The Butler County American Legion has announced its playoff schedule.

The eight-team tournament will begin Tuesday with four first-round games.

No. 1 seed Saxonburg (17-2) will host No. 8 seed Prospect at 6 p.m. at Laura Doerr Park.

No. 5 seed Center Township (10-10) will travel to Wonderland Park in Evans City to take on No. 4 seed Meridian (12-8) at 6 p.m.

No. 2 seed East Butler will host No. 7 seed Zelienople (9-10) at 6 p.m. at Speedo Field at 6 p.m.

No. 3 seed Mars (12-8) will welcome No. 6 seed Butler Township to Marburger Field at 6 p.m.

Second round games will be played at the site of the higher seed Wednesday with the championship game to be held Friday at either East Butler's Speedo Field or Highfield Park.

Saxonburg is the regular-season champion and if it wins the tournament, it will represent the county in the Region 7 playoffs.

If another team claims the tournament, it will play Saxonburg in a best-of-three game series to determine the Region 7 representative. That series will begin July 16.

The BB Rooners, a 15-to-18 year-old baseball team located in Warren, Ohio, will hold tryouts for its fall and next summer teams.Interested players should call coach Rod Simmer at 724-651-5817 for more details.The BB Rooners will also sponsor a college showcase July 28 at Flagherty Field in New Castle.Interested players should call Brian Warner at 724-588-3621 for more details.

NEW YORK - Negotiators from the NHL and the players' association met until early Monday morning and planned to return to the bargaining table just hours later as they inched toward a deal that would end the lockout.A source close to the talks told The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity that there was "still lots to do" and that discussions would likely stretch past Monday. The sides, which already met for seven straight days, were scheduled to resume negotiations in the later morning.Talks wrapped up for the night at 1:30 a.m.The NHL's executive committee is also scheduled to convene with commissioner Gary Bettman on Monday to get an update on the ongoing negotiations.Indications from both sides are that a new collective bargaining agreement is on the verge of being hammered out, which would stop the lockout that was imposed by Bettman last Sept. 16 and wiped out the entire 2004-05 NHL season.There has been a sense of urgency on both sides to get a deal done now and not put next season in jeopardy.The sides have met for nine consecutive weeks and have painstakingly exhausted the finances of all 30 teams in an effort to figure out how to change the economic landscape of the league.The new agreement is expected to contain a salary cap with a ceiling in the upper 30 millions and a minimum in the neighborhood of the low-to-mid 20s.Player salaries will not exceed 54 percent of league-wide revenues.