I didn't feel good about doing fall sports predictions before the season started. I hope you'll forgive me. I had my reasons.

But now that we have a very small sample size of results, I'm ready to forecast this year's fall sports in the Tri-9 Conference. You can click the keyword 'predictions' above to see how I've fared in the past.

Spring sports are off to their typical rainy start. The only surprise is that the forecast doesn't call for snow later this week -- it's almost become a tradition for snow the week of the season's first baseball game.

Gotta love North Carolina weather.

Let's get to my picks for all 8 spring sports.

Once again, I'll be ranking all of our area basketball teams every week. Expect an update each Sunday on this blog.

Today, I'm not only bringing you my preseason SWakeSports rankings, but also predictions on other winter sports.

You've seen how my weekly picks went for the football season. What about my overall picks?

Not nearly as good.

But, I'll take the time to show you just how bad I was, sport-by-sport. I even gave myself grades.

My how things have changed in this neck of the woods when it comes to high school football.

My first year here -- 2008 -- the Tri-Eight Conference had just two teams with winning records. In each of the past two years, five teams have had winning records.

It's a good change for competition's sake, but that's made things harder for me to make any predictions. It's given a different feel to predictions as well. Being the third place team in the Tri-Nine (Tri-Eight as it was then) in 2008 meant you were an average team. Last year, it meant you were one of the Triangle's best.

And so with great difficulty, I present to you my predictions for the Tri-Nine this season (game picks will be in the next blog). There's a mini preview with each.

It's time again for my fall sports predictions, in which I try to make the safest pick possible after as much research as possible.

You may ask: why so much research, they're just opinions and predictions?

Hopefully you've seen my boys and girls basketball previews today.

As you may be accustomed to by now, I rank all of our area basketball teams every week. The first ranking will be the first Sunday in December. This year we add Grace Christian and make it 11 teams (eight public, three private).

Here are my preseason rankings for both boys and girls basketball, with how I think they'll do in their respective leagues. I also added other winter sports at the end.

You'll have to wait till Wednesday to read my football predictions on the year. As for the rest of the fall sports, I won't keep you waiting any longer.

Last year, I was pretty much dead-on with my assessment of our area's conference tournaments.

I don't think I'll have as much luck this year, but I'll try anyway.

While our area men's teams are losing a ton of seniors, almost every area girls team returns just about everybody. In fact, only two of the 12 players named to the Tri-Eight All-Conference teams will graduate (Cary's Kelsey Campbell and Athens Drive's Alyx Ingram). In some ways, next year's girls basketball teams will resemble the competition that we saw this year from the boys. There's one clear frontrunner (Apex) but a number of talented squads with a chance to go deep next postseason.