News & notes

Add the Albany Twilight League to the summer sports entities that will sit out 2020 due to COVID-19. The league made the announcement Tuesday night, after holding out hope that their 90th anniversary season could be played. The 8 team league, which is a Stan Musial league for 18-up, plays one game a night at ancient Bleecker Stadium, but play now won't resume until 2021.
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Capital OTB should see a spike in online & Phone-a-Bet action today with the return of live racing at Belmont Park. Whether or not the OTB parlors in the 518 will be among businesses reopening under Phase 2 today is another matter altogether. With the Belmont Stakes 2 1/2 weeks away, NYRA has gotten the go-ahead to get the track warmed up for the first major event of the year in the Northeast.
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The Tri-City Valleycats should know by the end of this week if the 2020 NY-Penn League season will be played. The team is supposed to open the season on the road in 2 weeks. They do have the capacity for audio streaming, but I would recommend adding video streaming for home games, and the same applies for the rest of the teams in the league, which extends all the way out to West Virginia and Ohio. If fans cannot be admitted, there's no sense leaving them in the dark. Just sayin'.
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Russell Sage College will be fielding a baseball team in 2021, as baseball is one of a group of new sports added to the school's athletic program. Sage has had baseball before, but it was cut some years back due to budget cuts. College & high school budgets in the 518 are very fluid, so there's no telling if this will stick in the long term.

Having been to Sage's gym for a high school basketball game, I'd say some upgrades are in order......
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Former Columbia High and UAlbany standout Casey Bump was named the new softball coach at Siena College last week, after 7 seasons as an assistant to head coach Bill Lajeunesse, who retired at the end of the 2019 season. Bump's debut season will be in 2021, of course.

Meanwhile, the College of St. Rose hired former New Hampshire star Whitney Edwards as their new women's basketball coach, hoping to turn around a program that has had some rough years recently.
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There must be something about the University of Maryland that has 518 players looking to move elsewhere.

2 years after Kevin Huerter turned pro after his sophomore season, former Niskayuna standout Olivia Owens is transferring from Maryland to Kentucky for next season, swapping the Big 10 for the SouthEastern Conference, and a better chance at television exposure on the ESPN family of networks, especially ESPNU (Spectrum digital channel 370) and the SEC Network (channel 384). Mark it on your calendars when the schedules come out!