Former Amsterdam football and basketball star T.J. Czeski is in trouble with the law, one of at least a dozen people charged Tuesday in an extensive police investigation of drug sales.

   Several of those arrested are also former Amsterdam athletes, including two-time all-state pick Michael Alteri, The Recorder of Amsterdam reported.

   Czeski and his sister, Tara Czeski, were charged with felony criminal sale of marijuana and conspiracy, authorities said. T.J. Czeski was released on $7,500 bail.

   Czeski was the NYSSWA's Class A player of the year in football as well as an eighth-team all-state selection in Class AA basketball in the 2005-06 school year. As a senior quarterback, he threw for 1,618 yards and 25 touchdowns, with just five interceptions, to lead the Rams to a state championship. He had 144 passing yards and 81 on the ground in a 35-14 victory over Geneva in the NYSPHSAA final at the Carrier Dome.

   He was a first-team all-state defensive back in Class A as a junior.

   Czeski is a freshman at Wagner, where he averaged 1.3 points in about 8.5 minutes per game as a point guard on the basketball team in the just-completed season. He averaged 18.5 points, 7 rebounds and 5 assists the previous season as an Amsterdam senior.

   Alteri, 21, was arraigned on a charge of criminal sale of narcotics. He was third-team all-state in Class A as a junior and first-team all-state as a senior running back in 2003.

   Also arrested was Brittany Smitherman, who was charged with misdemeanor sale of marijuana. Smitherman was an NYSSWA Class AA, 10th-team all-state selection in 2005.

   Tara Czeski played basketball at Assumption College from 1999 to 2003.

   Amsterdam police are expected to hold a news conference, possibly involving other law-enforcement agencies, on Friday.

   No one can accuse Orchard Park of easing into its 2007 boys lacrosse schedule.

   The Quakers opened yesterday at Georgetown Prep, the co-No. 1 in last year’s final Laxpower.com rankings. Adding to the challenge, Georgetown Prep already had 10 games in the books this season, winning them all.

   Georgetown Prep held a 9-6 lead at the half and went on to defeat Orchard Park, 15-7. The Quakers got goals from six players.

   OP, the 12-time defending Section 6 champion in Class A, completes its southern swing today with a game in Maryland against Loyola-Blakefield (3-2), which was 14th nationally a year ago.

   Turf-field census (continued): Yesterday's blog item listing the high school fields in New York with artificial turf attracted tips from a few readers.

   Add the following schools to the list:

• Section 4: Corning (school district's shared field).
• New York City PSAL: Bronx JFK, Midwood.

   Also, Harrison (Section 1), Johnstown (Sec. 2), Penfield (Sec. 5) and Spencerport (Sec. 5) all have new fields in the pipeline.

   A tale of two cities: Don Imus is getting beat up -- and deservedly so -- for his stupid remarks about the Rutgers women's basketball team.

   He's been taken off the air for two weeks, there are calls for his firing and perhaps a few more people are coming to understand that the man hasn't been on top of his game for a long time. He used to be borderline brilliant, but that was too many years and too many "shock jocks" ago to remember. He's now more grating than great.

   But let's put this affair in context. Imus' transgression -- while offensive -- was of the sticks-and-stones variety. Words can sting some, but what Imus said didn't have

the potential to change lives, other than his own.

   Contrast that with another story on the pheriphery of the sports world. Word out of North Carolina is that state prosecutors will drop all charges against the defendants in the Duke lacrosse rape case today.

   Three Duke players stood accused for more than a year of sexual assault of a stripper at a party. A grand jury had indicted the players on charges of rape, kidnapping and sexual assault against a black dancer last spring but all three have maintained their innocence from Day One.

   The local prosecutor who secured the indictments has come under fire from many corners. Critics have wondered whether the indictment of three white students was at all related to the fact that the district attorney needed votes from a largely black community in the upcoming election. There was a startling lack of physical evidence against the players and allegations that DNA evidence that could have helped clear them was not properly disclosed to defense attorneys.

   It got so bad that the state attorney general had to take over the case.

   And now authorities have apparently come to the conclusion that there is no case. The young men may have shown poor judgment -- alcohol and strippers at a party in a private residence are a lousy mix -- but they did not commit a crime.

   Do you see where I'm going with this?

   Those three young men will probably -- hopefully? -- be able to get their reputations back. But who's going to give them back the past year of their lives?

   The Rutgers players feel insulted and hurt, which is understandable. And they deserve some sort of redress, so Imus' two-week suspension certainly doesn't bother me.

   But let's not lose perspective. The real case of people who were wronged based on their race involved the three young men who used to play lacrosse at Duke.

   The Democrat and Chronicle reported this morning that former Franklin High and Seton Hall University runner Garfield Ellenwood has been named head coach of Liberia's track and field team for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

   Ellenwood, 33, has been coaching some of that nation's athletes in recent years. Bethune-Cookman College hired him as track and field coach in September 2006 after he had served two years as an assistant at UNLV. He had a prior stint at Campbell University in North Carolina.

   Ellenwood was the second leg of Franklin's extraordinary 400-meter relay in 1993. Ellenwood, Thomas Evans, Antwoine Anderson and Jermaine Stafford clocked a :40.73 at the Penn Relays in Philadelphia that still stands as a state record. He went on to earn a degree in Social and Behavioral Sciences at Seton Hall.

   Calling all helpers: Also in the Rochester newspaper this morning, Alan Morrell did a piece about the advantages of artificial-turf fields this cold and snowy April.

   To Al's credit, he did not gloss over the fact that the jury is still out with respect to medical issues. Dr. Michael Maloney of the University of Rochester's department of orthopedics believes skin injuries and infections are more commonplace for athletes playing on artificial turf, a possibility that will need close monitoring as more of these fields get installed.

   The story reminded me that I've been wanting to do a census of artificial-turf fields at New York high schools, but I need your help. I've put together a first draft of fields and want to turn it into a permanent reference page on this site. Here's what I have so far:

• Section 1: Bronxville, Byram Hills, Carmel, John Jay Cross River, Lakeland, Lakeland Panas, Pleasantville, Rye, Rye Country Day, Somers.
• Section 2: Amsterdam (middle school), Broadalbin-Perth.
• Section 3: Central Square, Cicero-North Syracuse, Homer, Liverpool, Marcellus, Rome Free Academy, Sauquoit Valley, Solvay, Syracuse Corcoran, Syracuse Henninger, Syracuse Nottingham, Utica Proctor, Watertown, Waterville, West Genesee.
• Section 4: Binghamton, Elmira Heights Edison, Union-Endicott, Vestal.

• Section 5: Aquinas, Caledonia-Mumford, East Rochester, Hornell, Irondequoit, Penn Yan, Waterloo.
• Section 6: Amherst, Lancaster St. Mary's.
• Section 7: AuSable Valley, Plattsburgh.
• Section 8: Centereach, Cold Spring Harbor, Garden City, Hewlett, Manhasset, Oceanside, Port Washington.
• Section 9: Dietz Stadium (Kingston School District).
• Section 11: Commack, Comsewogue, Copaigue, Lindenhurst (middle school), Huntington, Mount Sinai, Newfield, Patchogue-Medford.
• New York City CHSAA: Cardinal Hayes, Fordham Prep, Holy Cross, Monsignor Farrell, Moore Catholic, St. Joseph by the Sea, St. Peter's.
• New York City PSAL: Benjamin Cordozo, Curtis, Frances Lewis, Grady, John Adams, Lafayette, Newtown, Thomas Jefferson.
• New York City private: Horace Mann.
• Long Island CHSAA: Chaminade, St. Anthony's, St. Mary's, St. John the Baptist.

   Send me an e-mail with additons and corrections.

   Fun content alert: Newsday launched a nice feature a couple of months ago, looking back at the history at a different school sports program every week or so. The focus this week is on East Islip, with much attention paid to Sal Ciampi Jr. and his father, who've coached baseball and football for much of the last 35 years.

   Previous installments are archived on the site and include looks at Garden City, Elmont and Farmingdale.

   The Democrat and Chronicle did a similar feature with Rochester-area schools a couple years ago, and it proved to be very popular with readers. They serve a purpose for editors, too. They can be written when time allows and are evergreen in nature so they can be popped into the newspaper on short notice if weather wipes out a large portion of the day's schedule, leaving a gaping hole to fill.

   Rankings update: The first NYSSWA boys lacrosse rankings of the season will be published later this week. We hope to be able to launch the weekly girls rankings April 20.

   Former Caledonia-Mumford football star Matt Cappotelli, who became a rising star on the pro wrestling circuit, disclosed last week that his brain tumor is growing and he'll undergo surgery May 1 in Boston.

   Cappotelli first revealed the medical problem 14 months ago during an Ohio Valley Wrestling show taping. He updated his condition during another OVW taping recently in Louisville, Ky.

   He said an MRI exam revealed that the tumor has grown. He has experienced severe headaches and vision problems recently.

   Cappotelli ran for 3,602 yards over the 1996 and '97 seasons for Cal-Mum before attending Western Michigan. He was the MTV Tough Enough III winner, which launched his OVW career. He was close to joining the national wrestling TV lineup in 2005 until he suffered a broken leg in a World Wrestling Entertainment house show match.

   New cardiac emergency guidelines: The National Athletic Trainers' Association has released new guidelines to help high schools and colleges deal with cardiac emergencies on the field, expressing concern that there is not yet enough proper planning in place.

   New York is one of the states that has made automated external defibrillator (AEDs) mandatory. Lead guidelines author Dr. Jonathan Drezner of the University of Washington says more than 90 percent of U.S. colleges have the devices but more than half the high schools do not.

   The guidelines urge schools to develop an emergency plan including:

• A communications system that outlines individual responsibilities during in an emergency.

• Making sure a defibrillator is available.
• Making sure multiple people, especially coaches (who tend to be closest to the scene) are trained to use AEDs and do CPR.
• Assuming immediately that if an athlete collapses, it's cardiac arrest rather than some other problem.

   The guidelines are published in the Spring 2007 issue of the Journal of Athletic Training.

   Some of the reading is heavyweight material for us civilians, but the 16-page PDF version of the report does contain a thorough, seven-point checklist that trainers, ADs and school administrators can follow in order to prepare or update their own emergency plans.

   Make folks take IQ tests first: Want to know why we have no intention of ever installing unmoderated user forums on our site? Go to the Syracuse.com boys lacrosse forum and look at message No. 6399.

   If that's not the dumbest rationale for why some schools are successful in lacrosse -- or any sport, for that matter -- then I don't know what is. Proposing that we group schools by alleged social class rather than enrollment and/or geography is proof that a few vehicles on the information super-highway are running a quart or two low.

   I know newspaper web sites feel this need for interaction with readers to increase site "stickiness" and so forth but, quite frankly, so much of what gets written is absolute garbage.

   Extra points: New Jersey's AD of the year is a New Yorker. Edward Craumer Jr., a basketball star at Corning East in the 1960s and later a basketball and tennis coach there, has been named by the New Jersey Directors of Athletics Association as its Director of Athletics of the Year. He is AD at Tenafly, N.J., High.

   This morning's Albany Times Union contained a letter to the editor that got the blood boiling a tad bit hotter than the water used to boil Easter eggs.

   Author Rob McCaffrey, formerly a member of the Brittonkill school board, contends that school spending on sports constitutes "the biggest ongoing fraud in our schools."

   Well, we know he's wrong for numerous reasons, not the least of which is the $187 million construction debacle in New Brunswick, N.J., documented by The New York Times today. The cost overrun alone on that one high school -- which theoretically might not get finished because funding has just about run out -- would pay for the combined sports programs this year for approximately half of New York's schools.

   McCaffrey contends that though schools justify the cost by saying sports develops character and values, many young athletes learn to cheat, lie and take drugs. He cites a 2004 survey of athletes by the Josephson Institute of Ethics that has some admittedly discouraging statistics, including:

• 58% of males and 24% of females believe it's OK to deliberately inflict pain in football to intimidate an opponent.
• 37% of males and 15% of females agree that it's more important to win than to be considered a good sport.
• 69% of males and 50% of females admit to bullying, teasing or taunting someone in the previous year.
• 69% of all athletes admit to cheating on a test in the previous year.
• 26% of males and 19% of females said they stole something from a store in the last year.

   But what McCaffrey failed to mention was that a 2006 study by the same Los Angeles organization sampled the broader student population rather than just athletes and showed equally disturbing numbers.

• 42% of all students believe a person "has to lie or cheat sometimes in order to succeed."
• 82% admit to lying to parents in the previous year about something significant -- and 57% did so more than once.
• 23% stole from a parent or relative, and 28% stole from a store in the past year.

   McCaffrey then threw out a shocking number. It's one that I cannot dispute outright. But if it's accurate, then I regard it as more of an indictment of his own community than of high school sports in general. "In my former district," he wrote,

"each spectator at a school sports event costs the taxpayers about $50."

   I tried running my own numbers for a small Class A school in Monroe County whose former AD revealed some budget data during a conversation a couple of years ago. I bumped up the number by way too much in order to give McCaffrey the benefit of the doubt, and then I estimated attendance -- home games only, to help reflect the fact that the visiting school's fans did not contribute to the home school's budget -- in a conservative fashion.

   I came up with $35 per spectator. If I had used budget and attendance numbers that bore a closer semblance to reality, the number dropped to $19. Knock another $2 off either figure if you want to account for money brought in at the box office and a similar amount for the concession stand. And, remember, I'm only counting varsity attendance.

   Now Tamarac High in the Brittonkill school district is about 60% the size of the example school I'm citing, so there are some economies of scale disadvantages to acknowledge -- no hockey or lacrosse teams to prop up attendance (but also no expense) and no discount on coaching salaries based on school size -- but the $50 per spectator number indicates that a bad case of apathy has broken out in that neighborhood.

   Remember, Auburn brought 10,000 fans to a single game at the Carrier Dome last Thanksgiving weekend.

   "Interscholastic athletics pull resources from under-funded academic programs and add to the taxpayers' burden," he concludes. "The sports' special interest group . . . is very vocal and powerful but also short-sighted, self-serving and single-minded. It is turning your school into a taxpayer-supported athletic club. Most likely your elected school board, like the one I was on, is no match for this group."

   Wow. And people accuse me of being overly cynical.

   It's the slow time of year: One look at our server statistics for yesterday confirms that (a) it's a holiday weekend, (b) we're still more or less between sports seasons even though lacrosse is in full swing, and (c) it's been too cold across most of upstate New York to play most sports the last few days.

   Yesterday's site traffic was the lowest it's been since Nov. 23. Yep, you guessed it. That was Thanksgiving day.

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