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.