Maryland

The deadline for submitting sports copy is 9 a.m. on Monday. We prefer email (howardcountysports@patuxent.com). We do not accept results by phone. When two Howard County teams play, players from both teams (first and last names) must be mentioned in the write-up. Volleyball The Columbia Volleyball Club 13U Eagles won the silver medal at the NVVA 13s May Day Tournament on May 5 in Sterling, Va. Members of the team are: Lisa Zoch, Camille Johnson, Emily Przybyla, Alexa Welch, Madeline Winters, Melissa Bonzelet, Catherine Ott, Valerie Odonkor, Tomiwa Sobande and Kennedi Holloway.

ESPN analyst Paul Carcaterra participated in a Q&A Monday. The former Syracuse All-American midfielder, who can be followed on Twitter via @paulcarcaterra, also offered parting commentary on the three programs from Maryland that were in the NCAA tournament - sixth-seeded Maryland, Loyola and Towson. After Maryland's 16-8 loss to Cornell Sunday, senior long-stick midfielder Jesse Bernhardt and senior midfielder John Haus said the setback would not define a senior class that had advanced to back-to-back NCAA title games without winning the championship.

On his way to Virginia in January, Johnathan Thomas decided to make a quick stopover at Maryland. The three-star running back from St. John's Prep in Danvers, Mass., got a tour of the campus and met with coach Randy Edsall , who offered him a scholarship “right on the spot.” “He showed great interest in me. I was their No. 1 running back prospect,” Thomas said Sunday. “That just made me want to really think about the place and see what they had to offer. And I got to see what they had to offer.” Four months after this trip to College Park, Thomas decided to accept Edsall's offer.

It used to be that the Maryland Film Festival was just a cool neighborhood event for Courtney Knipp - a bunch of obscure movies being shown just up the street from her home in Mount Vernon. Not anymore, not with thousands of film fans massing in and around the Charles Theatre , watching movies - 127 this year - - and comparing notes with hundreds of filmmakers from all over the world. This tiny corner of the Station North Arts District becomes the center of the film universe for one weekend every May. And that is so cool by Knipp.

If you ever find yourself looking for an excuse to eat more cupcakes, 11-year-old Krissa Hillman has a good one. The fifth-grader from Bollman Bridge Elementary School in Jessup is the creative mastermind behind Cupcakes for Literacy, a business that sells baked goods to benefit local schools, libraries and reading programs. "Literacy is a big part of life. You have to read everything," Hillman said. "So what better way to help people understand than though something everyone likes?"

For five days ending Sunday, thousands of film fans and scores of filmmakers watched movies together at the 15th Maryland Film Festival. From three-minute comedic shorts promoting horror films to gripping documentaries about the rise of Napster and cutting-edge narrative features about the relationship between a teacher and one of her students, the festival offered local cineastes the chance to lose themselves in the boundless possibilities of film....

I am a female sports fan. I go to games, watch them on TV, download the apps, read the stats, and buy the T-shirts. I recently heard about the launch of a new professional women's soccer league, and I started thinking about the sports to which I am attached. They are all professional male sports - plus men's college basketball - but I have never thought about why. I suspect it has to do with my age (51), which limited my exposure to girl's athletics - Title IX was just beginning to be implemented when I was in school - as well as my sports fan role model, my father.

Maryland moved Monday to reduce the commercial harvest of female blue crabs in the aftermath of a survey finding that the Chesapeake Bay's crab population hit a five-year low last winter. The Department of Natural Resources announced that it was lowering the daily allowable catch of female crabs, effective Thursday. The move comes nearly a month after Maryland and Virginia officials announced the results of their annual winter dredge survey, which found that the bay's crab population had declined by nearly two-thirds over the previous year, to around 300 million, with juvenile crabs plummeting 80 percent.

For Capt. Martin Noorsalu, deploying to Afghanistan with the Maryland National Guard last year was an unusual opportunity. Noorsalu is one of only a dozen helicopter pilots in the Estonian Air Force. The sole air defense service of the former Soviet republic numbers some 400 personnel. They fly four helicopters. But from September to December, Noorsalu and fellow Estonian Air Force Capt. Rene Kallis flew medical evacuation missions in Afghanistan with Maryland National Guard members in the 1st General Support Aviation Battalion of the 169th Aviation Regiment.

Mothers are very important people. They give us hugs and kisses; they put Band-Aids on our wounds; they hide special notes in our lunch boxes. They're so special and important that they even get their own day. Today, my two brothers - Matthew and Jacob - and I will celebrate our mothers for Mother's Day. We'll plot how to surprise our moms and talk about what we should make for a special breakfast, then go do something fun with them. But this Mother's Day will be even more special than all of the others because we'll plan all our surprises knowing that soon after, on May 18 (one week before their 30th anniversary)