According to doctors, 19 of the players suffered from muscle damage from an enzyme known as creatine kinase, or CK.

While one of the doctors, Dr. Craig Winkler of Willamette Valley Medical Center in McMinnville, is calling it a weird case, it sounds like the cause of the injuries was an intense training camp put on by McMinnville’s first-year coach Jeff Kearin.

Players and the coach have said that the camp, which began on Aug. 15, was done indoors in non-air-conditioned rooms on days where the outside temperature was over 90 degrees. Players were not allowed to take water breaks until every exercise was done, and if someone messed up, everyone started over again.

High CK levels can result from vigorous exercise, or the use of supplements. The lack of water and extreme temperatures – one report estimates it was close to 115 inside the room – compounded the problem.

According to The Associated Press, of the 19 players admitted, five were treated in the ER and sent home and 14 were admitted to the hospital. Three of those players required surgery to reduce the soreness and swelling in their arms.

There are a few things here that are quite alarming. One is how close to serious injury some of these kids were.

The normal range for CK is 35 to 232 units per liter, but some students showed levels as high as 42,000, putting them at risk of kidney injury, Winkler said to the AP. Those with levels in the 3,000 range were treated in the hospital’s emergency room and released, while those with levels above 10,000 were admitted.

And even once players began falling ill, the camp was allowed to continue. Despite all this, no one in the school district, or anyone who has worked with Kearin in the past, seems to think there was anything excessive or extreme done.

Kearin, who according to oregonlive.com was asked by the school not to comment, said he “didn’t know it could get that hot in Oregon.”

Blood tests for the players are expected back by Wednesday, which would show if any of them had taken any supplements that contained creatine. While creatine is a legal supplement, the players have denied taking it. Most of them were surprised they landed in the hospital at all.

Maybe Kearin isn’t in the wrong here, but he has to know better. He’d have to have been living in a cave for the last 10 years to not know how serious his actions were.

Withholding water during a practice in a sweltering gym? It’s just plain reckless.

Technorati Tags: high school football, Oregon

• The Miami Dolphins swung a deal Wednesday to get wide receiver Brandon Marshall from the Denver Broncos, and then signed him to a contract extension. Add that to the signing and swapping the Jets have done this offseason, and winning the division may not be the slam dunk it’s been for the Patriots for most of the last decade. As of right now, New England appears to be third, at best.
• The Stanley Cup playoffs opened with three of the four games being won by the road team. While Ottawa’s win over Pittsburgh and Philadelphia’s win over New Jersey raised eyebrows, the one surprise was out West, in a game the home team won. Phoenix beat Detroit at home, while eighth-seeded Colorado knocked off top-seeded San Jose, which really is no surprise at all.
• Only in Texas would almost $60 million be spent on a high school football stadium that will seat 18,000 people. Unbelievable.
• The NCAA still hasn’t made it official that it will expand the men’s basketball tournament to 96 teams (but it will). Doesn’t matter to Joe Lunardi, who already has a 96-team bracket done for next year.
• Did anyone notice Fred Hill is still the men’s basketball coach at Rutgers? Does anyone care?

Technorati Tags: Brandon Marshall, Dolphins, Jets, NCAA, Patriots, Stanley Cup

• With Michigan State and Duke winning on Sunday, the Final Four is now set for Saturday in Indianapolis. The Blue Devils will face West Virginia, while the Spartans take on the hometown team, the Bulldogs of Butler.
• Even though Duke is making its 11th Final Four appearance since 1986, the Blue Devils are not to be hated. Not everyone is happy with the four teams that are left.
• The merry-go-round of college basketball coaches has already started to twirl. Iowa has itself a new coach. So does Seton Hall. Robert Morris looks like its keeping its coach. After being turned down by three candidates, St. John’s is looking at two others. And did DePaul really think it could get Ben Howland to leave UCLA?
• The MIAA proposal to change the format for its high school football playoffs was shot down.
• Dan Shaughnessy remembers Darryl Williams, a tragic hero in the history of Boston sports.

Technorati Tags: Butler, Duke, Final Four, Michigan State, West Virginia

In it’s simplest terms, the question is whether or not to change the format to match that of other sports, and in the process allow more teams to make the playoffs.

I’ll admit, I know nothing about high school sports in Massachusetts. This story here takes a good look at what is going on.

From the sound of it, something needs to be done to not only increase the number of teams that make the postseason (it’s ridiculous that undefeated teams at one point missed out) and decrease the number of “state” championship games – Super Bowls – to make it a more true state championship.

While it there are some negative aspects to the change, it sounds like current format is a complete mess.

Technorati Tags: Football, high school, Massachusetts

The Milford student section cheers during the fourth quarter of the Class I championship game.

Crowds at New Hampshire high school basketball games has grown of the last several years, and with it has grown the concern that everyone in attendance is on his or her best behavior.

What exactly that constitutes is up for debate in some cases, but John Doyle of Foster’s Daily Democrat does an excellent job of taking a closer look here.

In a time when college student sections are glorified for their passion and shenanigans, a lot of high school students see that and want to emulate it at their respective school’s basketball games. While that enthusiasm is certainly welcome, it has to be within reason, which then creates a problem.

Do you put a limit on what can be done or said by a fan, which is just another form of censorship? Or do the same freedoms allowed to college students not apply to high schoolers?

I’ll admit, I’m torn on this. While I dislike the idea of any kind of censorship, high school is a lot different from college in many ways. Most college crowds number in the thousands, and like Doyle says in his article, sometimes chants and cheers can go unnoticed. But in a high school crowd of a few hundred, it’s different.

Also at issue is the maturity and the psyche of the high school athlete. Is it really fair to heckle a 15 or 16 year old for missing a shot or making a mistake? No, it’s not.

After being out of the loop for a few years, I had the chance to see a lot more games this basketball season. In many cases, I was surprised by the turnouts. For example, a mid-January game between Milford and Bedford drew a crowd that had to be at least a thousand deep (and of course it was at Bedford).

Another regular season game, in early February when Bishop Guertin hosted Merrimack, had a capacity crowd before the end of the junior varsity game.

The crowd that surprised me the most had to be the one that followed Milford wherever it went, and not because of its size, but because of its good sportsmanship.

Four years ago, I never would have guessed that. When students first began attending games en masse, it created an atmosphere that often times got too intense. Several times during that first season, it felt like the Milford gym might explode with the intensity of the crowd, and on one occasion I witnessed, it almost did.

But give athletic director Marc Maurais and the school’s administration and the staff that attends the games a whole lot of credit. They’ve done a great job of sticking to a set of rules, and give the students credit, too, for adhering to it.

The crowds for all the teams involved in the Class I semifinals and the final were quite large. If that’s usual for the other three schools, I’m not sure. But I will say this, of the four of them, Milford’s was the loudest and the one that showed the best sportsmanship.

The students should take just as much pride in that as they do their desire to support their classmates.

Technorati Tags: Basketball, fans, Milford

Some people have good luck charms, things they wear or carry with them that they believe will bring success. Others will do certain things, or eat certain meals, before a game to bring out the best in their performance.

And then there’s the underwear.

Or any sort of outfit, if you’re a fan. Yours truly has certainly been know to wear the same collection of clothes when a little extra karma is needed.

What about sports writers? I’m sure there are some out there who have a lucky pen or pencil, or something to that nature. I can’t say that I have one.

But is it possible for a sports writer to be an omen of bad luck himself? Before you answer, consider the following.

When I was a senior in college – and sports editor of the student paper – I spent most of a semester doing a weekly feature where I had an Q&A with an athlete about things other than sports. In total, I probably did about six or seven of these interviews, and of those athletes, one suffered a season-ending knee injury less than a week later. Another suffered several nagging injuries and had a disappointing season. And a third was busted for underage drinking, again less than a week later.

My first newspaper job was in a small town in southern Kentucky. We covered several different high schools, including the one that was in the same town as the paper. As second-in-command of the sports desk, I only covered that school’s football team on three occasions. Of course that team lost all three games, including one to a school from a smaller classification who it hadn’t lost to in about 40 years.

My second newspaper job was in a western Pennsylvania town about an hour north of Pittsburgh. I arrived with about three weeks before the high school basketball playoffs began. During that time, unless I was covering two of our local teams playing each other, the school I was at a game for lost. And once the playoffs began, that continued, much to the delight of my boss.

And that wasn’t all that happened while I was at that paper. We also had an Athlete of the Week feature that either myself or the other sports writer would do. After a while, it seemed that whenever I would write the feature, the athlete involved would then have his or her worst week of the season right after.

One of the kids, who ran track, pulled his hamstring at practice THE SAME DAY we did the interview. That fall, when I went to talk to him for football, he said something along the lines of “I don’t know if I should talk to you, the last time I did, I got hurt.” I’m pretty sure he was joking.

It seemed the bad luck had left me when I returned to New Hampshire a little more than four years ago.

Until now.

But instead of being bad luck to a number of teams, my less-than-desirable charm seems to only have a hold on one team. This basketball season, I’ve seen this team play three times, and all three have been its worst games of the season. We’re talking not only losses, but losses in which this team has scored its fewest points all year.

The first time, no one said anything. The second time, it was ‘hey, you know you’ve seen our two worst games of the year?’

The third? Of course there were plenty of jokes about my presence and the bad luck it brought. At least, I’m pretty sure they were jokes.

Technorati Tags: bad luck, Basketball, good luck, high schools, karma, superstitions