Leading off today: Stan Wier, who helped Buffalo Nichols win a Federation boys basketball championship last winter, will transfer to a private school in Indiana, The Buffalo News reported.

   Wier, a rising junior who averaged 16.5 points last season to earn fifth-team all-state honors in Class A from the New York State Sportswriters Association, will attend La Lumiere, a boarding school in LaPorte, Ind. He had already disclosed in June that he would not return to Nichols. He played his freshman season at East Aurora.

   Wier told the paper La Lumiere has a potent team with a 7-foot, 6-10 and 6-10 starting frontcourt and four underclassmen who may be regarded as national top 100 recruits. That could lift Wier's game and his recruiting profile beyond just the current college offers from Rhode Island and Colgate.

   Stephenson arrested: Former New York City prodigy Lance Stephenson, the state's Class AA player of the year in 2009, was arrested yesterday after being accused of pushing his girlfriend down the stairs of her Brooklyn home, various media reported.

   Stephenson, the state's career scoring leader after leading Abraham Lincoln to four straight PSAL championships, was taken into custody at the scene after the early-morning incident at the home of Jasmine Williams, 21, the mother of his child, The New York Post reported.

   Stephenson, 19, was charged with two counts of assault -- one of which is a felony -- two counts of menacing and one count of harassment, the paper reported. The felony carries a minimum sentence of seven years; if Stephenson is convicted on all counts, he could face 12 years behind bars.

   Stephenson played one year of college basketball in the Big East at Cincinnati, was selected in the second round of the recent NBA draft and signed a rookie contract with the Indiana Pacers. It's not clear how the charges will affect his three-year deal, which reportedly guarantees him $1.5 million over the first two years.

   More Lincoln news: All-state guard Shaquille Stokes told The New York Post he will return to an obviously loaded Abraham Lincoln squad in the fall, dispelling talk he might transfer down to Word of God Academy in North Carolina for his senior year.

   Stokes was a sixth-team all-state pick in Class AA after averaging 23.4 points per game. He has drawn interest from West Virginia, Cincinnati, Rutgers and several mid-majors.

   However, the paper also reported over the weekend that 6-7 forward Chris Ortiz, who transferred into Lincoln from Christ The King in December, does not know where he'll attend high school as a senior.

   Ortiz, who played for the Puerto Rican under-18 team this summer, said he's waiting to sit down with his mother to plot his next move. If he suits up for Lincoln, the Railsplitters would have an all Division I frontcourt of Ortiz, Jordan Dickerson and Kamari Murphy to go with Stokes and highly regarded incoming freshman ball handler Isaiah Whitehead.

   Baldwin picks up some help: Rising junior point guard Darius Faulk will not join former St. Michael Academy basketball teammates at Nazareth, deciding the two-hour daily commute to East Flatbush would be too much.

   She told The New York Post she is moving from Hempstead and will play for defending Section 8 Class AA champ Baldwin this season. "It feels good,” Faulk told the paper. "Now I can just work on getting better instead of worrying about school."

   Faulk said St. John’s, Syracuse and Kentucky are

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showing the most interest in her.

   Rising senior Allysia Rohlehr, who lives in Island Park and attended SMA before it closed in June, will play her final year at St. John the Baptist.

   Off and running: With the start of practice this morning for most fall sports teams, I re-activated our Twitter update page, which aggregates tweets from high school reporters across New York.

   The link to that page will frequently be featured on the NewYorkSportswriters.org home page during the school year as dictated by events on the statewide scene.

   One team that people will be talking about, if not tweeting, a lot ahead of its September opener is the Corning football squad, the result of a merger of the East and West athletic programs. About 60 varsity candidates and perhaps even more JV players will be reporting today as the Trojans and Vikings formally become the Hawks under head coach Tim Hughes.

   East and West have put some quality teams on the field in Class A in recent years, and a lot of people are curious as to whether the Hawks could quickly become a Section 4 superpower.

   Along those lines, let me offer a warning: When Paul Rodgers left Bad Company and Jimmy Page came over from Led Zeppelin to form The Firm, what resulted was more like Bad Zeppelin than a super group.

   In the Rochester area, I covered Rush-Henrietta Sperry and R-H Roth in 1986 as they won the two largest classes of the Section 5 football tournament in their final season as separate teams before declining enrollment prompted the school district to trim down to one combined high school. Though there were significant graduation losses from both schools, there was certainly quite a bit of talent in the pipeline -- and that talent never blended quite right. It would take 21 seasons before R-H would win sectionals.

   A few years before that, Pittsford saw the writing on the wall and merged the Mendon and Sutherland football teams into one squad in 1983. Though district officials cited smallish rosters as the issue (a plausible reason in the days when the Monroe County League divisions were dictated by geography rather than enrollment), I was among the observers who saw it as an attempt at a trophy grab.

   Sutherland was typically a .500 team in its latter years, but Mendon was coming off three straight sectional crowns in the second-largest classification. Blending the rosters was absolutely a muscle move aimed at challenging Fairport, R-H Sperry and Irondequoit for he top rung in the East Division.

   Well, it's 27 years later and Pittsford's next sectional championship as a combined program will be its first.