You have to hand it to the folks who do the public relations campaigns for Gatorade, USA Today and Parade Magazine. They’re great at hyping up their own honors, acting as if nobody else in the country has a clue to what’s going on in high school sports. Well, at least we have a Web site to prove that those of us who write and compile similar honors and rankings at Student Sports have more than a clue.
LeBron James and Allyson Felix must have had a blast attending the ESPY Awards on Wednesday night in Los Angeles, hours after they were honored at a luncheon in which they were named Gatorade’s first-ever National Athletes of the Year.
If you don’t know who James is by now, you’ve been stranded with Gilligan and the Skipper on some island for the last two years. James led his St. Vincent-St. Mary High basketball team of Akron, Ohio to an unbeaten record last season and was the very first pick in the recent NBA draft. He’ll be playing for the Cleveland Cavaliers and has signed lucrative contracts with that team as well as Nike Inc.
Felix, who is from L.A. Baptist High of North Hills, Calif., set the national record in the girls 200-meter dash at the Mt. SAC Relays in April and then two weeks later did even better with a world junior record at a Banamex Grand Prix event in Mexico City. She finished her prep career with three California state crowns in the 100 and two in the 200. She led the nation with top times in three events: 11.29 in the 100, 22.11 in the 200 and 52.26 in the 400.
Earlier this summer, Felix was featured on the cover of Student Sports Magazine and we decided to choose national athletes of the year to run in conjunction with her cover story. It took us about 30 seconds to pick James and Felix. That issue came off the presses two weeks ago.
Wonder how long it took the p.r. firm that handles the Gatorade account to come to the same easy decision? Were conference calls made? How about collecting the opinions from a panel of “experts?”
To choose James and Felix, first you have to agree that your “Athlete of the Year” can be someone who only plays one sport. Many newspaper prep writers around the country who choose similar honors think that’s wrong, that anybody who’s an “Athlete of the Year” has to be a multi-sporter. We think it’s okay to choose a one-sport athlete if that athlete is particularly dominant at what they do. And since James and Felix already may be among the best in the world at what they do, they fall into that category.
For this year’s multi-sport athletes, the best of the bunch for boys probably would include Roger Kish for football and wrestling from Lapeer West High of Lapeer, Mich., and Clayton Richard for football and baseball from McCutcheon High of Lafayette, Ind. For the girls, the nation’s top three were Liz Podominick for basketball and track from Lakeville High of Lakeville, Minn., Noelle Quinn for volleyball and basketball from Bishop Montgomery High of Torrance, Calif., and Katie Gearlds for basketball, softball and golf from Beech Grove High of Beech Grove, Ind.
The athlete of the year business then gets sticky when you start considering one-sport athletes who may not have represented their school. What about the 2001-02 school year? Should Sarah Hughes of New York, the gold medalist at the Winter Olympics in women’s figure skating, have been the winner? She was in high school and was an athlete. We’ve picked figure skaters retroactively for our Cal-Hi Sports girls state athlete of the year lists and we tend to think that they should count toward any high school athlete of the year honor.
Gatorade’s selection process in coming up with its own national athletes of the year was simplified in that only those who had already been chosen player of the year in a particular sport were considered for the overall honor. That didn’t bite them in the butt this time with the obvious winners that were staring them in the face, but that process could conceivably knock out some very strong two-sport or three-sport candidates in the future.
Next year, for example, California’s Candice Wiggins of La Jolla Country Day will be one of the top 20 volleyball players in the nation and may be one of the top five or 10 in basketball. But if she’s not a player of the year in one of those two sports she wouldn’t be eligible for the Gatorade honor that Felix won this week and that doesn’t make sense.
Candace Parker, the girls basketball phenom from Naperville Central High of Illinois who was the consensus national player of the year for 2003, would have been a leading favorite for national athlete honors in 2004. She will unfortunately miss most, if not all, of the 2004 season after suffering a torn ACL injury at a recent summer camp. Parker was the Student Sports National Junior Athlete of the Year and we’d say Wiggins was perhaps second.
For the boys National Junior Athlete of the Year, the winner for us was determined to be Florida’s Xavier Carter. The football wide receiver and super sprinter from Palm Bay High of Melbourne, Fla., was on our cover the month before Felix was and ended the year first in the 100, second in the 200 and first in the 400 at the Class 3A Florida state final. Carter swept all three events at the Arcadia Invitational in April and this fall will be one of the nation’s most-watched football players.
The farther back you go in class the harder it is to pick national athletes of the year, but for sophomores we really felt strongly about the two we selected: Greg Paulus from Christian Brothers Academy of Syracuse, N.Y., for the boys and Foluke Akinradewo from St. Thomas Aquinas of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., for the girls. Paulus was a standout last fall at quarterback for the CBA football team and is a sweet-shooting guard in basketball. Akinradewo is a 6-4 phenom who averaged 18 points per game in basketball, sailed past 40 feet in the triple jump in track and is one of the top college prospects in her class in volleyball.
Finally, we come to the freshmen. It’s hard enough even finding freshmen who play on varsity teams, so choosing a National Freshman of the Year is very difficult. We went with Demond Carter from Reserve Christian of Laplace, La., for the boys only because he was our national freshman of the year in basketball. Another we liked was David Lighty from St. Joseph of Cleveland, who as a freshman scored 23 points in a varsity basketball game against LeBron James’ team and who was a starting wideout on the varsity in football. The girls honoree was Nicole Blood, distance running standout from Saratoga High of Ganesvoort, N.Y. She was ninth as a freshman at the national cross country final in San Diego and led the nation this spring in the 3000 meters.
So if one of these juniors, sophomores or freshmen is honored as a national athlete of the year down the road, remember where you saw it first.