Leading off today: Steve Bush, who coached West Genesee to its first NYSPHSAA championship last November, has accepted a job with the Miami Dolphins,
The Post-Standard reported today.
Bush, a former Syracuse University assistant, met with his players this afternoon to break the news to them.
Bush will join the Dolphins as an offensive assistant coach. He'll work with former Syracuse coach Paul Pasqualoni, who was named the Dolphins' defensive coordinator this week. Bush was an assistant coach at SU under Pasqualoni from 2000-04. When Pasqualoni was fired in 2005, Bush took over a West Genesee program that was 3-13 in the previous two seasons.
Bush also has worked with Dolphins head coach Tony Sparano at the University of New Haven.
Mercy, mercy me: USA Today reports that you can add Montana to the list of states with a mercy rule in basketball next year. When a lead reaches 40 points in the second half, the clock will run except for injuries and timeouts.
Interestingly, coaches on the wrong end of some nasty sometimes disapprove of the rule.
Percy Gregory, whose Hampton (Va.) Kecoughtan team was defeated by Hampton by 108-8 this month, said this:
"I would say let the girls play. There is some value, some fundamental value, that a team can get out of a loss like that. At some point, you treat it as a practice."
Following up: Former prosecutor Beth Modica, 44, had sex with two underage boys, joined other teens in booze and pot parties and kept it all a secret from her police-chief husband, Rockland County officials said Tuesday.
Modica was indicted on 35 counts alleging statutory rape, criminal sex acts, sex abuse and endangering children. She pleaded not guilty at her arraignment in Rockland County Court and was ordered held on $75,000 bail, The New York Daily News reported.
Rockland DA Thomas Zugibe said Modica had intercourse and oral sex with a 16-year-old boy and oral sex with a 15-year-old boy last summer. He also said that she served and shared alcohol and marijuana with "many" other Suffern High students at her home or in her car.
A spokesman for the DA's office said that earlier reports that the incidents may have involved members of the Suffern hockey team were not accurate.