Author: delcohoops

Welcome to the sixth year of Delcohoops.com, the one site you can check for all the news on all the Delaware County high school basketball teams!

We are pleased to announce a new master sponsor, Burman’s Health Shop. Burman’s is located on Edgmont Ave in Brookhaven and feature a full line of health supplements and vitamins. Burman’s Health Shop is pleased to support the promotion of high school basketball through the Internet pages and our LIVE and archived game broadcasts available on Delcohoops.com.

We have been delighted with the fan response these past five years and expect to go well over 1,000,000 hits in our sixth year. We now cover 24 public and private high schools throughout the Delaware County!

We also will continue with our very popular Game-of-the-Week featuring some of the best high school basketball our county has to offer broadcast LIVE over the Internet and available 24/7 after the game is completed. There is no charge to listen to any of our games; live or on archive.

We are delighted to have the great voice of high school sports, Dave Burman, to lead our broadcasts for the third year in a row as our play-by-play announcer. Pete Fulginiti and Mike Mayer will continue with their color commentary. We have also added Andrew Kaufman to our broadcast crew as we hope to expand our pre and post game interviews on our broadcasts.  Our broadcast team is excited and looking forward to another great year of high school basketball for Delaware County

Check back with us frequently for article, stories and photos as the season progresses.

Like to become a sponsor? Drop us a quick email at delcohoops@aol.com and we’ll get back to you with all the information. You can sponsor this web page and/or our Game-of-the-Week broadcasts.

By Bill White

It’s hard these days to find things almost everyone can agree on, but this should be one: It’s idiotic to make Pennsylvania public and private high schools compete in the same tournaments. That’s because private schools can recruit college prospects from all over and the public schools are stuck with students in their district boundaries. The disparity is particularly obvious in football and basketball.

Year after year, it’s the same story for District 11’s best Class 6A football team. They look great until they have to play District 12 representative St. Joseph’s Prep, which looks like a Rose Bowl team. This year it was Bethlehem’s Freedom getting dismantled, 42-14.

It’s happening all over the state, but the PIAA insists that it can’t conduct separate tournaments for private and public schools. That’s because of our wonderful state Legislature’s Act 219, amended in 1972 to include this deceptively short but incredibly momentous passage:

“Private schools shall be permitted if otherwise qualified to be members of the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association.”

(click on this link for the full story)

By Matthew DeGeorge

As administrators swapped war stories in State College Tuesday, neither Russell Wren nor Glen Mallon stood up to offer his testimonial to the group. But both athletic directors settled their minds on the same tale.

In the fall of 2014, Springfield, where Mallon is a longtime AD, rode a 12-1 record into a District 1 Class AAA football final against 11-1 Great Valley, where Wren is the AD. The Patriots prevailed that night, 21-0, in a hard-fought game. A week later, when the 12-1 Patriots faced District 12 champ Archbishop Wood, they trailed 30-0 after 12 minutes, on the way to a 44-7 states loss.

“It’s really not fair, and that’s the heart of what the people today were saying, is that this is an unfair situation,” Wren told the PaPrepLive.com. “That’s why they’re calling it the Equity Summit. It’s not an equitable situation.”

The Playoff Equity Summit, organized by public schools, drew representatives from more than 150 schools, including five from District 1. As New Castle Area School District Superintendent John Sarandrea told those assembled, more than 375,000 students were represented. The schools sought to organize and ensure their voices are heard in the debate over competitive balance in Pennsylvania. The majority of those voices are saying that the problem is the mixing of boundary and non-boundary schools in postseason competition.

“I think was it very loud and clear from the members that we need to continue the dialogue, and that’s at the heart of this,” said William Hall, the superintendent of the Millcreek School District in Erie County and one of the organizers. “We have to be heard, we feel that we have not been heard, and even at this point, judging from some of the reaction that’s out there, we feel that the door’s being shut on us.”

(click on this link for the full story)

By Matthew DeGeorge

The atmosphere within Executive Room 12 at the Penn Stater Hotel and Conference Center was convivial if deliberative Wednesday afternoon. The tenor of debates circulating through the PIAA Executive Board struck a start contrast to the rhetoric espoused outside the organization’s highest rungs.

The board struck an optimistic tone as it passed several measures, including a postseason ban for late-high school transfers and the implementation of a competition formula starting in 2020-21, aimed at easing what Executive Director Dr. Robert Lombardi called the “perceived imbalance” between public and private schools. The view of another meeting to take place next week in State College, the “PIAA Playoff Equity Summit” that will bring together representatives from more than 100 public schools to thrash out a unified position to approach competitive imbalance, was decidedly dim.

“My comments are the same as at the oversight committee (in Harrisburg in June),” Lombardi said. “We believe it’s contrary to the law. And if the legislation wants to change, we will follow the legislation and do whatever it says. And the board has discussed it upside-down, inside-out, many different ways and proposals and ideas. But they’re not going to violate the intent of the law which is we’re going to take private schools as full members of PIAA.”

Legislators that have spoken to PAPrepLive.com, including State Sen. Scott Martin and State Rep. Robert Matzie, express the same sentiment. The PIAA incorporated private schools into a previously all-public body via a 1972 act of the General Assembly. Any board action to split the association or to conduct separate tournaments for public and private schools would, according to prevailing logic, violate the letter and/or spirit of that law and fail to withstand the subsequent and inevitable court challenges.

(click on this link for the full story)

 

By Matthew DeGeorge

The rough triangle of Pennsylvania highways connecting the Penn Stater Hotel and Conference Center with the State Capitol and Pittsburgh’s Hill District takes about four hours to cover. But such was the importance of the story that State Rep. Jake Wheatley Jr. wanted to tell Wednesday that he was willing to endure the trek for just a few minutes on the floor.

The Democrat from the 19th District wanted to hear directly from the PIAA’s Board of Directors at its bimonthly meeting as to why this new layer of transfer restriction was so important. Why was it vital to include a postseason ban for the first season after an athlete has transferred from 10th grade and beyond? And before they made that choice, in the public comment section of the board meeting, did they grasp the burden that Wednesday’s action would impose on student-athletes, like those that had reached out to Wheatley?

“What’s behind the rule and who’s really going to be punished?,” Wheatley told The Daily Times and PaPrepLive.com. “I think it’s children of color and children who are going to be locked into bad schools in their districts. You’re putting another hurdle that kids have to jump through.”

Through the unique window of his constituency, Wheatley broaches a salient balance in the negotiations undertaken by the PIAA, both Wednesday and at large: How to weigh the rights of individual student-athletes with the imperative of competitive equity?

(click on this link for the full story)

By Matt DeGeorge

Dr. Robert Lombardi will from time to time talk with his hands, and in situations like Wednesday, the gesticulations proved extremely illustrative.In the hallway at the Penn Stater, the executive director of the PIAA used the airspace around him to map what had transpired in the last weeks and months with a special competition committee impaneled to discuss how to ease the PIAA’s competitive imbalance issue.

First, that committee recommended that the PIAA ban from postseason play any athlete transferring after the natural break from high school. Then the pendulum swung — like Lombardi’s hands in the retelling — to allow underclassmen to transfer and bar only transfers after the junior year. Finally, as Lombardi takes a shuffle-step to return to the middle ground from where he fielded the question, the end result upon consultation with districts was a compromise that is the new transfer law of the land, decreed Wednesday at the PIAA’s bimonthly board meeting.

That spirit of animated debate and ultimate compromise characterized a lengthy process that all parties in attendance Wednesday hope will ameliorate some of the PIAA’s competition balance issues. It’s not yet the perfect solution, should that white whale exist. But it’s a step forward.

(click on this link for the full story)

By Matt DeGeorge

When John Sarandrea said yes a year ago, he didn’t know how much weight was behind the question.

The WPIAL needed a new superintendent’s representative to its board, and Sarandrea, a former basketball coach now heading the New Castle Area School District, thought he was up to the task.

Soon into that endeavor, the role’s main task was explained: Superintendents wanted to delve into competitive balance in the PIAA. Would Sarandrea take the lead in canvassing District 7’s administrators?

That inquest led to the “PIAA Playoff Equity Summit” next Tuesday in State College, open to public-school administrators to ascertain how to rectify competitive imbalance that has led to an overwhelming proportion of PIAA championships won by private and charter (so-called “non-boundary”) schools. Topics on the agenda, like separate championships and even a possible secession from the PIAA, were once regarded as third rails in this conversation, but they’ve gained traction as animosity has mounted.

(click on this link for the full story)

By Matthew DeGeorge

Scott Martin was a state championship wrestler at Lancaster Catholic. He was an instant standout on the football field at Millersville on the way to two All-American selections and an NFL training camp stint.

But when he returned home from his freshman year of college, none of those accolades prevented him from serving as a church handyman at his alma mater, fulfilling the number of hours needed to pay off grants to attend Lancaster Catholic. As the sixth of seven children to earn a Catholic education, from a blue-collar family as the son of a police officer, Martin understood the need to work for his opportunities.

“When I went through, I didn’t get scholarships,” Martin said by phone recently. “I got loans. I had to work them off, literally. I had to go back after I finished school because I still owed them a certain number of hours and I washed windows over the summer.”

The work ethic plays a part in how Martin, a Republican State Senator in the 13th District serving Lancaster County, ascended to such heights, athletically and professionally. It also sculpts his position on the Pennsylvania Athletic Oversight Committee (PAOC), a six-member body in the General Assembly that guides the PIAA’s operations.

(click on this link for the full story)

PaPrepLive’s five-part series on competitive balance in the PIAA

By Ed Palattella

Superintendents, other officials to hold statewide meeting to discuss “the possible formation of a separate entity” to oversee high school sports in Pennsylvania.

The call for separate playoffs for some high school sports in Pennsylvania has taken on another dimension — the possibility of replacing the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association.

Superintendents and other officials from at least 75 public school districts from across the state are scheduled to meet in State College on July 24 to discuss “the current inequity” in the playoff system, which the PIAA now operates, according to an email that schools received on Tuesday about the meeting.

Another potential topic of discussion, according to the email, is “the possible formation of a separate entity to provide a fair, equitable playing field for all students and schools in Pennsylvania if appropriate action is not taken by either the PIAA or through legislation.”

(click on this link for the full story)

By Matthew DeGeorge

It was about an hour into a meeting in the bowels of the K. Leroy Irvis Building before the ill-fitting title of the committee meeting was broached.

“I’ve yet to hear anyone advocate that,” said State Sen. Scott Martin, R-13 of Lancaster.

The title of Monday’s meeting of the Pennsylvania Athletic Oversight Committee was a “Hearing on Public, Private Sports.” The subject that many public-school stakeholders want to discuss, separate championships for public and private schools, isn’t about to happen anytime soon.

But that fact doesn’t preclude progress on the issue of competitive imbalance, and the tone of optimism Monday indicates that it could be on the way sooner rather than later.

Public and private championships in a state of the size and sensibility of Pennsylvania are a non-starter. The mere terminology is prohibitively impenetrable: Monday’s meeting included Sean McAleer, executive director of the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, calling the distinction of boundary/non-boundary “a legal fiction,” while the testimony of PIAA executive director Dr. Robert Lombardi sought to cleave his body’s membership into “traditional schools” and “schools of choice.” It was a minor point in the proceedings, but rest assured that any attempt to put weight behind those terms would meet harsh rebuke.

(click on this link for the full story)