ORONO – A beloved former Black Bear is returning to the men’s basketball team, but this time, he’ll be the one steering the ship.

Chris Markwood was announced as the new coach of the University of Maine’s men’s basketball team. He will be the 23rd to hold that position at the university. While this is his first collegiate head coaching gig, he has plenty of experience on the bench – he has spent the past 16 years as an assistant coach at various DI programs (including a previous stint at his alma mater).

Markwood comes to UMaine from his previous spot at Boston College, where he served as an assistant to this year’s squad. Before that he spent seven years on the staff at Northeastern, serving in a variety of capacities – after this arrival in 2014, he was an assistant coach for four years before being elevated to associate head coach and recruiting coordinator in his final three seasons with the Huskies. The three years prior to his time at Northeastern were spent as an assistant at the University of Vermont.

However, Maine fans will remember Markwood for his time here in the state – both on the floor and on the bench.

Markwood played his high school ball at South Portland High School, where he was named the state’s Gatorade Player of the Year in 2000. He matriculated at Notre Dame, playing two seasons for the Fighting Irish before transferring to his home state’s flagship university. Markwood played two seasons for the Black Bears and was the team captain in his senior year; he graduated in 2005.

After graduation, he spent six years on the University of Maine coaching staff before leaving for the Vermont job.

It seems like a great hire for the Black Bears, a native Mainer and school alum taking the reins for a program that has struggled to find its way in recent years. Over the course of his coaching career, he has shown himself to be a good tactician and a solid recruiter – he’ll need to utilize both skills to the fullest to maximize the potential of what can admittedly be a tough sell of a situation.

We’ll have to wait and see what Markwood does with this opportunity – it’s his first head coaching gig, and again, UMaine’s program has faced ample obstacles in the past and has plenty looming in its future. But with a talented young coach like Markwood taking the lead, there’s reason for optimism going forward for the Black Bears.

It’s that time again, that time of year when even the most casual of sports fans (and plenty of non-fans) start paying attention to the wild and wooly world of college hoops.

You guessed it, folks. NCAA tourney time is upon us.

Selection Sunday is on March 13 this year, so I figured I’d try to get some thoughts out there far enough in advance for you fine folks to take advantage when the time comes to fill out your own brackets.

(Please bear in mind - I’m no expert when it comes to the college hardwood. At all. I have the basic knowledge of the general sports fan and that’s it. However, I do have a touch of the degenerate gambler about me, so … take that for whatever you like.)

We all know the drill at this point: you pony up some cash or sign up for a contest and fill out your own copy of the bracket, picking winners all the way through the tournament, up to and including the 2022 champion. If you make the best picks, you win the pot.

Of course, with over 9 quintillion ways to fill out a bracket, the odds are not in your favor. But hey - there’s always a chance.

Here are a few of my (very basic) observations with regards to the sweet science of bracketology.

He’s the winningest Division I men’s basketball coach in NCAA history. He’s won multiple national titles and been to even more Final Fours. He’s been in charge of USA Basketball and led the national team to gold medals more than once. He is an iconic figure, one of the titans of the game’s last half-century.

You know who he is … even if you might not know how to spell his name.

Ian O’Connor’s “Coach K: The Rise and Reign of Mike Krzyzewski” (Mariner Books, $28) purports to be the definitive biography of the man who is arguably the definitive figure in college basketball in the past 50 years. From his early days growing up in Chicago to his time as West Point – first as a player, then as a coach – to his ascension to the top job at Duke, where he turned a decent ACC team into one of the greatest college basketball programs ever.

O’Connor dives deep, digging through extant sources as well as conducting his own interviews with scores upon scores of people with close connections to Coach K. The result is a fascinating portrait of sporting greatness, a long look at a man who ascended to the heights of his profession. A man who, for all his flaws, would prove to be a beloved figure in the history of his sport.

It’s that time again, that time of year when even the most casual of sports fans (or even non-fans) start paying attention to the wild and wooly world of college hoops.

That’s right, folks. NCAA tourney time is upon us.

Selection Sunday is just around the corner, so I thought I might try to get some thoughts out there far enough in advance for you fine folks to take advantage when the time comes to fill out your own brackets.

(Please bear in mind - I’m no expert when it comes to the college hardwood. However, I do have a touch of the degenerate gambler about me, so … take that for whatever you like.)

We all know the drill at this point: you pony up a bit of cash or sign up for a contest and fill out your own copy of the bracket, picking winners all the way through the tournament, up to and including the 2020 champion. If you make the best picks, you win the pot.

Of course, with over 9 quintillion ways to fill out a bracket, the odds are not in your favor. But hey - there’s always a chance.

Here are a few of my (very basic) observations with regards to the sweet science of bracketology.

There are few times on the American sports calendar as eagerly anticipated as March Madness. The NCAA basketball tournament is one of the most celebrated sporting stretches of the year, with teams from all over the country harboring hopes of championship glory.

Now, the reality of the tournament is that, while there will be 64 teams that gain entry to the bracket (68, technically, when you take the play-in games into account), only a handful of those have realistic aspirations of winning it all. For the majority of these teams, the real victory is getting there in the first place.

A handful of those hopefuls serve as the primary subjects for legendary sportswriter John Feinstein’s newest book “The Back Roads to March: The Unsung, Unheralded, and Unknown Heroes of a College Basketball Season” (Doubleday, $27.95). It’s a look at the teams and people who live the college game off the beaten path. Sure, there’s some mention of the Dukes and Kentuckys and Virginias of the world, but this book isn’t about them – it’s about the teams grinding it out in conferences where if you don’t win the whole thing, you have no shot at The Dance.

It’s that time of year again, that time when even the most casual of sports fans (or even non-fans) start paying attention to the wild and wooly world of college hoops.

That’s right, folks. NCAA tourney time is upon us.

Selection Sunday is just around the corner, so I thought I might try to get some thoughts out there far enough in advance for you fine folks to take advantage when the time comes to fill out your own brackets. Bear in mind - I’m no expert when it comes to the college hardwood.

However, I do have a touch of the degenerate gambler about me.

We all know the drill at this point: you pony up a bit of cash or sign up for a contest and fill out your own copy of the bracket, picking winners all the way through the tournament, up to and including the 2019 champion. If you make the best picks, you win the pot.

Of course, with over 9 quintillion ways to fill out a bracket, the odds are not in your favor. But hey - there’s always a chance.

Here are a few of my (very basic) observations with regards to the sweet science of bracketology.

The Legends Club' looks at three giants of college hoops

One of the most exciting times of the entire sports year is fast approaching. The NCAA basketball tournament has reached the point of being a cultural touchstone dozens of games playing out over the course of weeks, with schools large and small taking their shots at the immortality that is a national championship.

College basketball has always lent itself to fierce rivalries, but perhaps the fiercest of them all was and to a degree still is located in the state of North Carolina.