It’s certainly been a busy weekend in the sports world, and a good bit of the action involves Houston-area teams.
First, Houston reinforced its status as the youth baseball hotbed of America this weekend as The Woodlands High School baseball team won the Texas 5A Baseball Championship over fellow Houston-area championship game participant, the Katy Tigers. The 38-1 Highlanders will conclude the season as the no. 1-rated high school team in the U.S. by Baseball America, a position that the team has maintained for most of the season. The Highlanders best player — pitcher and shortstop Kyle Drabek — was the Philadelphia Phillies first-round draft pick earlier this week in the Major League Baseball Draft of high school and college players.
Meanwhile, Houston’s other no. 1-ranked baseball team — the Rice Owls — are just a win away from the College World Series after rolling over the Oklahoma Sooners in the first game of their best-of-three NCAA Super-Regional series at Rice’s Reckling Park. The second game in the series takes place today at noon at Reckling.
Another remarkable performance radiated somewhat beneath the radar screen on a sports scene pre-occupied with baseball, NBA and Stanley Cup playoffs, French Open tennis, and the upcoming U.S. Open golf tournament. Xavier Carter — a 6′ 3″, 190 lbs. sophomore sprinter for LSU who also plays wide receiver for the Tigers’ football team — put on the greatest performance in the history of college track and field on Saturday since the legendary Jesse Owens back in the mid-1930’s. Carter became the first sprinter to win the 100 and 400 meters at the NCAA track and field championships Saturday, and then punctuated that incredible performance by anchoring LSU’s winning 1,600-meter relay team. Combined with his anchor on LSU’s winning 400 relay team the previous night, Carter shared in four NCAA event titles, the first person to do so since Owens won both short sprints, the 220-yard low hurdles and long jump for Ohio State in 1935 and ’36. Carter won the 100-meter race in a school-record 10.09 seconds and then followed that performance with a 44.53 in the 400 only 30 minutes later. In so doing, Carter scored an incredible 40 of his team’s 51 points in LSU’s second-place finish (behind first place Florida State) in the NCAA Track and Field Championships.
In the more sanguine world of golf, Jim Furyk went on the disabled list this week by injuring himself gargling, while this Bob Verdi/Golf Digest interview examines David Duval’s travails in attempting to regain Duval’s stature as one of the PGA Tour’s top players. Also, in the wish-I-had-time-to-do-that-department, don’t miss this Wall Street Journal ($) article on the emerging number of senior amateur players who slide into retirement by playing in dozens of amateur tournaments around the country. One of the featured players in the article is Houstonian Mike Rice, who is the reigning US Senior Amateur champion.
Finally, speaking of the NBA Championship Series, although the focus is usually on the star players such as Shaq, Nowitzki, and Wade, David J. Berri — the Cal State-Bakersfield economist who is a co-author of The Wages of Wins: Taking Measure of the Many Myths in Modern Sports — notes in this NY Times article that it is actually the lesser-recognized players who often make the difference in the series.