Leading off today: Ossining basketball guard Saniya Chong will continue her career at UConn next fall, she disclosed over the weekend.
Chong picked the Huskies over Louisville, Maryland and Ohio State on Saturday during her official visit to UConn, the New Haven Register reported. She is the first member of Geno Auriemma's 2013 recruiting class, but hardly the only New Yorker. The Huskies roster is stocked with three past scholastic stars who could spend extensive time together on the court -- center Stefanie Dolson, guard Bria Hartley and incoming forward Breanna Stewart, the consensus national player of the year last winter for state and Federation champion Cicero-North Syracuse.
Chong, a first-team all-state pick as a junior, averaged 33.3 points, 9.7 assists and 5.2 rebounds last season, demonstrating great range with 100 3-pointers.
“I feel really excited, relieved as well,” Chong told The Journal News. “I’m just really happy right now. I feel like I really made a good choice. I think it’s the best thing for me.
“All the colleges, basically every college has the same concept. But UConn, I just really fell in love with it – the players, the campus, how close it is to home, the staff, the coach.”
Mess in progress: I hadn't been paying especially close attention to the situation until Sunday morning, but it's pretty apparent that Section 4 has a problem with its Class D football seedings -- not a good development since the tournament starts this weekend.
The first sign that this has a better chance of winding up in State Supreme Court than being resolved amicably? The official sectional football handbook says "If by some chance there does happen to be a tie. The section IV president will flip a cone."
Yup, that's a sentence fragment followed by a sentence that concludes with a typo. Thankfully, none of the folks involved in that train wreck of prose is in the business of educating our young ... uh, never mind.
“The Section 4 football committee is in some pretty good trouble right now,” veteran Walton coach Jim Hoover told The Daily Star in a splendid understatement.
In a nutshell, here's the problem: Section 4's 17 Class D teams are divided into four divisions. Unatego, Harpursville, Groton and Tioga all went unbeaten in divisional play and finished no worse than 5-2 overall, so no one has qualms with those teams advancing to the quarterfinals. More on that in a moment.
The fun begins with filling out the rest of the field. The handbook posted on the section's website says, "The 'D' class will be ranked 1-8 using the Section IV football ranking system, the top four teams will have home field advantage."
That in itself doesn't assure the four division champs of playoff bids. But, as I said, they all went unbeaten in their division and finished 5-2 or 6-1. They're in, regardless. But who else advances? Second-place divisional finishers? If so, Bainbridge-Guilford (5-2 overall), Walton (3-4), Union Springs (5-1) and Elmira Notre Dame (5-2) would complete the field, with only seedings left to hash out.
No matter how logical that may seem, I don't see anywhere in the handbook where that's the criteria -- which calls into question why you need four small divisions instead of three bigger ones that would facilitate better scheduling. There are rumblings out there that the Class D coaches agreed before the season that first- and
