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

Fall tournament brackets NYSPHSAA football NYSPHSAA boys soccer NYSPHSAA girls soccer NYSPHSAA field hockey

passionate arguments in favor of the shootout go something like this, 'Everyone is exhausted. What else are you going to do?'"

   Gold advocates an extra 30 or 40 minutes of OT, then start pulling one player per team off the field every five minutes until getting down to 7-on-7. That's more or less what I've advocated for awhile since penalty kicks are to soccer what kickstands are to automobiles.

   On the flip side, I'll agree that mega-marathon overtime sessions can't be accommodated in soccer. Many playoff matches are part of tripleheaders or even quadrupleheaders. All you need is a couple of those matches to last 130 or 140 minutes of playing time and your final game of the night will start an an insanely late hour, somewhat like Section 2's girls experienced on Saturday.

   One other point on penalty-kick shootouts: At the very least, soccer officials need to put an end to this nonsense of recording the game as a tie if there's no winner at the end of OT. Soccer people like to say that the penalty kicks just determine who advances in the tournament. Um, guys (and ladies), that's what's known as determining a "winner."

   The next kid I see walk away happy after being named a co-champion but losing in the penalty-kick shootout some cold November night will be the first. Let's get back to calling a win a "win" and a loss a "loss."

   Stupid human tricks: A teenager flew a small airplane low over a high school football game last Friday and dropped a football into the end zone as a prank, said Huntersville, N.C., authorities who are now charging him with misdemeanors.

   Brian Morris, 17, was in court Thursday to face charges of dangerous flying and dropping objects at a sporting event. Morris was flying low enough that some spectators could see the tail numbers on the rented Cessna 172, police said.

   "He was below the level of the stadium lights, so that was quite a shock to people who were there," Huntersville police spokesman Capt. Michael Kee said. "It's certainly up to the judge, but the seriousness of what he did, it potentially could have been a bad situation."

   Kaleb Combs, a junior at Hopewell High School and Morris' friend, said many students knew what Morris was planning and that students collected $700 at the game in case he needed bail money.

   Live from PAETEC Park? Barring a last-minute complication, I intend to get out tonight to blog the Sweet Home vs. Aquinas Class A football quarterfinal. I'll set up a link on the NewYorkSportswriters.org home page and update several times each quarter.

HOME | BLOG | RANKINGS | BRACKETS | REFERENCE | KERR CUP | ABOUT US

©2007-19 Abbott Trento Online Media. All rights reserved. Contact us via e-mail.