Leading off today: It's not quite as good as a musician making it onto the cover of Rolling Stone, but it's close.
The Fayyetteville-Manlius girls cross country team, which ascended to the top of the heap nationally last season for the second consecutive year and is loaded again this fall, graces the cover of the October issue of Running Times, The Post-Standard reported.
Coach Bill Aris said the magazine contacted him in June about doing a piece on the program. "I was shocked they wanted to devote that kind of time and coverage to high school cross country," Aris told the paper.
The magazine sent a reporter and photographer to Manlius in June for a 90-minute interview and photo shoot at Green Lakes State Park. The result is a four-page spread focused on F-M’s training approach.
Thumbs up: Congratulations to the Middletown Times Herald-Record on its launch of Varsity845U.com, the college companion of its outstanding high school sports site.
College sites can be a dicey proposition because the audience is much more fractured than the hyper-local crowd that follows high school sports. But there's certainly a market for it, and Varsity845U has a healthy selection of local schools spanning from junior colleges to Division I programs.
The site will consolidate some information that was already being posted to its sports site in the past and includes story archives and message boards.
Thumbs down: A resounding jeer goes out to HighSchoolSports.net for giving prominent play to the Massey Ratings, a computerized football rankings system, so early in the year. The site is featuring the rankings on its home page even though many states haven't even opened the season.
What's my objection? USA Today spoke to Ken Massey, whose better-known work includes college football ratings that are part of the Bowl Championship Series formula. Massey admitted that, with minimal 2008 data available so far, he's relying on data from the 2006 and 2007 seasons as part of his formula.
Do the math on that one. Many (if not all) of the players who made those 2006 and '07 teams worthy of a national ranking are now true or redshirt college freshmen. Why
