Massachusetts
Local roundup: Massachusetts Pirates to play Indoor Football League playoff game in Texas
Despite limping into the playoffs, the Massachusetts Pirates are one of the eight teams to make the Indoor Football League’s postseason.
The third-seeded Pirates (8-8) will attempt to upset the second-seeded Frisco Fighters (13-3). The teams will clash Saturday at 7:05 p.m. at the Comerica Center in Frisco, Texas in a first-round Eastern Conference game.
In its first season in Lowell playing out of the Tsongas Center, Massachusetts looked like one of the best teams in the IFL during the first month.
The Pirates captured a thrilling 44-40 win over a strong Green Bay Blizzard team in its season opener on the road. Green Bay went on to capture the No. 1 seed.
The Pirates followed that up with three straight wins at home to start at 4-0 thanks to victories over the Jacksonville Sharks (26-21), Sioux Falls Storm (49-41) and Iowa Barnstormers (52-29).
But they have been unable to duplicate that magic down the stretch. Massachusetts went 3-5 on the road and ended the regular season with two straight losses. In the Pirates’ last game, they fell 44-22 to the Tulsa, Oilers in their worst loss of the season.
In that game, former Westford Academy quarterback Connor Degenhardt scored a pair of touchdowns.
Massachusetts and Frisco waged a terrific battle in the regular season. On June 1 in Texas, the Fighters held off the Pirates, 52-48.
If the Pirates go on the road and upset Frisco, they will meet the winner of No. 4 Quad City and No. 1 Green Bay, who open the playoffs Friday.
In the Western Conference, No. 3 Arizona will visit No. 2 Vegas on Saturday and No. 4 San Diego will play at No. 1 Bay Area on Sunday.
Future River Hawk
The UMass Lowell baseball program has received a commitment from a talented New York infielder.
Tyler McKillop announced recently on social media his intention to play for head coach Nick Barese and his staff. A 6-1, 180-pound shortstop/third baseman, McKillop is coming off a terrific junior season at Bayport-Blue Point High School.
He hit .377 with a .500 on-base percentage, .492 slugging, 23 hits, 16 RBI, 12 walks and six steals.
New WHS coach
Wilmington High boys basketball players are set to meet their new coach on Thursday.
Former Methuen High coach Anthony Faradie will coach the Wildcat varsity program. He’s considered a very solid hire as he did a terrific job turning around the Rangers in the tough Merrimack Valley Conference.
Faradie lives in Wilmington and works in Medford so changing coaching jobs will certainly help his commute.
Faradie posted a 125-103 record at Methuen, including a 49-29 mark since the pandemic. Prior to coaching in Methuen, he coached six seasons at Medford.
Witkum victorious
The worth was wait it for Westford’s Ed Witkum on Saturday night in North Woodstock, N.H.
In the final race of the night – six divisions were in action – at White Mountain Motorsports Park, Witkum drove to victory to capture the debut of the Little Webb’s 350 Supermodified Series. Witkum wasn’t deterred by a major caution on lap 14 as he led for all 40 laps during a dominating performance.
Another local joined him in the top 10. James Capps III of Tewksbury drove to sixth.
Originally Published:
Massachusetts
Massachusetts High School Boys Basketball Scores (1/17/2025)
The Massachusetts high school boys basketball season is in full swing, and High School On SI has scores for every team and classification.
Keep track of Massachusetts high school boys basketball scores below.
Massachusetts high school boys basketball scores
MASSACHUSETTS HIGH SCHOOL BOYS BASKETBALL STATEWIDE SCORES
DIVISION MCSAO
DIVISION 5
DIVISION 4
DIVISION 3
DIVISION 2
DIVISION 1
2024-25 MASSACHUSETTS BOYS BASKETBALL SCHEDULES: FIND YOUR TEAM
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Massachusetts
The primary care system in Massachusetts is broken and getting worse, new state report says – The Boston Globe
Primary care, the foundation of the state’s health care industry, is crumbling, and Massachusetts is running out of time to fix it, according to a report published Thursday by the state’s Health Policy Commission, which sounded the alarm on many ways the front door to the health care industry is broken.
Among the problems: high and growing rates of residents reporting difficulty accessing primary care; an aging and increasingly dissatisfied physician workforce; and an anemic pipeline of new clinicians.
“I worry when I look at some of this data that the state of primary care has crossed a line from which recovery will be very difficult, unless we take action soon,” the commission’s executive director, David Seltz, said in an interview.
The report sets the stage for the work of a new state-appointed primary care task force, created by a health care law signed earlier this month. The law outlines that the new 25-member group will consider issuing recommendations related to increasing recruitment and retention of the primary care workforce and establishing a target for how much insurers should spend on primary care.
Such goals would put Massachusetts more in line with other states, including California, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington, which have set benchmarks for primary care spending. Seltz called such efforts an important way to rebalance the incentives of the market.
“This is an opportunity to shift the dialogue, to one of: ‘What can we do immediately to relieve this deep challenge?’” Seltz said.
While the findings set the stage for reform, they are perhaps not a surprise. Previous reports on primary care have been blaring the warning signal for years. Increasingly high portions of residents have said they had difficulty accessing health care. Analysis on health care spending has shown dwindling amounts of health care dollars going to primary care.
But the report lays out in stark terms just how dire the prognosis on primary care is.
Among the findings:
- Patients’ ability to access primary care is bad and getting worse. New patients must wait an average of 40 days in Boston, twice as long as the average of 15 other cities studied. Access to primary care worsened across the state in recent years, with such issues especially pronounced in lower-income communities.
- A lack of primary care access means more reliance on emergency departments, which are more costly places to get care. In 2023, a whopping two-thirds of those who sought care in hospitals’ emergency departments said they were there because they couldn’t get an appointment in a doctor’s office or clinic.
- Massachusetts has a lot of doctors — the highest total physicians per capita in the country. However the vast majority of those physicians are specialists. Compared to other states, Massachusetts has the fifth lowest share of primary care physicians.
- The primary care workforce is aging, with an estimated half of primary care physicians over the age of 55.
- The pipeline for new primary care doctors is dwindling, with only one in seven new Massachusetts physicians in 2021 going into primary care — among the lowest share in the country.
A primary driver of the current challenge is related to the low reimbursement rates primary care receives relative to other specialties and hospital services, the report states, a factor that disincentivizes both new graduates from entering the field and the health care industry from investing in it.
Beyond the low pay, primary care can be an exhausting job, requiring myriad billing and administrative tasks, increased documentation requirements, and visits too short to accommodate the core point of primary care — caring for the patient.
Dr. Alecia McGregor, a commissioner and an assistant professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, noted the state is seeing evidence of that very burnout and corporatization of medicine, with both those complaints cited as key reasons primary care doctors at Mass General Brigham recently filed to unionize.
The state is currently making up for primary care physician shortages by leaning more on nurse practitioners and physician assistants, together known as “advanced practice providers.” However the share of even those providers working in primary care is dropping, in part because of the low pay.
“Relying on advanced practice providers to serve as (primary care providers) instead of physicians may not resolve challenges related to the availability of providers if we can’t improve job sustainability in the field of primary care,” said Sasha Albert, associate director of research and cost trends at the Health Policy Commission, during a presentation at Thursday’s commission meeting.
Beyond setting the stage for a new task force, Commissioner Tim Foley said the “scary” report emphasized the importance of the commission remaining focused on drivers of the recruitment and retention challenges.
“It just highlights again our need to continue to focus on the workforce issues,” said Foley, who is also the head of union 1199SEIU, which represents health care workers. “We had the hearing on the impact of the workforce, and it hasn’t gotten any better. It’s probably gotten worse.”
Jessica Bartlett can be reached at jessica.bartlett@globe.com. Follow her @ByJessBartlett.
Massachusetts
About Half of Massachusetts Cities Have Four-Year Mayoral Terms
Fall River Mayor Paul Coogan is up for re-election this fall. If it seems the Spindle City is in a perpetual state of campaigning, it is.
Like all Massachusetts cities with elected mayors, Fall River has a municipal election every two years. New Bedford does as well.
However, while Fall River elects a mayor every other year, mayoral elections are held every four years in New Bedford.
City councilors, school committee members, and other elected municipal officials in both cities face re-election every two years, thus the perception that they are always campaigning.
Of the 351 communities in Massachusetts, 47 have elected mayors. Twenty-four (51 percent) of them have four-year mayoral terms. Twenty-three (49 percent) have two-year terms.
For most of its history, New Bedford had two-year mayoral terms. In 2017, voters narrowly approved a ballot question extending New Bedford’s mayoral term to four years.
There was a time when New Bedford held mayoral elections annually.
Mayor Jon Mitchell, first elected Mayor of New Bedford in 2011, was the first to win the new four-year term in 2019. In 2023, Mitchell won a second four-year term. Mitchell has not indicated if he plans to seek a third four-year term when his current term is up in 2027.
Mitchell told WBSM as far back as 2013 that he favored a four-year term, calling the two-year term “archaic.”
In 2017, Mitchell told WBSM, “Running the City of New Bedford is not like running a lemonade stand.” Mitchell said a two-year term forces more short-term decisions than long-term ones.
The Massachusetts Municipal Association’s website lists all current Massachusetts mayors, the length of their term, and when their term expires.
New Bedford Mayors
New Bedford has had 49 different mayors, along with two acting mayors and one interim mayor.
Gallery Credit: Tim Weisberg
WBSM’s Top SouthCoast Stories 1/1 to 1/10
These are the top stories in New Bedford and across the SouthCoast from January 1 to January 10, 2025. Click the photo or title to read the complete story.
Gallery Credit: Tim Weisberg
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