Leading off today: With so much of the week's news dominated by a never-ending parade of sectional and state tournament action in the various spring sports, I thought I'd pause to catch up on a few stories that may not have made it onto your radar screen.

   I'll be back Sunday with a regular update covering some of Saturday's top action from around the state.

   Making the best of prom night: The Frontier boys lacrosse team found itself playing on senior prom night for the second time in three years on Friday.

   The prom started at 7 p.m. and the game at 8, so scheduling was definitely an issue. But several players and their dates made the best of the situation. Seven girls wore their prom dresses to the Section 6 Class A game between Frontier and Orchard Park at Canisius College’s Demske Sports Complex.

   Frontier lost to OP, as was also the case two years ago. But school officials accommodated the affected students. While prom-goers are generally locked out if they don't arrive by 8 p.m., administrators made an exception and also arranged for dinners to be set aside.

   A one-girl wrecking crew: The best small-school girls track team in Texas is once again named Bonnie Richardson. The senior from Rochelle, Texas, won the Class A state team title by herself for the second consecutive year today by beating 56 schools.

   Richardson, who was the only girl on her school's team this spring, won the long and high jumps, and took second in the discus, third in the 200 meters and fourth in the 100 meters in the two-day meet.

   She is expected to enroll at Texas A&M on a track scholarship in the fall.

   Rochelle's high school doesn't even have a proper track for Richardson, who runs on an oval of hard, rutted caliche soil, a fact noted but not necessarily understood by other coaches eager to groom future stars.

   "They read in the paper that she runs on caliche, and they call saying, 'How do we get one of those caliche tracks?'" Steve Butler, superintendent of the Rochelle school district, told The Associatd Press. "They think it's something fancy. They can have this one."

   More trouble for Oliva: Authorities in Boston are investigating allegations that Bob Oliva, the Christ The King boys basketball coach who resigned in January amid allegations of sexual abuse, may have molested a longtime family friend during a trip to Massachusetts more than 30 years ago, The Daily News reported.

   The paper reported Boston police initiated the investigation in March and that Sgt. John Donovan of Boston's Crimes Against Children Unit has interviewed more than a dozen people close to Oliva or his alleged victim, Jimmy Carlino, during the past month.

   Oliva told the paper he has not been interviewed by Boston police. "My whole life has been turned upside down over something that never happened," he said.

   Carlino alleged Oliva molested him over the course of several years during the 1970s, when Carlino was a teenager. While the statute of limitations would hinder prosecution in New York, Massachusetts officials wouldn't face such hurdles if they were found evidence that Oliva had abused Carlino during a trip they made to a baseball game.

   Oliva was 549-181 in 27 seasons at CTK and won five

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city championships.

   Ticket trouble: Baseball coaches are upset with the New York City Department of Education and the Yankees over a ticket policy that will likely leave some fans unable to attend Tuesday's PSAL finals at the new Yankee Stadium.

   At past championships at the old Yankee and Shea Stadiums, fans needed only to show an ID to get through the turnstiles, but this time they'll also need one of the very limited free tickets that are being distributed. The Department of Education provided a total of 4,500 tickets to the four participating schools (they got 800 apiece), DOE employees and public-school students; the stadium has a capacity of 52,325.

   "Forty-five hundred seats out of 50,000 makes no sense to me," Norman Thomas coach Nerva Jean Pierre, whose team will play Monroe HS in the 'A' division title game, told The Daily News.

   A Yankees spokesman said the PSAL requested 4,500 tickets, "so that's what we gave them."

   DOE spokesperson Margie Feinberg said the ticket system was created to "control the crowd," tough she could not cite any incidents of violence or vandalism at a PSAL baseball championship.

   Monroe HS coach Mike Turo told the paper the 2006 championship game at Shea Stadium drew 5,600 fans and the 2004 title game at Shea drew 6,600. Last year's championship game between Madison HS and George Washington HS at Shea drew approximately 4,000 fans.

   "It's placed us in a difficult situation," Monroe principal Rick Massel said. "Our students can't afford a ticket to the baseball games when the Yankees play. Now they have an opportunity to see their own team play at Yankee Stadium and they can't go."

   Friday Night Lightning strikes twice: Nearly two decades after he left Odessa Permian, the coach at the center of the Friday Night Lights book and film is back with famous high school team. Gary Gaines, who moved into college coaching just after leading the school to a state title in 1989, has returned to help turn around a storied prep football program that has fallen in recent years.

   The school board rehired Gaines, 60, who had been helping with search for a new coach, in March.

   Gaines guided Permian to the state 5A championship one season after H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger spent a year in town researching his best-seller, which chronicled how high school football binds Odessa, a West Texas oil patch community.

   Made into a movie in 2004 and now an NBC television series, the book was a hit everywhere but Odessa, where residents felt Bissinger betrayed their trust by writing about the sociological issues.

   Permian's won six state championships in 50 years, including three in the 1980s, but lost 49 times between 1997 and 2006. The program was 38-11 the last four years under Gaines protege Darren Allman, who left this year to take another coaching job.