Sorry it's been such a long time since the last post. The end of basketball season, particularly one in which at least one local team goes deep in the state playoffs, becomes a huge grind. Lots of traveling, lots of late nights.

Anyway, now that it's in between seasons, this gives us a chance to catch up on some news and notes from local high school sports.

Wildwood Catholic's Anthony Raffa has been named a first team South Jersey all-star by the Courier-Post and the Philadlephia Inquirer. Middle Township's Mike Farrow was a first-team pick by the Courier-Post and a second-team selection by the Inquirer. Speaking of Raffa, who's headed to Albany, he certainly distinguished himself in Saturday's North-South All-Star Game by scoring 20 points. Here's a video highlight link from the game:

http://www.acidplanet.com/components/embedfile.asp?asset=959250&T=9374

In case anyone's wondering, area winter sports all-stars will be announced in this week's editions of the Gazette and Wildwood Leader.

Now that's late March, obviously the attention begins to turn to spring sports. As usual, one issue that comes to the fore every year in the spring is the weather. Friday afternoon was no exception as I bounced around the area to take some pictures of spring sports practices/scrimmages. Here's how dramatic the temperature difference was: at about 3:45 p.m., it was 76 degrees at the Goshen Complex in Middle Township, where I checked out the Panther baseball team. At 4:30 p.m., it was 62 degrees and breezy at Lower Cape May Regional, where a slew of Caper Tiger teams were working hard on the athletic complex. And then at 5:15 p.m., it was just 51 degreees in North Wildwood, where the softball teams from Wildwood Catholic and Lower Cape May were scrimmaging. Incredible!

Speaking of spring sports, sources tell me that a scout from the New York Mets was on hand last week to take a look at Lower Cape May's Matt Szczur as the Caper Tigers battled Wildwood in a scrimmage. Szczur already has a scholarship to Villanova for football and baseball, so it will be interesting to see if he gets drafted in June.

Also in this week's papers, we hope to have previews for area baseball, softball and boys tennis teams. I say HOPE because a lot of that depends on the cooperation of area coaches. It seems that every year, it's the same coaches who neglect to send back information forms about their teams. Then it's left to us to track down the information. Not such a huge task in the wintertime, but there are now as many as eight spring sports being played by the five schools we regularly cover in southern Cape May County, so sometimes tracking down the info about every individual team becomes difficult. So if there are any spring sports coaches reading this, PLEASE turn the forms back ASAP.