Tzvi Lewisohn, a Calhoun High School senior, loves to win. Basketball, bowling, you name it, Lewisohn is a competitor. But, he is quick to note, more important than winning is sportsmanship. “We always congratulate the other teams,” Lewisohn, a member of Calhoun's Challenger bowling and basketball teams, says with a smile. “We don't want them to think we're out to win; we're just trying to have fun.” Of course, it doesn't hurt that both teams are undefeated for the past two years. They have not lost since the Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District started the Challenger basketball league for special-education students with a handful of other Nassau County school districts in 2008. more

Craig Papach, Kennedy High School's athletic coordinator and a 19-year phys. ed. teacher, had long heard the stories of poverty and loneliness, and he wanted to help. So, on Thanksgiving morning, he and his family piled into their car and made the trek from their suburban home in a quiet Wantagh neighborhood to a tiny church on Beach 94th Street in Queens. They went to lend their hands and, equally important, their ears to a day-long effort to aid the homeless. Papach was one of 10 Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District teachers who joined roughly 100 volunteers from Rock and Wrap It Up, a Five Towns-based nonprofit group founded by Syd Mandelbaum, to feed hundreds of impoverished street denizens, some of whom had not eaten for days. more

Saul Lerner, the Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District athletic director, recently resigned his post as coordinator of the Nassau County Boys' Basketball Committee because, he said, the Section VIII Athletic Council rejected a proposal of his to fine-tune the seeding process that ultimately determines teams' playing schedules. In 2006, Lerner was the architect of an ability-grouping system that determined a team's conference by its record. Previously, teams were assigned to conferences without much regard to their records. Rather, officials used what they called the "snake," in which teams were seeded and then laid out on a grid that wound back and forth in serpentine fashion. more