Busy time of year

From the second week of March into April is one of the busiest times on the sports calendar. March Madness starts officially Sunday, March 15, with selection of the teams for the men’s and women’s college basketball tournament. There are only 20 games left in the regular season for NBA basketball, and Major League baseball Is halfway through spring training.

I can’t wait for the regular season to start in baseball. It’s even hard for me, as a diehard baseball fan, to watch an entire spring training game. For the most part so far, it’s been all good news for the Phillies. Zach Wheeler is making good progress in his recovery from injury and could be ready to pitch in the big leagues by early May. Andrew Painter was very good in his first start in spring training, his first official spring start in the three years after his Tommy John arm surgery. And I hope Bryce Harper and Kyle Schwarber have very good performances in the world baseball classic over the next two weeks.

The 76ers are currently in sixth position in the Eastern Conference. It’s important for them to keep their position so they don’t have to play in the play-in games, which is a very short form of playoffs. If you lose two games as one of the 7-10 seeds, you are out of the playoffs before they really even start. The 76ers’ goal should be to win as many games as possible to try and get to the fifth seed. They desperately need Joel Embiid to get healthy from his latest injury if they want to have any chance to make it to the second round of the playoffs this year.

March Madness is also about to begin. There are four specific teams that have been interesting for me to watch this year – three of them being the usual suspects, and one obvious Cinderella team. These are Duke, Arizona and Kansas, and the Cinderella team is Miami of Ohio, who is undefeated so far in the season going into their conference tournament. Duke has a superstar player in Cameron Boozer, who is the son of former NBA player and Duke alumnus Carlos Boozer. He’s going to be one of the top two or three picks in the NBA draft as a freshman. Duke‘s team has been winning a number of games by large margins this season. It is nice to see Arizona back as one of the powerhouse programs in college basketball. They were very good in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Kansas is also very good this year, as usual. They have another one-and-done player named Darryn Peterson, who is also going to be a top 10 pick in the NBA, but he hasn’t been playing a lot for the team due to injury and illness, so we’ll see what happens. Miami of Ohio has come out of nowhere to be undefeated on the season so far. Unfortunately for them, the MAC conference is so weak they’ve had to remain undefeated to get recognized nationally.

In local sports, the state basketball tournaments have finally begun after being postponed because of the crazy snow we got. Unfortunately, the Cape girls lost their first game in the second round to Ursuline Academy by the disappointing score of 46-34. It was a sad way to end a very successful season. They only lost two games in the regular season. I thought they had a real chance to go far in the state tournament, but on Wednesday they had significant trouble making easy shots in front of the basket, and two of Ursuline's players made some big three-pointers all game long. You can’t have that situation and expect to advance in the playoffs. The boys’ team advanced into the third round thanks to a very good performance. They beat A.I. DuPont High School by a score of 73-55 after being only up one point at halftime, 29 -28. They will be playing their next game at 2 p.m., Saturday, March 7, against Howard High School in Wilmington.

Go Cape!