Locust Valley
Locust Valley Enters 2024 With Youthful Team
by Aaron Diaz Special thanks to Metamorphosis Landscape Design for sponsoring this year’s season preview series. A satisfying finish to the 2023 season for the Locust Valley Falcons left the team with a 12-11 record. Head Coach Brian LoRusso took his team to the playoffs but lost in the first round to Carle Place in a three-game series. Now heading into the 2024 season, LoRusso looks to build off of last year’s success with a young team at its core. “We graduated a large part of our team,” LoRusso said. “We only have three returners this year. Two are sophomores and the other is a senior. We are going to be extremely young but I expect big things from them so we hopefully make the playoffs.” 2023 was a big graduation class for Locust Valley. The Falcons graduated 12 seniors and will...
Locust Valley Ready to Build off County Championship Appearance
by Andy Smith Locust Valley 3, Oyster Bay 2 WP: Matt Gallo (5 IP, 3 H, 5 Ks) S: Jack Baker Christian Corey: 2 RBIs Locust Valley will face Wheatley in the Nassau B Finals in a best of 3 series beginning on Monday at SUNY Farmingdale pic.twitter.com/SFVSq5cBfr — Axcess Baseball LI (@axcessbaseball) May 21, 2022 The Locust Valley Falcons are coming off a strong year in 2022. The Falcons finished with twelve wins and made a deep playoff run. However, their season was ultimately ended by Wheatley in the County Championship. Locust Valley will be entering 2023 with a new skipper. Brian LoRusso, a former college baseball player at SUNY New Paltz and college coach in Maryland, looks to continue the success of the Locust Valley program. The Falcons are starting their campaign without some key ...
Q & A With John Lonardo
By Michael Malaszczyk Coaches are the backbone of baseball. A team’s style of playing, the playing time allocation, the relationships in the clubhouse, and so on are very much dependent on the coach. In terms of sheer knowledge of how to coach, one won’t find someone more knowledgeable than Coach John Lonardo (currently coaching at Locust Valley), who is retiring after a whopping 34 years of coaching baseball. In an interview with Axcess Baseball, Coach Lonardo was happy to share his thoughts and reflections on his long, storied career. “I’ve been coaching since 1988,” said Lonardo. “I got my start playing college baseball at John Jay College. When I wrapped up with college baseball, I got my first job as an assistant coach at Bethpage High School.” After spending a number of years as an a...
What’s Going On With Nassau Conference V
This year was bizarre from the jump – so I understand that a lot of decisions had to be made for the first time. That much is true. That still doesn’t mean that common sense doesn’t apply. So when Nassau and Suffolk each switched up their conference formats for this season, there was going to be a decision that needed to be made. At the most basic level, Nassau had five conference and Suffolk had six. That would be fine if there was no Long Island Championship involved, but once they decided that June 20th would be the Long Island Championship day – they needed a way to even it out. According to my source, the conventional wisdom would suggest that Nassau Conference V would play a playoff like the other leagues – top 2 get byes, 3 v 6 and 4 v 5 in the first ro...
