup for potentially brutal Federation games next weekend against Murry Bergtraum and Rush-Henrietta. My suspicion is that CTK, strong but not sensational, couldn't have pulled a sweep even with Lindsay in the lineup.

   Would Mackey have recognized the improbable odds of winning twice and kept Lindsay benched on the premise that it would be a lesson for future players? My head says "no" since she already missed several games. My heart isn't so sure. It would have been a great warning shot across the bow of future internal squabbles.

   Yes, it feels odd to lead off my first high school blog after a two-month hiatus with college basketball -- and women's college basketball, at that -- but these are most unusual times.

   And to think we all knew Brian Giorgis when he was just a pup, running the girls basketball program (amongst other sports) at itty-bitty Our Lady of Lourdes in Poughkeepsie.

   Well, he wasn't really a pup back then. But he's sure as heck the lead dog these days at Marist College, which scored two upsets this weekend to get to the Sweet 16 of the women's NCAA Division I basketball tournament.

   Giorgis has done a masterful job of building the Red Foxes program into an up-and-coming national contender with a roster full of rust-belters who don't waste possessions on offense and play defense as though it's a personal insult for the opposition to get an open look from any closer than 25 feet from the rim.

   Before arriving at Marist five seasons ago, though, he built Our Lady of Lourdes into the state's best girls basketball team not named Christ The King. His teams went 451-44 in 19 seasons, including 56-2 over the final two years, and sent more than 30 players into the college ranks. Lourdes won league championships all 19 of his seasons there and captured Section 1 championships in each of his final 11 seasons.

   And, as the ESPN announcers noted during Monday's 73-59 victory over Middle Tennessee, Giorgis' scholastic success was not limited to the basketball court. We believe he is the only coach to take teams in four sports to NYSPHSAA Final Fours, with the other sports being baseball, softball and volleyball.

   Marist's dream is scheduled to come to an end next weekend against Tennessee or Pittsburgh, but the Red Foxes' season has already been a huge success.

   Lights, camera, action: I feel a little bit better about paying my cable bill these days in the aftermath of the weekend basketball telecasts. Time Warner's upstate cable network showed the five NYSPHSAA boys finals live, with the Sunday doubleheader especially attractive.

   With Glens Falls and Bishop Maginn playing twice apiece, attendance at Glens Falls Civic Center nearly topped the tournament record. They might have sold a few more tickets had those schools' finals not been televised Sunday, but the NYSPHSAA more than made up for any small monetary loss with great exposure.

   Here's hoping that some sort of similar TV deal can be worked out for lacrosse this spring and one or two of the major sports -- football, anyone? -- in the fall.

   Young criminals in training: Word is already on the street that Madison Square Garden officials may want no part of future PSAL games following the outlandish "fan" behavior during and after Sunday night's game between Abraham Lincoln and Boys & Girls.

   Fights in the stands midway through the second half spilled out onto the streets, with reports of gunfire and at least 21 arrests, which made Rochester's problems during the Section 5 finals two weekends earlier look like amateur hour.

   If the PSAL final is allowed back into the Garden in 2008, look for a 1 p.m. start and lots of additional security.

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