Sports

By John Bernhardt
They went to SUNY Cortland to take place in the Empire State Senior Games not really knowing what to expect. It was more adventurous spirit than expectation that brought them there. At the start of play in the 60-64-year-old age bracket of the pickleball championships, any pressure Peter Lederman and Jeff Ditchek may have felt they put on themselves.

Bloomville — The Rocky Crest Farm in Bloomville brings its own “field of dreams” to life this Saturday, June 19 as the Delaware County Vintage Baseball League swings amid the cornfields and pastures, just like their ancestors did more than 100 years ago.

The Margaretville Central School Booster club will sponsor three summer sports camps for student-athletes in kindergarten through eighth grade beginning June 30. The focus of the first session, which will be held from June 28 through July 1, will be soccer and basketball.

By Julia Green
It was the same nemesis that struck down both the Andes and Roxbury girls in their quests for a sectional title last week. For Andes, defeat came in the quarterfinal round at the hands of defending champion Afton, while the Roxbury girls advanced to the semifinal before falling to the same team.

Margaretville Central School held its 17th annual athletic awards banquet Monday night to recognize the achievements of MCS student-athletes and to present a number of end-of-year awards.
In addition to recognizing the various accomplishments of Blue Devil sports teams, individual honors were bestowed with the Henry Dietrich Awards, the Nate Dougherty Memorial Awards and the Most Outstanding Senior Athlete Awards. In addition, the MCS athletic department presented the Distinguished Coaching Award to longtime modified softball coach Bill Fiedler.

By Julia Green
As the regular season drew to a close, the Andes girls weren’t even planning to compete in the 2010 Section IV Class D softball tournament. Due to scheduling conflicts with the senior class trip, the Mountaineers were under the impression that the final week of scheduled competition would bring their successful season to a close.
But then, something changed.

It’s a hybrid of racquet sports, a unique combination of badminton, ping-pong and tennis. Invented in 1965 by two fathers, Bill Bell and Joel Pritchard, looking for a diversion to slow the whining of their bored children during a summer in Puget Sound, pickleball was named for the Pritchard family dog, Pickles, a frisky cocker spaniel who loved racing onto the playing court and stealing the ball as the children played.

By Julia Green
When the top-seeded Margaretville Blue Devils faced visiting eighth-seeded Jefferson in the second round of the 2010 Section IV Class D baseball tournament on Friday, it was a rematch of the previous week’s Delaware League title game. Unfortunately for the Blue Devils, so was the result.

By Julia Green
As Margaretville Head Coach Rick Funck has been saying since the start of the season, his team’s successes and failures are heavily dependent upon how many errors the squad commits on a given day. Unfortunately for the Blue Devils, the number they committed in Thursday’s Delaware League title against Jefferson in Oneonta was too high to get away with.
“It was kind of a disappointing game in the sense that I felt like we beat ourselves with poor defense,” said Funck, whose team fell 9-5.

By Julia Green
Third time’s a charm? It certainly was for the Margaretville Blue Devils, who trounced the Roxbury Rockets 12-1 in the Delaware League title game on Thursday at SUNY Oneonta. It marked the third match-up of the season between the two teams, and the first Margaretville victory over the Rockets. It was also a rematch of last year, when the Blue Devils and the Rockets faced off in the 2009 crossover game.
“If they played like that all year, we’d have been 15-0,” said Margaretville Head Coach Bill Lonecke, whose team finished the regular season 9-6 overall.