Having already placed third in the NYSPHSAA Championships, defending the Rochester District Golf Association title by an 18-stroke margin over 72 holes and reached the semifinals of the U.S. Junior Amateur, the rising sophomore from Pittsford Mendon will now get the chance to tee it up alongside the big boys.

   Hall, 15, who played in the prestigious Porter Cup this week, has accepted a sponsor’s exemption to play in the PGA's Turning Stone Resort Championship next week in Verona. The Turning Stone invitation was extended on Monday on the heels of his showing at the U.S. Junior Amateur.

   Hall's final event of the summer is likely to be the U.S. Amateur Aug. 26-29 in University Place, Wash. He won the local qualifier this week at Crag Burn.

   By the way, do a Google news query for Hall and you'll see he's getting massive attention these days -- and justifiably so.

   Another prodigy: Jamesville-DeWitt basketball star DaJuan Coleman is another upstate athlete getting a lot of media love these days. The 6-foot-9, 290-pound rising junior was written up this week by USA Today on the eve of the AAU Junior Boys National Championships this week in Orlando, Fla.

   Everybody has Coleman in the top five of his recruiting class, with ESPNU listing him as No. 2 on the strength of his sound skills coupled with soft hands and surprisingly graceful footwork.

   By the way, credit to blogger Adam Zagoria for getting the 411 on Coleman's preferred colleges. Coleman told Zag his list includes Connecticut, Florida, Kentucky, Louisville, North Carolina, Ohio State, Pittsburgh, Syracuse and West Virginia.

   Sad news out of Spencerport: Former Spencerport wrestler Justin Melia died Friday from injuries suffered a day earlier in an expressway motorcycle accident outside Rochester.

   Melia, 20, was a 2008 Spencerport graduate. He qualified for the NYSPHSAA Division I tourney at 96 pounds as a junior and 112 as a senior.

   "A lovable kid who was a great representative of our Ranger wrestling program," former Rangers wrestling coach Bill Jacoutot told the Democrat and Chronicle. "His loss is a devastating blow to our community."

   Another delay on Staten Island: A year-long renovation project at the Curtis High pool that disrupted the 2009-10 girls’ and boys’ swim seasons is running behind schedule and will cause more scheduling headaches this fall, The Advance reported.

   New Dorp, Tottenville, Susan Wagner and CSI/McCown all depend upon Curtis as the home pool for practices and meets. Most had their normal 10-meet season cut in half last year.

   Department of Education spokesperson Margie Feinberg projected a November re-opening of the pool following its first major work since it opened in 1936. The project includes installation of a dehumidifier, new bleachers, a handicap access ramp and new tiling.

   Curtis AD Eric Ritzer said his school's teams will practice at Wagner College three times a week, but has not yet heard from the PSAL regarding fall meet schedules.

   More construction ahead: As you've likely noticed, the bulk of the redesign of our site was rolled out Friday night

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with a whole new look to the home page and the first wave of changes on interior content.

   The work on interior pages will continue in the coming weeks in order to make their look and feel more consistent with the home page. Blog pages will eventually look quite different. with that section probably being migrated to one of the more popular blog software sites readily available.

   A few notes about the redesign:

   • The module-driven, rectangular look is intentional. It allows considerable flexibility on the fly if necessary. When I live-blog from various events, I'll demote one of the top blocks to a spot lower on the page and replace it with a module calling attention to the live content.

   • Most of the ads on the site are delivered via Google AdSense. The reconfiguration increases the size of the main ad (a "leaderboard" in web lingo) and demotes the five smaller ads to the bottom of the page. Because Google has a much larger inventory of leaderboards to deliver. it's more likely that the ads you see will be more relevant to the site's content.

   • The top of interior pages will eventually look like the top of the home page -- logo, ad and horizontal navigation strip.

   • I plan to add some mobile-friendly pages after doing more research on specs. This will make it easier to access the site via iPhones and other devices.

   • The RSS-powered headline scrape, featuring the latest headlines from a variety of newspapers, remains. However, I've stripped the front-page version of that list down to about 15 papers for the sake of speed in loading the page (the module also contains a link to the full list of nearly 40 publications). This will save some angst caused by the vendor-supplied software sometimes crapping out and preventing any of the page from loading.

   •The graphics down the middle of the home page promoting our football, basketball and other sites will change and move up or down based upon what time of year we're in. I'm also in the planning phase for adding boys and girls soccer sites by around Labor Day, taking advantage of scripts and technology made available by MaxPreps.

   Girls basketball and girls lacrosse are also very high on the NYSSWA priority list. One of the lessons I've learned in the last year is that splitting the main site into smaller pieces (RoadToSyracuse.com, RoadToGlensFalls.com, etc.), reduces traffic on the main site but increases overall page views considerably by allowing users to dig deeper into the sports they enjoy most.