zeke smith photography

As someone who lives in a college basketball town, it's no secret: I love March. It's an incredible month of what I think is the greatest spectacle in sports - I guess if you can call a month-long series of events a spectacle.  I've shot both pro and college sports, and while arguments can be made for the superiority of both I really love the college game because: 1) the players seem to wear their emotions on their sleeves a lot more, which makes for both great drama and great pictures, and 2) in the 1-and-done system of the NCAAs, history can be made on any given night with an upset, whereas the better team generally wins out in a best-of-5 or best-of-7 playoff format. Granted, this can also produce some disastrous results for the teams you root for;  the name of Weber State's Harold "the Sheaux" Arceneaux will forever be embedded in the minds of Carolina fans for his one-man destruction of their season in 1999.

 However, those types of moments are forever embedded in the minds of a lot of people. My favorite March Madness memory is probably from the 1998 tournament, when I was a sophomore in high school. On the first day of the NCAA tournament, I came into my second-period Health class expecting another pretty average day, but our teacher Jim Sziksai informed us that an old friend of his, Valparasio coach Homer Drew, would be appearing in the NCAAs that morning and asked if it would be all right with us if we took the day off and watched Valpo play. He acknowledged they would probably get killed anyways but high school kids relish doing no work, and for those of us that were sports fans it was that much more awesome. Some of us watched the game pretty intently while most of the class caught up on homework but wouldn't you know it, spunky Valparaiso hung around with 3-seed Ole Miss and as the game drew closer and closer to the end, the entire class got wrapped up in watching and rooting for the underdog. As it got down to the last few minutes, Sziksai was so excited he started pulling in a few other teachers on the hall, so other kids were pouring into our classroom. There was this collective tension as the clock ticked toward the end, when the coach's son, Bryce Drew, would produce one of the most memorable finishes in NCAA history...

The entire classroom, now stuffed to capacity, went nuts. I think those are the types of memories I love because it demonstrates something that I really believe to be good about sports: it brings people together. This random group of high schoolers in Asheville, NC was going crazy over an Indiana college winning a game in Oklahoma City. Pretty awesome.