More than 70 New York City high school basketball teams were forced to forfeit their first games of the season after their rosters were not submitted by a strict new deadline.
Seventy-four teams in the Public School Athletic League were penalized for failing to meet the new Nov. 18 deadline. The earlier deadline was implemented this season following last year's cheating scandal involving age restrictions and academic records.
The league began resuming some games on Friday after widespread outrage in the sports world.
Previously, teams did not have to upload their rosters to the PSAL website until one week before their first game.
Some schools will begin the 14-game PSAL season next week, while others won't have any primary league games until Dec. 3.
“They have bigger fish to fry in the PSAL than the coaches who assembled their rosters 24 hours late,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School boys varsity coach Glenn Thomas told the Post. . “Our children are the ones who are hurting the most.”
However, the crackdown on cheating is welcomed.
“I think it's a good thing that they're stepping in and trying to get PSAL in order,” Thomas said.
He said the early deadline makes it difficult for some schools, which have to wait until the end of the fall sports season before allowing students free basketball tryouts and allowing coaches to take a pay cut. said. Players must also submit medical and parental consent forms and fees, which take time to collect.
Ron Naclerio, a longtime coach at Benjamin N. Cardozo High School, said the new roster rules should have come with a grace period.
“Coaches tried, many succeeded, [some] We failed because we didn’t have the courtesy of an extension until the next day,” he told the Post.
Naclerio said coaches could lose four hours' worth of pay, about $250, for each forfeited game.
The league, which is made up of about 700 basketball teams, said it is working to get the first game back for about half of the penalized teams that applied immediately after the deadline and met other requirements. chalk beat.
