Congratulations to the West Tisbury School boys basketball team, which Coach Matt Gebo guided to victory against Oak Bluffs in the Island championship last week. There was a big turnout at the high school gym with parents, friends and younger siblings rushing the court afterwards to celebrate both Hawks and Blazers. The team mascots — hawk and dragon — were on hand too, keeping things friendly. How on earth do these kids play basketball wearing masks? And how does somebody in a full hawk costume not keel over from heat exhaustion in a crowded gym? They’re all amazing.

If your kids are interested in volleyball and haven’t signed up, it’s not too late. Coaches Annie Ollen and Jonathan Fleischmann are hoping to have both junior varsity and varsity teams, both co-ed. Games will start after the February break. Also, a heads-up: if your child has had Covid-19 since their last doctor’s check-up, they’ll need to get cleared by their doctor before joining a school team.

But enough with the sports talk, am I right? The schoolwide spelling bee was Tuesday, Feb. 15. As ever, some students went all out, studying the lists of words and dreaming of the big competition in Washington, D.C. There was a lot of buzz regarding this event, at least in the backseat of my car on the way home from school. Congratulations to seventh grader Story Taylor, who won for the second time.

Spelling bees fascinate me. They’re a deeply strange way to celebrate academic achievement, and yet they carry on from one generation to the next. Is there anyone in America who remains unscarred by some spelling bee-related indignity? And this year brings a fresh challenge: not to bring up masks again, but how are the judges going to tell certain letters apart through triple-ply polyester? However you look at it, this is going to be an edge-of-your-seat event.

If you have open-pollinated or heirloom seeds, or if you’ve saved seeds from last growing season, or even if you are entirely seedless but have an interest in gardening, come to the library for the annual Martha’s Vineyard Community Seed Library’s seed swap on Saturday, Feb. 19 from 12:30 to 2 p.m. It’s not hyperbolic to say that swapping seeds like this is an incredible and quietly revolutionary act that can change the world.

The rising sixth graders in Chilmark and West Tisbury are raising funds for their Shenandoah voyage in August. Find your nearest young friend and buy a raffle ticket! The prize is $1,000 worth of scratch tickets and, with a limited number of entries, the odds are pretty good. Thank you to Dardanella Slavin for organizing this.

And by the way: remember before Venmo, when kids did their own fundraising? Those were the days. If we wanted a class trip we had to hustle the mean streets asking grown folks for cash money. Sometimes they said no and afterward we walked home barefoot through skunk-infested woods. (Fact check: parents were heavily involved in that kind of fundraising, as well.)

Mother Nature loves us and in her kindness gave us a little snowfall the night of the Super Bowl. My freshman staggered out of his bedroom early Monday morning and took a look outside. “There’s no way we have school today,” he said hopefully. I told him about the two-hour delay, expecting thanks and praise, but his face crumpled. “It’s not enough,” he said sadly, and returned to his bed.