Teams

Basketball, education and cultural experience come together beginning tomorrow at the 11th annual Basketball Academy at Morgan State's Hill Field House. The tournament invites girls and boys basketball teams from the Baltimore and Washington areas to spend their days taking classes in SAT preparation, college admission process, personal finance and health, and touring the National Aquarium in Baltimore and the Great Blacks in Wax Museum. Their evenings feature competitive basketball between mostly nontraditional rivals.

A) Stanford will cheer Nevada, and not just because Cardinal coach Trent Johnson brought Nick Fazekas to Reno. B) Illinois point guard Chester Frazier will track Old Dominion scores. C) West Virginia will root for Winthrop. D) Billy Packer will proclaim the strength of the Missouri Valley Conference. Other than D, those predictions are more likely to be realized than some of the seed lines that you will see attached to your favorite team between now and Selection Sunday, March 11. Conference tournaments began last night, and for the next 10 days, attention must be paid by Stanford and the aforementioned bubble teams.

The Ravens repeatedly promote the fact that coach Brian Billick is 51-1 when leading by 14 points or more at any point in a game. What's left unsaid is the Ravens' inability to come back on teams. When opponents score first, the Ravens are 0-4 this season and 5-12 (.294) over the past three seasons. When trailing at halftime, the Ravens are 15-42 (.263) in Billick's 8 1/2 seasons. The problem seems rooted in their philosophy, not their personnel. The Ravens stress efficiency over electricity, meaning the offense's goal is to eat up time of possession by running the ball and completing short passes.

BOYDS -- There's a dripping baby bottle in the rental car cup holder and a basketball sliding around in the back seat. Steve Blake is driving to the gym to work out with his wife. Then it's back to his Montgomery County basketball camp followed by dinner with mom and dad -- last night was spaghetti -- at their chain hotel. Yes, regular guys do occasionally make it in the NBA. They do sometimes win an NCAA championship, as Blake did at Maryland in 2002, and marry a cheerleader (Blake did that, too)

LOS ANGELES -- Ben Howland can win the NCAA men's basketball title this weekend in Atlanta. He is well aware of that, as is all of college basketball. What he isn't aware of is that he already has won a basketball coaches' lottery, something priceless. It comes in the form of a quote, uttered Sunday night by the greatest college basketball coach of all time. "I don't think my teams played as good a defense as Ben's teams," John Wooden said. Wooden is 96 and exaggerates now as much as he ever did. Which is never.

Three years ago, Johns Hopkins men's basketball coach Bill Nelson helped give birth to the Provident Bank Pride of Maryland Tournament. Now, he's hoping to use this year's state Division III showcase to help his young frontcourt quickly grow up. When the defending champion Blue Jays tip off tonight at Hood College in one of four first-round games, they will do so without five graduated seniors, including four post players, who combined for more than...

The fact that the Ravens swept the Pittsburgh Steelers and are on to bigger and better things this season could lead to the perception that Bill Cowher's resignation isn't a big deal for them. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's a huge deal. The coach known as The Chin, who announced his resignation yesterday after coaching the Steelers for 15 seasons, got the best of the Ravens much more often than not. He dominated them. There's no telling what will happen in Pittsburgh now, but the departure of Cowher, one of the NFL's best coaches, means the Ravens have a better shot at becoming the lords of the AFC North.

The coaching rivalry between Jim Calhoun and Jim O'Brien dates back to when they came into the Big East together in 1986. The first official function was at a league get-together on a Florida beach. "It seems like 100 years ago," Calhoun said last week.There were 25 games played between Calhoun's Huskies teams and O'Brien's teams at Boston College over 11 seasons. Connecticut won 22 of them, including the last 18 before O'Brien left for Ohio State last season."We should be the big underdog, it's 9,000-to-1 that you keep doing that," Calhoun said.

Whoever came up with the terminology for at-large teams teetering between an invitation to the NCAA tournament and an early spring break -- or for those lucky souls who get neither and play in the No Interest Tournament -- might have to figure out a new word.Or at least make the so-called bubble out of plexi- glass.In some cases, such as the Big 12, entire leagues might be in jeopardy of sliding into oblivion at any given moment. Others, such as the Big Ten, have a lot of good teams but no great ones and could, as a result, get more bids than any league in history.

Felton Spencer had seen the future -- and was still reeling from its effect.Spencer, the backup center for the NBA champion San Antonio Spurs, had just fouled out of his team's first exhibition game last month vs. the Philadelphia 76ers.He had played six minutes."I have to adjust or I won't be playing too long," Spencer said about the league's rule changes.He wasn't whistling in the dark, though the shrill sound has become familiar to many players during the NBA's summer leagues and exhibition games, one that is still reverberating as the 1999-2000 season opens tonight.

It wasn't that long ago when owning an NFL franchise was nearly a no-risk venture. Revenue sharing, a salary cap and the most lucrative television contract in professional sports made it virtually impossible to go wrong from a business standpoint. Even if the team floundered, your bank account did not. But the recent recession ushered in a new set of realities. For the first time in a decade, eight NFL teams saw their overall value decline, according to annual rankings compiled by Forbes magazine.

Hubert Van Wyke "Bert" Simmons, who pitched and played outfield for the old Negro Leagues' Elite Giants and later became a Baltimore public school educator and mentor, died Wednesday after cancer surgery at Seasons Hospice at Northwest Hospital Center. The Woodlawn resident was 85. "I believe that Bert was the last surviving Elite Giant living in Maryland, and that was because he played in the team's later years," said Shawn M. Herne, chief curator of the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum and the Sports Legends Museum at Camden Yards.

Softball No. 5 Spalding at No. 8 Hammond: WHEN: Wednesday, 3:30 OUTLOOK: With the teams' respective playoffs fast approaching, this game is an ideal primer with two of the area's top pitchers doing battle. The defending Interscholastic Athletic Association of Maryland A Conference champ Cavaliers lean on first-team All-Metro pitcher Elaine Nescio and a strong defense behind her. The host Golden Bears have three-time All-Metro pitcher Stephanie Speierman, who has thrown six no-hitters this season and tossed a perfect game in the Class 2A state title game as a sophomore.

This spring, officials in Anne Arundel and Howard counties are introducing an alternative to county championship games - a District V championship that pits the best Anne Arundel team against the best in Howard. The program kicks off with title games in boys and girls lacrosse Tuesday at North County. The girls will play at 5 p.m., followed by the boys at 7 p.m. Greg LeGrand, coordinator of athletics for Anne Arundel County, said officials in the two counties have talked about ways to bring their teams together.

This girls lacrosse season has turned into one of the more topsy-turvy springs in recent memory, with upsets a near-daily occurrence and more teams than ever before vying for spots in The Baltimore Sun's Top 15. McDonogh has a firm hold on the No. 1 spot with Saturday's 10-9 win over The Washington Post's No. 1 team, St. Stephens/St. Agnes, and Wednesday's 10-6 victory over No. 2 Notre Dame Prep. After the Eagles and Blazers, the rest of the poll has turned into a jigsaw puzzle. Severna Park, two-time defending Class 4A-3A champion and a solid No. 2 until Saturday, dropped back-to-back games to No. 8 Broadneck and unranked Severn.

During Ray Lewis' news conference last week, he said he was only flirting with other teams. Flirting? If another team had offered Lewis more money than the Ravens, he would have been gone in a heartbeat. (For more, go to baltimoresun.com/ ravensinsider)

The 35th anniversary of the greatest college basketball game ever played passed quietly this week. That's a shame, because a classic like Maryland vs. North Carolina State, in the 1974 Atlantic Coast Conference tournament championship game, should never be taken for granted, much less forgotten. Especially today, as the two teams meet to open this year's tournament in Atlanta. A win would keep Maryland's hopes alive for an at-large bid to the 65-team NCAA tournament despite finishing in seventh place in the regular season and having a losing record in the conference.

It is the commodity desired above all others by those who run baseball teams. But even the teams that possess it know that a ligament pull here or a nagging blister there could send them right back to the desperate hunt. The importance of good pitching can't be overstated. Inspect the top 10 team ERAs from last season and you will find seven of the eight teams that made the playoffs. But examine those teams more closely and it's nearly impossible to identify a repeatable formula for building an excellent pitching staff.

As a near-deafening refrain of techno music rocked the 1st Mariner Arena, Kathy Brown gathered her 16 girls in the quietest corner she could find, drew them into a tight circle and voiced a theme she hoped would propel them through their 150 seconds in the spotlight. "I don't want any attitudes," said Brown, coach of Coastal Xtreme, a Salisbury cheerleading squad in town yesterday to compete in the 18th annual Maryland State Cheer and Dance Championships. "Go out as there a team, and you'll take the title."

I love franchises with roots deep in the ground and more heartache and suffering than a Nashville jukebox. But let's not pretend the Tampa Bay Rays haven't paid their dues and made a sufficient offering to the sporting gods. A good friend of mine is a Tampa, Fla., native and a Rays fan from Day One. He points out that it takes most teams many, many years to lose 972 games. Tampa Bay spent years simply fighting for a team and then managed to squeeze decades of despair into 10 short seasons.