Section Nine Football

By FEARLESS PHIL Section Nine football teams seem to be hoping for the best but gearing up for the worst. Hopefully the brunt of Isabel's winds and rain will have passed by the time the scheduled Friday night kickoffs take place. Just in case, we should all be ready to change plans at the last minute. Middletown athletic director Jon Jefferson has already rescheduled a Saturday night boys soccer game, originally scheduled to be played at Faller Field. The soccer match against Minisink will be held Saturday afternoon at 1 PM on the soccer team's regular field which runs parallel to Faller. "We're planning to play the Middletown-Port Jervis football game at 7:30 PM Friday night as scheduled," Jefferson said. "The only way we'll postpone that game is if school is closed for some reason or if we lose our electric. If we can't play Friday night, we'll play at 2 PM on Saturday. "We moved the boys soccer game and postponed a girls soccer game which was supposed to have been played on the football field prior to the boys game. With the possibility of a lot of rain, we didn't want to tear up the football field." The urgency to play football on Friday is two-fold. First of all, there could be a problem assigning officials for all the Saturday games. Secondly, next week is a short week. Because of the Jewish holidays, 14 games will be played next Thursday instead of on the weekend. Let's hope that Isabel slips by us with as little ruckus as possible. After all, WE HAVE FOOTBALL TO PLAY. * * * * * * * * * * * The New York State Sportswriters Association has released its first state football rankings for the season. Three of our teams have hit the top 20's in their respective classes. Monroe-Woodbury is ranked the #19 AA team. Their opponent this weekend, Schenectady is an honorable mention. Kingston is also an AA honorable mention. Next week we hope to see Newburgh somewhere on the list. Defending state champ Webster Schroeder is the #1 AA team. Cornwall is the #13 Class A team. Goshen and Wallkill are honorable mentions. Section One's Nyack, the state runnerup last year, is #1. The Class B list finds Spackenkill the #12 team. Marlboro and O'Neill are honorable mentions. The #1 B team is Harrison. None of our teams made the Classes C list. The top Class C team is Caledonia-Mumford. In Class D Chester and Millbrook are both honorable mentions. Millbrook hosts Rye Neck, another honorable mention, on Saturday. Powerful Onondaga, the defending Class C state champs and now a D school, is the #1 D team. Hancock, which whipped Eldred last week and plays Roscoe on Friday, is #12. Washingtonville coach Don Clark's old team, Newfield, is #6 in D. * * * * * * * * * * * Speaking of Coach Clark, I just discovered his excellent insight into sectional unity. What he wrote me shows the direction many of us wish Section Nine would take. "All coaches in my previous section (IV) did whatever they could do to help each other advance in the state tournament. We also had no problem helping each other out during the season. Their philosophy was that if every program in Section IV got better, we would all be battle tested when playoff or tournament games came around, and in most cases they were right. This also seems to be the philosophy in all the western sections (III, IV, V, and VI). I do not know if this thinking has any merit in the fact that these sections seem to do very well at the state level on a consistent basis." I know that Section One coaches bond at state tournament time, too, and for the same reasons Coach Clark just expressed. The worst humiliation a Section One football team can endure is to lose to a Section Nine team in the playoffs, it seems. It all begins with the coaches.