SHEEPSHEAD BAY'S ONLY INDEPENDENT NEWS BLOG

Students from the Millennium Development/Starrett City with former pro baseball player Terry McFarlin (top row left) and Mets Hall of Fame pitcher John Franco (top row in 42 cap)

Over 200 students from an assortment of Brooklyn youth groups celebrated Jackie Robinson day Monday by meeting some ex-baseball players and getting a private screening of the new movie about Jackie Robinson, 42, at the Regal Cinemas in Sheepshead Bay, according to a press release.

The kids, who spent the day hearing stories from former ballplayers John Franco and Terry McFarlin, were culled from the Marlboro Housing Development, Millennium Development/Starrett City, and the Coney Island Communities youth groups. They learned about the groundbreaking heroism exhibited by Jackie Robinson in the face of intense hatred and bigotry as he broke baseball’s color barrier back in 1947.

Franco and McFarlin, both products of Southern Brooklyn, also shared powerful words of wisdom with the children on hand.

“Stay focused on the goals you set for yourself and never stop working to improve yourself in a effort to achieve those goals,”  said ex-Met Franco.

“The more you put into something, the more you will get out of it. Always give 100 percent in whatever you do and more often than not, you will be successful,” added McFarlin.

In honor of Jackie Robinson day Monday, every player in the major leagues wore the number 42. Jackie’s number is also ceremoniously retired by every team in baseball.

The event was sponsored by the Municipal Credit Union (MCU) and the Brooklyn Cyclones, the New York Met Class-A affiliate.

Murrow High School (Photo: Erica Sherman)

Edward R. Murrow High School is continuing to mold an army of Garry Kasparovs with its latest victory, their eighth win at the National High School Chess Championship on Sunday, according to a report in the Daily News.

The tournament was held in Nashville, Tennessee, and had over 5,000 competitors from high schools across the nation going against one another from Friday to Sunday.

The team qualified for the tournament when they won the state championships for the 16th time in February. They also won the state championships last year, and took home the national title in 1992, 1993, 1994, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. The school’s team counts Olympic chess players and world title holders among its alumni, and an award-winning book has been written about the team’s formation.

Azeez Alade, a member of the current team who hails from Nigeria, told the Daily News that now that they have secured their victory – yet again – it’s time to declare check-and-mate on some burgers and video games.

“We’re all going to go to Dave and Busters! No more chess! We’re done with that — we’re celebrating,” said Alade.

Congrats to the Murrow team! We look forward to more victories in the future.

Source: Wally Gobetz via Wikimedia Commons

The Brooklyn Cyclones have announced that they will raising moneyfor various Superstorm Sandy recovery efforts, through a new program dubbed “Meaningful Mondays.”

The way it works is that $3 out of every ticket sold at MCU Park (1904 Surf Avenue) on Mondays will go to several charities involved in the recovery process. This will start in July.

According to the press release, each week the “Meaningful Monday” will focus on a different neighborhood affected by the storm. Here is a schedule the press release provided of which neighborhoods will go with which week:

•           Monday, July 1 –Coney Island Night to benefit ConeyRecovers.org.

•           Monday, July 8 – Gerritsen Beach Night to benefit Gerritsen Cares.

•           Monday, July 22 –Nassau County Night to benefit the Nassau Hurricane Recovery Fund.

•           Monday, July 29 – Red Hook Night to benefit the Red Hook Initiative.

•           Monday, August 19 –Staten Island Night to benefit The Stephen Siller Foundation.

•           Monday, August 26 – Breezy Point / Rockway Night to benefit The Graybeards.

Cyclones General Manager Steve Cohen states in the press release, “We hope that through our Meaningful Monday efforts, we can help the countless people still struggling to recover from the storm, recognize the heroes who were leaders in their communities during their time of need, and provide a night of fun and laughter at the ballpark as we all recover from Hurricane Sandy.”

Source: Brownstoner. Click to enlarge

Tennis anyone?

The popular racquet sport, along with yoga, swimming and dancing, are returning to the intersection of Shell Road and Avenue Z in Gravesend in what is set to be Brooklyn’s largest sports complex.

Sheepshead Bites first learned about the deal from the broker, Brian Hanson of Massey Knakel Realty Services, and now a report by Brownstoner provides a few new details.

Costing $20 million, the 140,000 square-foot complex, dubbed MatchPoint NYC, will feature a whopping nine indoor tennis courts, an Olympic-sized swimming pool and a restaurant. It replaces the Brooklyn Racquet Club, which closed in 2011 and was later demolished.

Set to open in six months, the facility – developed by Dmitry Druzhinsky and tennis coach Noumroud Moukhatasov, and spearheaded by entrepreneur Sergey Rybak – will provide an outlet to accommodate for the huge Russian love of tennis.

Source: 247sports

Sheepshead Bay’s Rashaad Coward is a 6’6″, 280-pound defensive tackling force and he is taking his football dreams to Old Dominion, according to a report by the New York Daily News.

As we’ve previously reported, Rashaad was weighing his options between the likes of Albany and Wagner College, before settling on Old Dominion.

Old Dominion, located in Norfolk, VA, has high academic standards for their student-athletes, making Coward mother’s pleased with her son’s decision.

“A lot of the players are good in the classroom and on the dean’s list, so she was happy about that, too,” Coward told the Daily News.

Fred Snyder, Coward’s coach, bestowed high praise on the future Old Dominion tackle, calling him the best lineman he ever coached.

“He had the size and ability and he worked hard to make sure what happened his freshman year when he got pushed around a little never happened again,” Synder said.

Coward is the first athlete out of Sheepshead Bay set to play Division I Football since Rutgers recruited Andre Civil in 2008.

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Who would have guessed that Marv Albert, one of America’s most famous and distinguished sports broadcasters, is a Brighton Beach native?

Albert, who is set to call the action for the Nets’ inaugural game in Brooklyn against the New York Knicks next week, reflects on his childhood growing up in Brighton Beach  in a fascinating piece at NBA.com.

Albert, who pined nostalgically about his days attending Brooklyn Dodger games and playing stickball in the Brighton and Manhattan Beach  neighborhoods he grew up in, is excited to see professional sports return to Brooklyn after a 50-plus year absence.

“It has a lot of meaning to me as someone that grew up in Brooklyn, and then broadcast the Knicks for 37 years and the Nets for 5 years,” said Albert, in a Monday conference call. “Just to see the reaction and how it’s been received, I just think it’s going to be a smash hit all around – not only the basketball.”

The first game is set to kick off on November 1 at the Barclays Center in downtown Brooklyn, and you can hear Marv call the action at 7 p.m. on TNT.

The deal to move the Nets to Brooklyn was a high-profile, high-stakes battle that played out in front of the public. The NHL’s New York Islanders, however, seem to have signed on overnight, and will call Barclays Center home beginning in 2015.

Now, after half a century without professional sports in Brooklyn, we have two major franchise teams and a brand-spankin’-new sports arena.

The Islanders deal became public yesterday, first from a few news outlets citing “sources,” and then from the grand poobah of Brooklyn cheerleaders, Borough President Marty Markowitz.

“Today is another great day for Brooklyn,” Markowitz said in a statement. “When I first campaigned for borough president, I made the promise that I would bring a major league sports team to Brooklyn.  But never, in my wildest dreams, did I think we would be home to both the Brooklyn Nets and the New York Islanders. It won’t be a long journey for the Islanders; after all, Brooklyn is where Long Island begins, and Nassau County is just a short Zamboni ride away from the big stage of Brooklyn and the Barclays Center. With the Nets and the Islanders, Brooklyn is beginning a dominant power play.”

Cue the grumbling. Right when complaints about traffic and parking around Barclays seems to have fizzled, the Islanders present a whole new challenge: suburbanites!

“An Arena in Brooklyn Faces Suburban Traffic Test” declares the Wall Street Journal:

Sam Schwartz, the engineer who prepared traffic plans for arena developer Bruce Ratner, sought to reassure local elected officials in the months before the arena opened that the vast majority of concertgoers and sports fans would travel via mass transit. It was an assumption based on studies projecting that fans of the Brooklyn Nets, the basketball team that relocated from New Jersey, would hail from Brooklyn and Manhattan.

… But those projections didn’t account for the arrival of the Islanders, a team whose fans hail from car-centric suburbs.

There are other concerns, of course. One is simply cultural. Do we want Brooklyn to become a “bro-town” with subway cars and local streets packed with jersey-donning drunks, blowing out their terrorist fist jabs and singing Chumbawamba hits? I don’t. I spent four years in New Jersey, and I’m so over that.

Source: Paul J Everett/Flickr

Ice skating is one of the most romantic activities in New York City, at least according to all the TV shows and movies. Because of this, you can be damned sure that hipsters of all stripes will be eager to hit the rinks when air freezes in a month or two. Sadly, they’ll have to trek far outside the comfort zones of their favorite neighborhoods to do so.

According to the Village Voice, plans to open up all of Brooklyn’s ice rinks have been delayed this year, leaving only Southern Brooklyn locations for the borough’s 2.5 million residents.

On the border of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, plans to convert the recently opened McCarren Park Pool into a skating rink fell through due to a missed September deadline caused by limited cash flow (what, no trust fund?).

With their own neighborhood offering no ice, desperate romantics of North Brooklyn would most likely try to flock to Prospect Park’s rinks, but would quickly discover that the massive $74 million dollar Lakeside Project has temporarily closed those rinks down this winter as well.

With the trendiest spots unavailable, a premium will be put on the touristy rinks of Central Park. And, really, if you flew all the way here from some cow-town just so you could say, “Like, yah, I’m from Brooklyn,” would you go skating in Manhattan’s Central Park?

That just leaves the rinks we have down here, the Aviator Sports & Events Center at 3159 Flatbush Avenue, and the Abe Stark Rink at Coney Island Boardwalk and West 19th Street. Locals, look out.

Coach Fred Synder. Source: sheepsheadfootball.stackvarsity.com

Sheepshead Bay High School head football coach Fred Snyder doesn’t spare kind sentiments when reflecting on this year’s team.

“They’re reliable, they’re personable, they’re good students, good citizens all the way down the line,” he told the New York Post. “I think our strength can be teamwork and leadership.”

With just 30 kids on his Sharks roster, he doesn’t feel like the low number is any type of detractor from gaining a coveted playoff spot for the 16th straight season this fall. After all, his 29-person team won the city title in 2001.

Snyder is especially counting on his three captains, Rashaad Coward, David Sharpton and Artem Artemyev, to lead the Sharks.

Coward, who has been working hard academically and athletically to improve himself, has seen his work payoff. He has already been recruited by some of the top colleges in the country to play for them.

Coward worked with a tutor all summer and took summer classes in order to bolster his academic record.

As for the rest of the team, Snyder has faith in each of their individual abilities.

“He’ll find a way to get something done,” Snyder said of Artemyev. “If he has to throw, he’ll throw; he’ll run. He’s got a good balance.”

Sheepshead Bay players have been successful in reaching the players the last 15 years in a row. Snyder is careful not to start the sports season with playoffs on his mind. He doesn’t pressure them to win the title, but to play well in each upcoming game.

“We’re not trying to be that team to end the streak,” Coward said. “So we have to keep working harder and harder and harder and hopefully get further than the first round.”