Leading off today: It's time to catch up on a few things while preparing for this weekend's NYSPHSAA football semifinals, so away we go . . .
Arbitello in charge at CTK: Joe Arbitello will be running the team when Christ the King's basketball season opens next month, replacing longtime boys coach Bob Oliva.
CTK's co-athletic director has been at every practice and scrimmage and will be the coach for the foreseeable future, The Daily News reported.
Oliva, 63, who has been battling a heart ailment, expects to return this season, but he's satisfied the team will be OK under Arbitello and assistants Greg Lemko, Artie Cox and Derrick Phelps.
"Right now, Joe's going to be the guy that's going to be the focal point," Oliva said. "He's got all the ingredients."
Arbitello has coached CTK's varsity "B" team in the past and handled the JV girls program last year.
In April, Oliva told CTK officials he had received a letter from a law firm accusing him of sexually abusing a family friend more than 30 years ago. Alleged victim James Carlino sought $750,000 and Oliva's resignation at CTK. Oliva denies the charges and said doctors have told him to take it easy for awhile.
Dundee coach retires: Longtime Dundee football coach Ed Allen announced his retirement after 21 seasons in charge after his team lost to Maple Grove in the state Class D quarterfinals last weekend.
“We couldn’t ask for a better season,” said Allen, who's been in coaching at Dundee for 33 years overall.
The Syracuse situation: The lead to Phil Blackwell's blog on Syracuse.com was dead-on when he noted this week that the four-year Greg Robinson era at Syracuse University "amounted to wishful thinking by Daryl Gross, his first and most public hire turning into a complete flop."
Revisionist history has the Paul Pasqualoni era on Piety Hill looking pretty good these days, but let's not lose sight of the fact that the last few years on his tenure were an undeniable disaster as well. Years of going through assistant coaches like Jimmie Johnson goes through checkered flags left the recruiting infrastructure in complete shambles. It's not as though the assistants were necessarily leaving for better jobs; they were leaving to get away from Pasqualoni.
The loss of guys like Randy Edsall and Phil Elmassian in the early years hurt SU's ability to recruit national-caliber players, and George DeLeone had stopped being effective in the critical New Jersey/Eastern Pennsylvania region in his final years -- partly because of the rise of Rutgers but largely because the Orange started taking the area for granted.
Blackwell notes Pasqualoni fared poorly when it came to keeping locals such as Mike Hart, Will Smith and Greg Paulus at home and that Robinson did better in that respect. But I disagree a bit when he suggests, "[I]t would be quite nice if, on the day he is introduced as SU's new head football coach, Lane Kiffin, or Turner Gill, or Skip Holtz, or Randy Edsall, or whoever gets the nod, would earn a lot of goodwill if he said, flat-out, that he intends to make all of Upstate New York SU territory.
