Leading off today: Sophomore guard Mandell Thomas scored a career-high 28 points for Rush-Henrietta in an 83-56 boys basketball rout of Irondequoit last night.
Dane Miller added 17 for the Royals Comets, ranked fifth in Class AA by the New York State Sportswriters Association. Irondequoit is ranked 17th.
R-H overcame an early 14-11 deficit by going on a 26-3 rampage.
"Everybody was saying Irondequoit was better, (Eagles center) Jordan Heath was better than me. We proved a point," Miller told the Democrat and Chronicle. "If anybody has a question about that again — box score. We beat them by 30. We got the job done."
Miller finished with eight steals, seven rebounds and seven assists.
Steamed: Albany Academy coach Brian Fruscio is not happy with the Section 2 boys basketball committee, to put it mildly.
His team, ranked second in the state in Class AA and riding a 10-game winning streak since a loss to Los Alamitos, Calif., is seeded behind both No. 16 Bishop Maginn and No. 19 Shenendehowa in the sectional Class AA tournament and will likely have to beat both in order to win the title.
That's on top of the fact the Cadets were bumped up from Class A by the committee before the season.
"I'm quite surprised with the lack of objectivity," Fruscio told The Times Union. "I have no idea what (the committee) is using for criteria. What we're basically being told is we're the No. 4 in our section (also behind No. 22 Albany CBA), but we're No. 2 in the state. That is impressive."
"It was a hard decision. We spent much of this morning discussing the double-A situation,” chairman Mike Lilac told The Daily Gazette. “Normally, we have a Big 10 side and a Suburban Council side. This year, the discussion centered on how to factor in a school that is not in a league, where to place them. It wasn’t something taken lightly."
Interestingly, the Cadets appear to have been penalized for playing an independent schedule. And Fruscio, whose team went 12-0 against teams with winning records and owns quality wins over the likes of Long Island Lutheran, Newburgh Free Academy and Bishop Loughlin, isn't buying the logic.
"They’re using league results as a big criteria," he said. "When we were told we were going to ‘AA’ and had no league to play in, we scraped together a schedule and played teams other teams didn’t want to play, and we beat some of the best teams in the state."
