One win last March was all that separated Elon from its first-ever NCAA Tournament appearance. After Team 108 came 40 minutes away from hearing “Elon Phoenix” called on Selection Sunday, the program’s 109th-ever squad reloads for another push toward March Madness.

Summer school provides a springboard into the fall semester for those who use it. For UNC-Wilmington guard Mike Okauru, a summertime course with NBA players and Olympians could have him poised for a monster 2021-22.

The last of the scheduled visitors Mike and Gina Farrelly planned to welcome at their Long Island home last Sunday afternoon rang their doorbell at 5 PM. He was the only one to show up as scheduled — and the only one who wasn’t arriving to get a tour of the house Gina had spent the last several days cleaning and preparing for potential suitors.

When a student attends school for the first time one of their earliest lessons is the ABCs. They provide the foundation on which virtually everything else is built.

A fanbase spoiled by 15 years of storybook coaching tales began dreaming of another one Jan. 31, 2009, when Speedy Claxton returned to the David S. Mack Sports & Exhibition Complex — dubbed by some as “The House That Speedy Built” when it opened as Hofstra Arena in January 2000— to have his no. 10 retired and raised to the rafters. 

Like thousands of fathers across the country, Martin Inglesby’s bond with his sports-loving son has grown one morning at a time. But neither he nor his son really enjoyed what the daily ritual evolved into over the last few months.

Twenty-eight teams are gone from the 2021 Women’s NIT field, leaving just four in the Memphis area vying for the championship. 

The goal for Illinois is to be the team cutting down the nets on the first Monday of April — something that obviously did not work out — so head coach Brad Underwood’s opening statement following the top-seeded Fighting Illini’s 78-49 win over no. 16 Drexel in Friday’s NCAA Tournament Midwest Regional opener was about as bottom-line and businesslike as possible.

The previously unimaginable — winning a conference tournament yet not getting to perform in the NCAA Tournament — became reality over the span of a few days last March for 11 programs including, of course, CAA champion Hofstra.

Twenty-one years ago in Indianapolis, Michigan State won what is still today the last national championship claimed by a Big Ten Conference program. 

Zach Spiker appreciated how many friends and former co-workers wanted to text him as late Monday night seeped into Tuesday morning. But with the biggest game of his career awaiting in mere hours, Spiker shut off his cell phone.

When Mike Schrage came to Elon in 2019, he brought a philosophy cultivated in tenures coaching alongside Chris Holtmann and Brad Stevens that each individual team should craft its own identity unique to the personalities, talents of and circumstances facing it. 

HARRISONBURG, Va., Sixth-seeded Drexel captured its first Hercules Tires CAA Men’s Basketball Championship and earned a trip to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1996 after a 63-56 win over eighth-seeded Elon on Tuesday night at the Atlantic Union Bank Center in Harrisonburg, Va.

The head coach’s teary-eyed press conference into as much a staple of March as brackets, buzzer-beaters and “One Shining Moment.”

Twenty-five years ago this month, Bill Herrion quipped that “people don’t know who Drexel is."