Time Out by John Bernhardt

Almost 40 years of coaching high school sports have seen the most unlikely scenarios. None matched the late inning decision-making at Wednesday’s baseball game between Margaretville and Roxbury.

It was the top of the sixth inning with Roxbury at bat when Margaretville physical education teacher Tracy Reither approached the bench with a sense of urgency in her step. Tracy reported that the spring music concert was about to begin and the band director needed two of the guys on my baseball team.

Keith Danzy knows how Jackie and Jack Harbaugh felt while watching their coaching sons battle it out in this year’s Super Bowl. Danzy could hardly sit still in the stands, glued to the action during Saturday’s New York State Class B Girls Basketball Regional Championship at the brand new Onondaga Community College Event Center in Syracuse.

Some believe basketball is a big man’s game. Those folks have never watched SUNY Delhi guard Stefan Bock play the game.

Stefan Bock is a coach’s dream. Bock attends to all the ‘little things,’ those minute basketball details that often mean the difference in the outcome of a game that coaches love to extol.
I paid careful attention to Bock, scripting everything he did during the first three minutes of Delhi’s semifinal match-up with HVCC Saturday afternoon. The kid is amazing.

For all but one successful team in each girls’ or boys’ basketball classification, the season will end with a loss. One team in each of New York State’s girls’ and boys’ class will actualize a journey that ends with a state championship. Along the way, many impressive basketball squads will end their season on the short side of a wave of disappointment.

Living in the Catskill Mountains it’s sometimes easy to allow yourself to believe you reside in a locale far removed from ‘big time’ events. That’s generally not the case. If you know where to look, there are all kinds of things taking place in the Catskills.

A Catskill event calendar can include big-time college basketball. This past weekend I enjoyed two highly entertaining men’s college basketball games, Friday night at SUNY Delhi and Sunday afternoon at Marist.

Personal experience adds clarity and insight to our lives. That was the case when my wife and I shared a basketball adventure traveling to Pearl River to watch Mariah Ruff and her Oneonta Yellowjackets battle the Pearl River Pirates.

We had a blast watching a marvelous high school basketball game involving talented gals from both school districts. The girls on both sides of the court played with passion, played with intensity, and played with skill. Anyone who believes basketball is not a contact sport could not have watched these ladies do battle.

Basketball coaches have long believed the remedy for a good shooter suffering from a shooting slump is to shoot his/her way out of the slump. A week ago Tuesday night, Jack Taylor of Grinnell College, an NCAA Division III school, took that maxim to a new level. The five-foot, ten-inch inch shooting guard dropped a mind-blowing 138 points through the nets, shattering college basketball’s single-game scoring record in Grinnell’s 179-104 rout of tiny Faith Baptist College.

What does it take to be an NBA champion? That’s the central question in the basketball education of New York Knick’s forward Carmelo Anthony. ‘Melo,’ as he’s known in basketball circles, has emerged at the onset of a new NBA season with a new outlook, a basketball perspective that has long-suffering New York Knick’s fans dreaming championship.

Denis Hamill’s column in Sunday’s New York Daily News took me back in time. Hamill’s column took root as part of an extended response to Mayor Bloomburg’s call to ban soft drinks in the war to slow exploding rates of childhood obesity. Rather than focus on limiting soft drinks, Hamill suggested the mayor take his obesity battle to the streets by getting kids to play stickball again.

Three particular paragraphs early in Hamill’s column tickled my funny bone and took me back to a childhood that in modern times seems almost otherworldly.

I’m not known for spontaneity. More programmed and cautious by nature, I prefer to know where I’m going and what I’m doing before I venture forward into the unknown. That’s why an off-the-cuff trip to Syracuse on Monday to watch Zack Wheeler pitch his first ever Triple-A start was a bit out of the ordinary.