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Message: [QUOTE="Orangeyes, post: 43648, member: 34"] This says Assumption was German, I remember mostly Italian's like Tony Galezi and Tommy Carfagno who were both prolific scorers. Tony still plays the game, he's older than me and Carfagno died very young, late 20's, early 30's. Assumption was feed by the Pompei program which was heavily Italian. Cherie wait until you hear what the former Mayor of Syracuse called you guys from Holy Rosary. Forty Roman Catholic churches have closed in and around the Syracuse diocese. Here are some memory cell ignitors: October 5, 1993 Tuesday Metro Edition, The Post-Standard PAROCHIAL LEAGUE: AN ERA NOW GONE BYLINE: Sean Kirst The court at Sacred Heart rolled up and down like a low-lying hill. St. Vincent's had a column across the ceiling, and other teams never quite decided how to shoot there. Hot-water pipes ran beneath one end of the court at St. Lucy's. Sometimes you'd be dribbling, and the ball would hit a hot spot and shoot up like a balloon. The Parochial League. Ten high school teams, symbols of ethnic enclaves across Syracuse. The Hearts. The Irish. The Lucians. Bandbox gymnasiums. Full-house crowds at Friday night games. Tropical heat and deafening noise. Tile floors. Wooden backboards. Little boys watching their brothers play, and waiting for their chance. "None of us would have believed it could ever go away," says Frank Satalin, a longtime Parochial League coach. "It's something we'll keep talking about until the day we die." That kind of devotion was evident Monday at Drumlins, where Monsignor Frank Sammons became one of seven new inductees into the Greater Syracuse Sports Hall of Fame. Sammons, 73, ran the Parochial League in the 1950s and '60s, when interest was exploding, when the Catholic and public school champions from Syracuse started playing an all-or-nothing game inside the War Memorial, while 6,000 fans went nuts in the seats. An East Side kid, Sammons played in the Parochial League in the 1930s, then ran the whole show after he was ordained as a priest. He began with 30 scholastic basketball teams, and he added a CYO program that gave more children a chance to play the game. By the early 1960s, he was coordinating 110 basketball teams, along with track, six-man football, cheerleading and baseball. Even more than today, each parish defined the people clustered around it. The Irish were at St. Patrick's, the Germans at Assumption, the Polish at Sacred Heart, the Italians at the North Side schools. The competition was ferocious, with the fans pushing up to the edge of every court. It all ended in the 1970s. Parishes could no longer afford their own little high schools. Many Catholics were moving out of the city, and the Baby Boom was over. Of the 10 high school teams in the Parochial League, not one still exists. Kids can't understand what they're missing. "The demise of that system in this city was a tragedy," says Mayor Tom Young, who played for St. Patrick's and later coached in the league. "These schools knit together the neighborhoods. They were schools you could walk to, and there were natural rivalries. We always wanted to beat St. Lucy's, (with) the kids from Skunk City, or the snobs on the hill up at Holy Rosary." The locker rooms were tiny. Two teams couldn't fit inside them at once. Frank Satalin remembers holding halftime meetings in school corridors. Fans showed up by 6 p.m., or they didn't get a seat. The lighting was lousy. The ceilings were low, and everyone played zone. Upsets were common. No win was for sure. "You'd shoot a layup," says Len Mowins, who starred for St. Anthony's, "and you'd run into the wall." The best players became neighborhood heroes. Gene Fisch of Sacred Heart. Satalin's kids, Jim and Fran. Tiny scoring ace Bill Jones of St. John the Evangelist. Smooth-shooting Mickey Flynn of St. Patrick's. Ormie Spencer of St. Lucy's, an elegant and quick-thinking wizard who was among the league's first dominant African-Americans. "He could do anything," Frank Satalin says. "I think he would fit in real well with the game today." To Sammons, the league helped meet his goals as a Roman Catholic priest. It attracted kids to the Catholic schools. It reinforced neighborhoods as extended families. Nearly 20 years after the end of it all, he often bumps into strangers who remember great games, which brings Sammons back to a bittersweet truth. "The sad thing," he says, "is that the schools closed down." [/QUOTE]

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