Coverdale and Bernheimer getting it done at next level

Bella and the Beacon band - Bella Myers - yes, Alison is her mom; her uncles are Rocky, Golden and G.R. – is a hockey player who sang the national anthem prior to the Mariner versus Beacon soccer game. The song is hard enough but meshing with a crazy uptempo middle school band on a reverberating echo in the valley sound system was impressive. Bella just never flinched. She is a very confident and self-assured young person, which was no surprise.    

No disrespect - The state tournament bracket for field hockey will be released Friday, but looking at the tournament points calculation table, it looks like Padua, Caravel, Delmar and Cape as the top four seeds with Tower Hill and Milford at 5 and 6. If that stands, both Delmar and Milford will be in the bracket opposite Cape. No disrespect to upstate teams, but you don’t want to deal with either of those squads until the final; however, going through potentially Sussex Tech, Tower Hill and unbeaten Padua to get there is no cake walk, and who walks on cakes anyway? I frame this tournament as giants versus giant killers. Any of the teams down ballot are capable of an upset effort, especially those with great goaltending. Cape, with five straight state titles and 99 consecutive wins against Delaware opponents, may not be No. 1 seed, but they are the No. 1 target.

Hand overplayed - Cubs manager Joe Maddon is younger than me - a frightening thought. He grew up in Hazleton, Pa., the son of an Italian father and a Polish mother (if you’ve even been to the Pennsylvania coal region, they track that stuff). He grew up in an apartment over his father’s plumbing shop. His mother is still a waitress at the Third Base Luncheonette in Hazelton, which means she hangs out there telling stories because her son is an unlikely famous American millionaire. Joe graduated from Lafayette in 1976, and in 2010 they awarded him an honorary doctorate. I was a doctorate candidate in anthropology at Temple University in 1970, but walked away figuring why go to New Guinea to study culture when Sussex County was still mostly unexplored? I’d like to have an honorary doctorate, but as Kevin “Old School” Young said many years ago as a Cape sophomore, “If you don’t cut nobody, you ain’t no doctor.” But seriously, Dr. Maddon almost walked into his own Polish joke with his handling of the pitching staff in games six and seven. That was risky business - like a plumbing store - but Joe got away with it, and forever in Chicago he will be the genius from Hazelton.   

Snippets - Dan Cook and I will be inducted into the Legends Stadium Ring of Honor at halftime of the Smyrna game this Friday night. That is the answer to the question, “Who are those guys and what are all those people doing out there with them?” And it looks like it’s my month to be honored, 40 years after being named head track coach at Cape – a job I never applied for by the way - and 30 years after leaving that job - I will be inducted into the Delaware Track and Field Hall of Fame at Catcher’s Country Club in Christiana Tuesday, Nov. 22. If you’re an athlete who shared that journey and would like to attend, please contact me and I will buy your ticket to prove to the upstate crowd “we are who they think we are,” all related. An angry and annoyed reader of this column recently referred to me as just another northern carpetbagger, a term that is associated with opportunism and exploitation by outsiders. Seriously, I just wanted to live near the ocean. Anyway 35 years ago, I had my passport validated in a short tailgate ceremony in centerfield of the Lewes Little League park by Terry Hudson, Wayne Mitchell and Jay McManus, who after watching me pour a cold beer into a huggy with a hole in the bottom said, “The reason we love you, city boy, is you’re just as dumb as the rest of us.” Go on now, git!