It's been quite a few years since I covered sports on a regular basis for a newspaper. But staff writer Aaron Moody's vacation last week offered me just that opportunity.

Tuesday night brought the season-opener for Knightdale's boy's basketball team. On Wednesday night, I drifted out to East Wake to watch a wrestling match and on Thursday night, the East Wake girls opened their hoops season.

All three games were interesting for different reasons.

At Knightdale, coach Battle Watkins is trying the build the kind of program that reloads rather than rebuilds. He lost a lot of really good ballplayers off last year's team that went deep into the state playoffs. But to open the season, his Knights fended off a pretty good Millbrook team.

At East Wake, wrestling coach Brian Staples is embarking on his first year as the wrestling coach. Brian was himself an all-star wrestler at East Wake in the mid-80s. When I told my brother Lee that Brian was the coach of this year's team he commented on the fact that Brian was so good as a wrestler because he was so smart. Lee's comment stuck with me, so when I interviewed Brian after the match, I asked him about the importance of being a smart wrestler. Brian agreed that intelligence on the mat is more critical than most people think.

I have to admit, I was one of those folks who always thought the best wrestlers were the strongest and quickest wrestlers. And while I'm sure that helps, I suspect Lee and Brian are correct. Brains almost always beats brawn.

After two sporting events and two wins by the home team, I returned to East Wake on Thursday night to catch the girls basketball season-opener. For a while it looked like it might be a good game. But the second quarter proved to be East Wake's undoing and they fell to Wake Forest-Rolesville. Senior Nicole Mangino was a great interview after the ball game. She described the game as "just chaos." I thought that was an extremely intuitive observation and I suspect Coach Toni Vick will work with her charges to help them avoid that tendency toward chaos in future games.

High school basketball has changed significantly in the two decades I've followed it. For several years now, the boys and girls have operated under different schedules. For years, I used to go to the gym and catch the second half of the boys junior varsity game (there was no girls junior varsity), followed by the varsity girls game and finally, the boys varsity game. All told, I'd watch about five hours of basketball all from a crouched position in one end zone where I shot pictures and took notes feverishly.

Neighboring Franklin County enjoys some of the greatest rivalries of any in the local area. Games in the old Bunn High School gym were hot, torrid affairs and on cold nights all the heat generated from the fans would turn the floor slick. One game between Bunn and arch-rival Louisburg actually had to be rescheduled because the floor became dangerously wet.

Aaron returns this week, so I'll return to my staid government meetings, but the chance to see some ball games was a treat. It will be for you, too, if you make time to go.