Leading off today: New York high school hockey, especially in Section 5, suffered a terrible loss early yesterday morning with the death of
Dan Barrows.
Barrows, statistician/historian for the Monroe County High School Hockey League for more than two decades, died of an apparent heart attack. He was 62.
A former coach, Barrows remained involved in the sport in a variety of ways ranging from working as a goal judge to compiling statistics and updating the league web site. He was generating elaborate team and individual stats updates on his computer each week in the mid-1980s at a time when even major college programs were still doing some of that work by hand.
I had last seen Dan in Wegman's about six weeks ago. We both ended up losing track of our significant others in the store as we stood around talking about the upcoming season for a good 20 minutes.
"Hockey was his heart and soul," league executive Dennis Fries told the Democrat and Chronicle. "What a jovial guy. He could talk hockey for hours. It's a devastating loss."
Barrows, who retired in 1996 as a computer programmer at Monroe Community College, is survived by his wife, Laurie.
A happy tale: Scott Kindberg of The Post-Journal did a nice piece on Falconer girls soccer coach Kersten Hardy. Falconer (15-0-4) plays Livonia in the state Class B quarterfinals tonight at Brighton High 11 months
after Hardy was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
She underwent eight chemotherapy sessions between March 5 and Aug. 8, during which time she had to stop working because of a supressed immune system. She received enormous support from players, students and teachers as she worked towards her goal of returning in time for soccer season.
I kept telling them that that was the one thing that really kept me going was knowing that I was going to come back and coach," Hardy told the newspaper. "These are really a special group of girls."
Two weeks ago, Hardy returned to her doctors for another exam. "I got my tests back that I was cleared," she said.
She'll still have to undergo quarterly exams for two years, but for at least one more night she gets to think about nothing but soccer.
It's that time of the year: Newsday blogger Jeff Gold steps up to the plate with a brief plea to abolish penalty-kick shootouts as a way to break ties in soccer.
Gold says no other sport uses a similar gimmick. Even the NHL, which uses shootouts after tied regular-season games, resorts to sudden death during the playoffs.
"I’ve never really heard anyone argue that the shootout is a good way to sort things out," he writes. "Rather, the most
