The Ohio High School Athletic Association doesn’t require, but favors artificial surfaces for its neutral sites after the first round of the playoffs to better accommodate potential worsening weather.
Memorial Stadium is home to the Yellow Jackets and Lehman Catholic.
Also getting a new artificial turf surface this spring is West Carrollton’s All-Sports Stadium. That’s courtesy of the Pirates’ 30-year agreement to allow the Dayton Dutch Lions FC to use its enhanced facilities for the Lions’ professional soccer program.
The Dutch Lions are scheduled to make their home debut there at 7 p.m. on Saturday vs. LA Galaxy II.
Those two surface updates increases to 12 schools in the Greater Western Ohio Conference that will have artificial turf this fall. The six remaining grass holdouts are Springfield of the Central Division, Greenville and Troy in the North and Fairborn, Miamisburg and Xenia in the South.
• Seedings for the boys tennis, softball and baseball postseasons have been determined. All of those tournaments will begin at the sectional level next week.
Troy and Centerville will host Division I and II sectional tennis, with finals on Saturday, May 17. The top four advance to the following week’s district at the Lindner Family Tennis Center at Mason.
Earning No. 1 softball seeds were Lebanon (D-I), Franklin and Kenton Ridge (D-II), Milton-Union (D-III) and Southeastern and Covington (D-IV).
Voted as top baseball seeds were Beavercreek and Springboro (D-I), Fenwick and Tippecanoe (D-II), Waynesville and Anna (D-III), and Bethel (D-IV).
Both softball and baseball postseasons begin on Monday, May 12. The higher seed hosts first- and second-round games. After that sites shift to neutral fields.
• Jill Phillips has left Princeton to be the girls varsity basketball coach at Lakota East.
With Ms. Basketball Kelsey Mitchell, Phillips guided Princeton to the Division I state championship this past season. The Vikings defeated 2013 D-I state champ Fairmont in a regional semifinal. Phillips succeeds Larry Sykes at East.
• Former Beavercreek coach and athletic director Rex Warner reminds us that Ed Zink wasn’t the first Beavers girls basketball coach. That would be Diana Olsen from 1970-75, although those were Girls Athletic Association teams and not sanctioned by the OHSAA.
Warner said most schools, including Beavercreek, initially fielded girls basketball teams early last century until being instructed to drop the sport in “the early 1940s,” said Warner in an email. “Their reason for dropping — too strenuous for girls!”
• Seen & overheard at last Saturday’s Don Mitchell Roosevelt Memorial Relays at Welcome Stadium: A meet official cracking that the shuttle hurdles should be renamed the hop, skip and jump.
Sadly, he was correct. Not certain when hurdling went out of vogue, but it’s the exception rather than the rule, now. Any veteran track and field person will tell you that wasn’t always so.
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