This past weekend, winter-season high school athletes, and the media following them, completed the most harried two weeks of the year. Finals were held in gymnastics, hockey, wrestling, and bowling, as well as advanced tournament games in girls and boys basketball. Add to the mix that basketball now has seven divisions, rather than four, and you really need a scorecard to keep track of the competitors.

Watching basketball has been energized this season by the return of the Fairgrounds Coliseum as a tournament venue. Now known as Taft Coliseum at the Ohio Expo Center, you could once again take in ten straight hours of basketball the past two Saturdays. One of my favorite parent moments was watching two of my sons be part of a Grandview team that won a district title at the Coliseum under coach Ray Corbett (now part of the CBUSsports family). They each still have a piece of that net.

One of the small controversies this winter has been the impact of having seven divisions and scheduling state semifinals in basketball at places other than the University of Dayton where the finals are held. In years past, the semis were played in the same long weekends at UD or wherever the finals were scheduled. This year, to accommodate the additional teams, the semifinal contests are being held at various venues the week before the finals.

A lot of fans would like to make it all happen in one weekend. There has also been some chatter that reaching the state semifinals should mean playing in larger venues, not high school gyms. For us at CBUSsports, we have to juggle games involving area teams at the same time at different sites, increasing our costs. Having said all of that, I’ve been involved in assembling season schedules in my time in minor league baseball. It is incredibly difficult, so I don’t envy the folks at OHSAA. It’s the first year with this challenge and I’m sure they’ll review it all when the dust settles.

In other news, the addition of girls wrestling has been a phenomenon. We’ve received a lot of positive reaction to our coverage. Otterbein University became the first college in our area to assemble a women’s wrestling program this year and they have a number of CBUS-area grapplers on their roster. Freshmen Hailey Hatfield from Delaware Hayes and Grace Murphy from Whetstone both recently qualified and competed in the NCWWC Nationals in Coralville, Iowa. More opportunities for more athletes.

And as we’ve seen high school compel the addition of college programs, we’ve seen the influence of a professional team on area high schools. For the second time in three years, Central Ohio has a state champion in hockey. The Upper Arlington Golden Bears beat St. Ignatius this past weekend for the title after Olentangy Liberty won it two years ago. There is little doubt that presence of the Blue Jackets in Columbus has had an outsize impact on the development of local youth and school teams. Those two OHSAA championships were the first since the tourney started in 1978.

What fun it has been the last couple of weeks for those of us who love high school sports. Whatever issues exist, they are tiny compared to the pure joy fans were able to see almost daily on the court, mat, rink, and lanes. Here at CBUSsports, we’ll go wherever basketball is played to finish up this winter season and then get ready for spring.