Leading off today: Center Amadou Sidibe scored 27 points to lead No. 11 Cardinal Hayes to a 78-67 victory over No. 1 Mount St. Michael on Tuesday in a clash of state-ranked CHSAA Class A basketball teams.

   Davon Sylvester chipped in 21 points to send MSM to its first loss after reeling off 20 victories to open its season. Hayes blew open a two-point game by outscoring MSM 23-9 in the third quarter, with Sylvester making two 3-pointers and scoring nine points in the eight-minute span.

   MSM guards Clarence White (22 points) and Malik Gill (20) combined for six 3-pointers in the fourth quarter to get the deficit down to 70-64 with 1:31 to go. But consecutive lay-ups by Sidibe put the game out of reach.

   Another football commitment: Add Tyler McLees to the list of Division I football signees. The St. Anthony's linebacker, an all-state first-team selection, has cleared the paperwork hurdles at the U.S. Military Academy and will play for Army in the fall.

   The 6-foot, 220-pound senior helped the Friars to an 11-0 season by making 136 tackles and two sacks. His father, Matt, is the linebackers coach at St. A's as well as the athletic director at Carey High.

   The full list of this year's major-college commitments can be found at RoadToSyracuse.com.

   Sentenced: Sammy Hasan, the former Williamsville girls track coach accused of improper conduct with a teenage athlete, was sentenced Wednesday to 60 days in jail.

   Hasan, 48, will serve that time on weekends, beginning Friday according to the Buffalo News. Amherst Town Justice Geoffrey K. Klein also sentenced Hasan to three years of probation and issued an order of protection that prohibits contact with the former Williamsville South female athlete for five years.

   Hasan, who coached varsity track in the district for nine seasons, entered a guilty plea guilty in September to misdemeanor counts of aggravated harassment and endangering the welfare of a child, the paper reported.

   Section 1 changes: Section 1 is significantly altering its football league scheduling for the upcoming season in the hope that some of the 14 schools that participated in alternative scheduling last season will come back into the fold.

   A Section 1 subcommittee was formed to recommend changes that were OK'd by the section's executive committee Friday, The Journal News reported. It will include a return to the Piner System (similar to what Long Island leagues use) to rank teams in all classes, divide them into leagues and schedule them. The process will begin with schools assessing their varsity squad's projected strength based upon criteria such as recent records and returning starters.

   The initial proposal also called for reducing the Class AA and A playoff fields to four teams apiece, but the coaches beat back that idea. Instead, there will be a seven-game regular season (six league games) followed by three rounds of playoffs in an 11-day span to catch up with the rest of the state in time for the NYSPHSAA quarterfinals.

   (The compressed schedule has been used before there. But from where I sit, doing it during sectionals is just begging for trouble. All it takes is a torrential downpour

accompanied by lightning -- not out of the question -- in either the quarterfinals or finals to throw off scheduling the rest of the way.)

   Each Class is projected to have one or two divisions. There are 27 potential Class A teams next fall that would be broken into two divisions; so-called "S-curve" scheduling would presumably assure that projected top contenders

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would play comparably strong schedules even if they don't play an identical list of opponents.

   New precautions: Long Island schools are educating parents and students on the dangers of MRSA after Hauppauge wrestler Nick Mauriello Jr. contracted the potentially deadly bacterial infection late last month, Newsday reported.

   Mauriello remains in intensive care at Stony Brook Long Island Children's Hospital.

   The Wantagh school district told parents no Wantagh students have reported any symptoms of MRSA; the wrestling team had a case of MRSA in 2008 and another involving a skin infection related to herpes in 2009.

   Sections 8 and 11 have guidelines that include disinfecting mats daily, having athletes shower after practices and competitions with liquid soap, and wearing clean practice garments. The mats used at this weekend's sectional tournaments and at the state tournament in Albany will be cleaned after each round, the paper reported.

   A call for help: MaxPreps is making its annual push to get as many boys and girls basketball rosters as possible input into its database ahead of the upcoming sectional tournaments this month.

   As I've mentioned before, the New York State Sportswriters Association and MaxPreps collaborate from time to time to share information and resources. We use data widgets supplied by MaxPreps to deliver game scores and individual statistics on our RoadToGlensFalls.com (boys basketball) and RoadToTroy.com (girls) sites.

   Coaches, AD or school staff interested in uploading their rosters can learn more here.