March Madness is hitting San Jose this week, with NCAA men’s basketball tournament games set to play at SAP Center. And unlike the Super Bowl in February, all the focus will be on downtown.
San Pedro Square again will be activated as an “entertainment zone,” with activities Thursday through Saturday. That includes a pop-up music fest featuring DJ Diesel (aka Shaquille O’Neal) on Friday from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. About 5,000 free tickets were distributed for the event on Sharks Way — if you got one, you should know by now — but you should still be able to catch the sounds from San Pedro Street.
Following that event on Friday, a drone show will light up the sky over the Guadalupe River Park’s Discovery Meadow, which is an easy 20-minue walk south of San Pedro Square if you’re visiting from out of town.
The Shark Tank also will transform into Basketball Central this week, with fan fests planned outside SAP Center for both Thursday and Saturday. The festivities will include interactive projection mapping on the exterior of the arena, plenty of music and food and a visit from Hoop Bus. The nonprofit uses basketball to transform communities and brings a school bus with a hoop on both ends so community members can get a taste of the game.
Fans for the four teams — Arizona, Texas, Purdue and Arkansas — will be posting up at various venues in and around San Pedro Square, whether they’re going to the games or not. By the way, if you’re looking to catch other regionals during the tournament, San Pedro Square will have more than 100 screens on games going on throughout the country.
You can check out a lineup of all the city’s official activities at sj26.org.
KHANNA COMES THROUGH: U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna paid a visit to Sunnyvale Community Services’ headquarters on Kern Avenue last Friday, where Executive Director Marie Bernard gave him a tour of the facilities — which are being repaired and upgraded thanks to $1.8 million of funds which Khanna helped secure during the Biden administration.
The funding is specifically helping to replace the warehouse’s roof so it can be prepared for a solar energy system and battery storage. That’s a big deal for the nonprofit, which helps more than 11,000 people every year with food assistance, financial aid and other services.
Sunnyvale Community Services Executive Director Marie Bernard, left, gives Rep. Ro Khanna a tour of the nonprofit’s headquarters on Kern Avenue on Friday, March 20, 2026. (PRx Digital)
“We’re a hub here in our community where many other agencies also come to get connected to the agencies they want to serve, so keeping the roof and getting it repaired and replaced was essential,” Bernard said.
During Friday’s event, Khanna said money already appropriated by Congress for projects like Sunnyvale Community Services’ roof work was delayed by the Trump administration. “If you’re a nonprofit and you’re not getting that money for nine months, you have layoffs, you can’t make payroll,” he said.
SCHOOL SPIRIT: More than 425 people braved an unseasonably warm afternoon last Thursday to attend Rey of Hope, the annual fundraising celebration at Cristo Rey San Jose Jesuit High School. As President Silvia Scandar Mahan has proudly told me time and again, 99 percent of the school’s seniors — all coming from low-income families — are accepted into colleges, with many getting to four to eight schools each.
With a stat like that, it’s no surprise that supporters quickly met and surpassed the evening’s goal of raising money to provide 175 scholarships at $15,000 each. No doubt that math would be easy for a Cristo Rey student, but for those of us who are math-challenged, that works out to $2,625,000.
Cristo Rey also honored two of its founding supporters, Sue Sobrato and John A. Sobrato. They weren’t able to attend in person, but sent along a video message that praised Cristo Rey’s work-study model. “We believe that combining a college preparatory education combined with real work experience is really the secret sauce at Cristo Rey,” John A. Sobrato said.
That sentiment was echoed by alum Alex Vazquez, who evoked emotions in the audience with his speech. Raised in East San Jose by immigrant parents, Vazquez said his mother had to fight to get him into Cristo Rey, where he flourished thanks to the Corporate Work Study Program.
“It gave me a professional vocabulary and the confidence to hold my own in tech conglomerates,” said Vazquez, who graduated from Lehigh University last year and now works as a strategy consultant at EY-Parthenon. “For the first time, I wasn’t an outsider looking in; I was on the office floor, rubbing elbows with leaders who showed me that my dreams weren’t just dreams — they were projections.”