Leading off today: Buffalo St. Joe's has stayed in-house to replace the winningest football coach in school history. Longtime JV coach and varsity assistant Dennis Gilbert, a 1984 graduate of the school, will be introduced as the new coach tomorrow, The Buffalo News reported today.

   He'll replace Bob O'Connor, who retired after the 2009 season with 169 victories in a 29-year career that included 13 league championships and a 6-5 mark in 2009. Gilbert was a sophomore defensive back for St. Joe's in 1981 when O'Connor was named head coach and was added as a JV assistant shortly after graduation.

   Gilbert, who is employed as a Buffalo police officer, served as head coach at Lancaster St. Mary's in 2007 and returned to St. Joe's the following fall.

   Down to the wire: Riverhead linebacker Malcolm Cater swore to Scout.com that he has not committed to either Rutgers or Syracuse and that the decision on his football future could come down to the final hours.

   Cater will make his announcement at school Wednesday on National Letter of Intent day. He had given a verbal commitment to Syracuse in the fall, decommitted last month and was thought to have committed to Rutgers last week after a campus visit.

   "I still have a lot to think about. I’m not sure right now," he told Scout.com.

   Mickey D nominees: I don't think I'm imagining things when I say that the McDonald's All-American Game has lost a little bit of its sparkle.

   There's a fairly lengthy list of criteria for the selection process, but the best way to get nominated in New York is apparently to live within a stone's throw of New York City. The list of 18 girls nominees contains only two senior girls who could legitimately be called upstaters -- Nikki Works of Syracuse Nottingham and Shaquita Smith of Amherst.

   That's a development almost as annoying as the welcoming audio message from Dick Vitale on the Mickey D's Web site. The boys list isn't that much more diverse, with six coming from upstate.

   No disrespect intended toward the very fine Christ The King program, but its a little silly for the Royals to have three of the 31 nominees when the best New York can hope for in even an up year is two All-American selections.

   For what it's worth, the omission of Taran Buie, who transferred from the Albany area to State College, Pa., over the summer is also a bit glaring.

   More joint efforts: Fielding merged fall and winter teams has worked out well enough for Oppenheim-Ephratah and St. Johnsville that the districts could be headed to a full athletic consolidation in the fall.

   The Little Falls Times reported O-E Superintendent Dan Russom made the recommendation that his board of

Road To Glens Falls boys hoops site

education consider a full athletic merger based on the potential financial savings and the increased opportunities for students.

   “This merger has afforded us the opportunity to provide more options for our students, options they did not have last year," Russom said. "And our students, to their credit, have been wonderful. In all facets this merger has been a success.”

   The merger has allowed the two districts to field modified and JV teams in some sports in which there used to be only a varsity team. Russom said four O-E girls, who previously would not have had a chance to try the sport, joined the modified basketball team in St. Johnsville. Likewise, several St. Johnsville girls are now able to play modified volleyball.

   End of a bad idea: Nassau County is ditching its controversial ability-based divisional alignments after three years, Newsday reported last week. Beginning with fall sports, Section VIII will return to league configurations based primarily on enrollment data. The Section 8 Athletic Council voted unanimously to make the change.

   "It really came to a head with baseball," Athletic Council official Jim Amen Jr. said. "They were ferociously opposed to it. Questions were being raised about how we did things in Nassau County."

   While ability-based leagues may sound logical, they have caused logistical and philosophical challenges. Teams in the top divisions were guaranteed playoff spots before the season began but ended up with weak regular-season records, and coaches in the more competitive leagues complained that there were too few opportunities to work role players and young reserves into the lineup against lesser opponents.

   "We'll look at enrollment as the first criteria for creating schedules, but we're giving latitude to the sports coordinators to incorporate ability," Great Neck's Dave Zawatson, president of the Athletic Council, told the paper. "In sports like basketball, you can schedule non-league games outside of your classification. Schools can also appeal to move up or down in conference."