One Newsletter After Another
Just a few small updates
Putting the Oscars and Selection Sunday and the WBC Semifinal on the same night is maybe too much for one evening.
As you might imagine, every year I crash and go into a little bit of a coma after the state title games. Sometimes I remember to update everything first. Sometimes I don't! This year has been slightly different. We'll get to that later.
But first, I started a bracket pool with a bit of a twist--it's free for paid subscribers. Test your mettle against people as deep in the high school basketball weeds as you are. Some of them are very dialed in to the college scene. Others (me) start paying attention around now.
You can join it on ESPN.
You'll need a password and for that you need to be subscriber. It should show up below here for varsity subscribers.
The winner gets street cred, of course, but also your choice of any t-shirt in the merch store I finally got re-posted. Don't put it past me to add a design or two before the tourney is over.
Like this oldie (but goodie):
If you missed it, Nolan Ames and Maddie Provost are your Mr and Miss Basketball winners. They were the favorites in the preseason and backed it up with monster senior years. Ames led Camden to the A North Regional Title and finished as Camden's all-time leading scorer (which is not one of the easier schools to achieve that mark).
Provost won bookend titles for Lawrence--one her freshman year and another this year. She will not graduate as Lawrence's all-time leader scorer, for obvious reasons.
So now we have to start looking at the 2026-27 Senior class. Put some potential candidates in the comments.
Provost also won the Gatorade POTY award.
The boys announcement is later this week.
This year in the post-tourney coma, I didn't just sleep a lot and catch up on Oscar nominees (although I did both of those things). I also started working on a revamp of the website that's gotten really, really, really positive feedback from the people I've shown it to. If it all goes well, it'll have a completely new design for rankings, Tourney Odds, Gold Ball Odds, Heal Points, team pages, and more. It promises to streamline things significantly on the backend in a way that should allow me to bring a bunch of basketball-only features to spring and fall sports. You might want to keep your subscription going, is what I'm saying.
It also has a new scoreboard, which currently looks like this:
Yes, that does have tabs for baseball, softball, lax, soccer, field hockey, football, and volleyball. Yes, you can filter by class. And yes, those streaming icons in the corner will take you to that school's streaming site. Stick around!
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Harbor House was this weekend and while it isn't perfectly predictable (coaches can't be there, because of hands-off) for next season, it is an early indicator of something. Teams that do well at Harbor House tend to have solid seasons the following year.
Hampden beat Oceanside in the high school girls final and MDI beat Presque Isle in the boys high school final. Of the four finalists, PI is probably the biggest surprise and that moves them firmly into the column of teams we should keep an eye on.
To that end, I've got a way-too-early preseason poll that you can vote in before anyone gets in the transfer portal.
I'll probably reveal the results in a podcast prior to the start of the spring sports season.
As for the newsletter, I think we're going to go weekly for a bit, at least until the spring season gets underway and we'll see from there.
What a terrible call to send the Dominican Republic home.
The Dominican Republic could have really used the ABS.
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) March 16, 2026
The USA hangs on and advances to the WBC Final!⚾️👮♂️ #WBC pic.twitter.com/hSpOdjS7Ec
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