With the Labor Day weekend over, it is now time for the high school students to return to college. It is also time for the high school graduates to go to college. This year, the Blue Dragons have 12 graduates who will be playing college baseball.

Of these 12, six will be receiving baseball scholarship money totaling $102,600 for this school year alone. PJ Antoniato will be at St. John's University where he will start at shortstop after starting at second base last year. PJ will team up with Island Trees outfielder Greg Thompson as they try to repeat to return to the NCAA Tournament again this year. Dan Weingart will enter his junior season at Sienna College and Jesse Darcy will return at Manhattan after he was second on the team in innings pitched despite only being a freshman last season. Scott Porter will be a sophomore at Molloy College after leading his team in victories as a freshman last year. New scholarship players this year will be pitcher Kevin Gerard, who was a finalist in the Diamond Award for pitching last year and outfielder Brian Chenicek, who will be his teammate at CW Post.

With these six players' scholarship money, Division has accumulated a total of $1,110,055 in baseball scholarship money since 1990. This is truly an unbelievable amount of money for one high school to accumulate in such a short period of time. This money is just baseball money, over the years the Dragons have also had a large number of players receive academic money. Of these six players, Jesse Darcy, Scott Porter and Brian Chenicek are also receiving academic money, which has not been included in the baseball scholarship money total. Not to be forgotten is Josh Flinn, a junior at Columbia, who passed on a large number of scholarship offers to get an Ivy League education.

Other college players will be Josh Flinn at Columbia; Jeff Tamarez, who will return to Nassau Community College after a highly-successful season last year; Ray Montoro, who will return to SUNY Old Westbury after starting at first as a freshman; Zach Flinn and Dan Devivo, who will enter SUNY Old Westbury as freshmen and join Ray as teammates while Tom Brussel will play this year at SUNY Farmingdale.

The coaching staff at Division is extremely proud of the accomplishments of its graduates both in the classroom as well as on the field in college and are very curious to see who will follow the paths of these other Division grads in the future as they look forward to driving the baseball scholarship figure toward the $2 million mark.