Leading off today: It's been a busy week for downstate baseball players, several of whom made decisions on attending college in September 2010.

   Mamaroneck senior Mike Rosenfeld picked Duke after receiving interest from more than two dozen schools. Rosenfeld hit .450 with four home runs and 30 RBI as a junior. He visted Duke briefly last month before deciding.

   John Jay rising senior Stephen Green has committed to pitch for Boston College, which he visited in February.

   "I wanted to stay in the northeast, and I wanted a good academic school that also had good sports, and it had that," the three-year varsity played told The Journal News. "I didn't really know anything about it (in February). I just wanted to see what it looked like. It seemed like the best one I saw."

   Green was 6-0 as a sophomore with 56 strkeouts in 29 innings. Elbow issues limited him to a 2-0 mark and 27 K's in 15 1/3 innings as a junior.

   Rye Neck lefty Ryan Pennell says he'll pitch for Elon in North Carolina. He's coming off a 9-0 season with 136 strikeouts and a 0.44 ERA and turned down Duke and St. John's.

   Robbie Aviles started the run on Section 1 talent in mid-July when the Suffern right-handed picked Florida.

   Van Erk elected: Nina Van Erk, executive director of the New York State Public High School Athletic Association, has been was selected president-elect by the National Federation of State High School Associations Board of Directors.

   Ennis Proctor, executive director of the Mississippi High School Activities Association for 18 years, took the helm July 2 for a one-year term as president.

   Van Erk, who has served on the NFHS Board of Directors for two years, was named NYSPHSAA executive director in 2000 after working as the director of health, physical education and athletics in the Katonah Lewisboro School District for five years. Previously, she served as AD at Rhinebeck from 1983 to 1995.

   Good insight: With football being such a large part of the culture in southern states, many major metropolitan newspapers rate prep sports coverage as being nearly as important as their professional and Division I college teams.

   Chief among them would be the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which served up a couple of noteworthy items this week.

   First, a brief blog entry called attention to a quaestionable aspect of football recruiting: Some schools put out as many as four times as many scholarship offers as they can possibly fulfill.

   "Schools are offering way too many kids," Jackson coach Mike Parris said. "Some of them are worse than others, but they’re all doing it. None of them can sign more than 25 but I hear about some of them offering 40, 50, 100 players. Inevitably you’re going to have a lot of disappointed kids."

   In theory, the math works out if five schools all make offers to the same 100 prospects because each could sign 20. But it rarely works out that neatly, especially if you're player No. 21 at a school that only has 20 scholarships available and had your heart set on attending.

   Relying in large part on info from players (who might be exaggerating about intererest they're getting), Scout.com reports that Georgia has offered more than 100 prospects for the 2010 class. Georgia Tech, which has only 12 open slots for 2010, has offers out to 40 recruits.

   The other story concerns the H1N1 virus ("swine flu"), which disrupted spring sports in several states and looms as a threat to reappear this fall. The AJC checked with a number of coaches, several of whom are changing up their

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plans for preseason preparations.

   The No. 1 casualty appears to be camps traditionally conducted away from school. While going away to train for a week has its advantages, coaches have started weighing the tradition against the rsik of one or two infected players spreading the virus through the entire team.

   Coaches are deciding it's easier to train on the school campus and send players home for the week at the first sign of a fever or other symptons.

   Fulton falls behind: The Fulton football team will likely have to take its act on the road full-time, The Valley News reported.

   The installation of artificial turf and a new track, part of the school district’s $23.7 million capital project, has fallen behind schedule. The football facility is not expected to be completed in time for fall action because temperatures may be too low by the time contrators are ready to put down the track.

   The culprit? Asbestos was discovered on the tennis courts, slowing down nearby work.

   Other work at the high school includes reconstructing existing locker rooms and adding new ones, improvements to the football bleachers and refurbishing the gymnasium.

   Taking another stab at it: The folks at iHigh.com are planning to ramp up their high school sports presence about seven years after all but abandoning the idea. They issued a news release this week claiming they are developing "America's first nationwide high school sports network."

   That rings a little bit hollow with the likes of MaxPreps.com, HighSchoolSports.net and about half a dozen other key players on the landscape. Come to think of it, this isn't even iHigh's first crack at it; the iHigh.com site was an early leader in high school coverage around the turn of the century (I wrote about a dozen stories for them in 2000) but wilted down during the dot-com meltdown.

   The release claims nearly 2,000 U.S. high schools have signed commitments to join the network, which will include team sites, photos, schedules, video, plus live and recorded game broadcasts. The iHigh folks say they'll stream as many as 10,000 sporting and school events live or on recorded video on iHigh.com this year.

   The company is based in Lexington, Ky.

   Extra points: It's a long way to the finish line on this one, but Corning-Painted Post voters are expected to decide in December on a proposal to combine East and West high schools into a single school by 2014 as part of a $174 million building plan. The school board gave its unanimous approval Wednesday night, and voters are supposed to decide Dec. 15. . . . Pete Salerno is stepping down after going 119-84 in 10 seasons coaching Southold girls basketball. Salerno, 33, and his wife, Christy, are expecting their second child in December.