Earlier this month, I wrote an A1 story for the Post Register laying out the case against high school sports. As you can see above, the Post Register ran my sports con story next to a pro one written by another reporter. These two stories were inspired by a recent bond measure that proposed a new high school in Idaho Falls (it passed, and the new school will be built by 2018 or 2019).

Here’s the link to my story, with the full text below (the pro story can be found here).

When Bonneville Joint School District 93 looked for ways to trim the cost of its new high school bond, it didn’t consider eliminating one large money-sucker: sports.

The Nov. 3 bond dedicated $63.5 million to a new high school and its additions. About $15 million of that is going toward athletic facilities.

“If you did not have athletics, you’d have a lot of people not coming to your school,” District 93 superintendent Chuck Shackett said.

About 40 percent of Bonneville and Hillcrest high school students play sports, according to the schools’ athletic directors.

But are competitive high school sports, particularly football, a necessary component of a well-rounded educational experience?

A growing list of educational experts and medical doctors are arguing that they are not. Citing high costs for facilities, equipment and travel, distractions from academics and health concerns, they propose that removing sports from the school system would make students safer and more focused.

High costs

In its three attempts to pass the new high school bond, District 93 only considered removing an athletic cost once, when it separated the high school from the auditorium and football stadium on November’s ballot.

Both questions passed. As a result, several athletic facilities will grace the new school, which will have a 1,500-student capacity and will open in fall 2018 or 2019. Here’s the breakdown of the $15 million:

• $5.7 million for a competition gym

• $3.4 million for a practice gym

• $2.1 million for a football stadium

• $4 million for everything else (tennis courts, track, baseball, softball, soccer and physical education fields)

The stadium alone was not vital. The Highland, Pocatello and Century high school football teams all rent Holt Arena, which is also home to Idaho State University’s football team. Boise, Capital, Timberline and Borah all share the football stadium in Boise’s Dona Larsen Park. Three District 93 schools sharing one football stadium might be an inconvenience, but it wouldn’t be impossible.

But sports cost more than just the facilities to house them.

District 93 doled out $502,000 in athletic stipends to pay coaches, trainers, etc. for the 2014-15 school year while paying $156,700 in nonathletic stipends for department heads, club advisers, etc., according to district records. Those numbers are so disparate because the district has more athletic employees (coaches, trainers, etc.) than non-athletic (department heads, club advisers, etc.). Employees with more experience also receive larger stipends.

District 93 Chief Financial Officer April Burton said the district also funds transportation costs for all extracurricular activities, which include organizations such as debate, band and orchestra.

Distracting from academics

Idaho State University defensive lineman Tyler Kuder  is set to graduate this month with a degree in sports management. When he attended Payette High School, he said all he cared about was playing sports and hanging out with friends. He earned a 2.4 GPA and a 20 on the ACT, causing several Division I football programs (including Boise State, Duke and Oregon) to lose interest in him.

“They didn’t have good academic support,” Kuder said of Payette.

High school is designed to educate teenagers and prepare them for adulthood. Yet, in many places across the nation, the students who participate in athletics are often pushed to excel on the field and merely get by in the classroom. In other cases, the students’ time is stretched so thin that they prioritize sports over studies.

“Sometimes, I got lazy thinking, ‘No, I’ve got football, I’ve gotta watch film,’ so I put that over homework,” Madison High School senior Michael Dredge said.

Student-athletes also frequently miss classes for travel to games and tournaments.

Bonneville High School athletic director Dale Gardner said freshman football players miss about one class a week, while baseball, softball, soccer and track athletes miss around four classes per week. Idaho Falls High School reported similar numbers. The number of missed classes increases if the athletes make district and state tournaments.

“Anytime any kid misses for any reason, whether they’re sick or whatever, that always puts an extra stress on the teacher because you still have to make sure that kid gets what they need,” said Natalie Woods, a math teacher at Hillcrest. “You hope that they’ll make good on themselves and come in and do it so you don’t have to chase them down.

“It’s just one of those things you deal with.”

Health concerns

For the first time in his high school career, Dredge, a defensive lineman, didn’t suit up for the Madison football team this past season. Three concussions within seven months prompted his parents to put their feet down.

Dredge’s first two concussions came from wrestling, but the highest percentage of concussions in high school sports happen in football.

During the 2014-15 school year, 1,264 concussions were reported by Idaho’s high schools, according to a survey conducted by the Idaho High School Activities Association. Football accounted for 567, or 44.9 percent, of those concussions.

However, female athletes are not immune to concussions. Research by the Women’s Sports Foundation shows that girls playing in many high school sports have a higher incidence rate of sports-related concussions than males in similar sports.

“It’s a real issue that parents and administrators should be aware of,” Shackett said.

Dr. Bennet Omalu wrote in a column published Monday in The New York Times that children should not be allowed to play high-impact sports until they are 18 years old. Omalu, a forensic pathologist, was the first to link head trauma suffered by football players to a neurological brain disorder, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.

“The human brain becomes fully developed at about 18 to 25 years old. We should at least wait for our children to grow up, be provided with the information and education on the risk of play, and let them make their own decisions,” he wrote.

Additionally, 691 high school students have died from playing football since 1990, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research. At least eight have died this year, the Kansas City Star reports.

“No life is worth any sport,” Dredge said.

An alternative

Critics of school-based sports programs argue that eliminating competitive sports from public schools would allow the students and teachers to focus on the institution’s primary purpose: education.

In much of the world, high school sports do not exist. In Europe, teenagers who want to play competitive sports often participate on club teams outside school.

Former University of Nevada men’s basketball coach Len Stevens told the Reno Gazette-Journal in 2012 that adopting the European model would allow high schools to focus on academics and more inclusive athletic programs such as intramural sports and PE.

Other than school spirit, high school sports don’t have much more to offer than club sports. For example, the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) is crucial for basketball players who want to play in college.

“The one thing about summer basketball is you get the chance to go see 1,000 kids at one venue on one day,” said Utah Valley University head men’s basketball coach Mark Pope, who signed former Bonneville player Telly Davenport last year. “It’s incredibly more efficient, in terms of a broad brush chance to evaluate, than it is to go visit kids at their high school.”

Clubs would not eliminate the danger of sports, but separating sports programs from the school system could reduce societal pressures on athletes to participate in competitive contact sports.

In their Oct. 30 paper titled “Medical Ethics and School Football,” published in the American Journal of Bioethics, Drs. Steven H. Miles and Shailendra Prasa wrote that “health professionals should call for ending public school tackle football programs.”

“Private play and private leagues, like the Pop Warner program, would continue,” they wrote. “Young people choosing such programs would play purely for the game and not be lured by ‘school spirit.’”

I wrote the cover story for the Post Register’s 2015 high school football preview. The article was about Mackay High School, a small-town team that won eight state titles in 19 years.

The last state title came in 2005. Ten years later, Mackay can barely field a team.

I investigated the causes of this sharp decline, and I set to find out if the Miners would ever return to their peak.

Here’s the link to the story. This is how my story opens:

The numbers baffle Jack McKelvey.

Mackay High School currently has five boys in the sophomore, junior and senior classes.

Combined.

Three of those boys are on the football team, which McKelvey is coaching for his 24th season. Sophomore Colt Kraczek is one of the two boys foregoing football for academics (“a brilliant mind,” McKelvey called him).

“He could probably help us,” McKelvey said, pausing for a moment. “Anybody could. We need bodies.”

When Mackay opens its football season against Butte County on Sept. 3, nine players will don the red and white. And for the first year in their history, the Miners are playing a JV schedule.

This is a long fall for Mackay, which won eight state titles in 19 years. Coaches, officials and former players say the decline is due to people moving away.

“Our enrollment here at school dropped so rapidly and so low, it’s been hard to hang onto what we had,” McKelvey said. “It’s a numbers game.”

On Aug. 15, I was covering the Idaho Falls Chukars’ home game versus the Helena Brewers. It was a nondescript outing until about 10:30 p.m. MT, when Tom Haudricourt of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel tweeted a link to this story.

Haudricourt’s story broke the news that Helena first baseman David Denson had come out as gay. Denson was batting cleanup that night for Helena.

After the game, I approached Denson, asking for an interview. He agreed at first, but he later asked to wait until the next day. I said that was fine, but I asked if I could get a quote that night. Here’s what he said:

The Associated Press got in touch with me before that, hoping to get some quotes from Denson. I told the AP I could only get one quote, which the editors used. I also told them about an interaction between Denson and a male fan after the game.

“I’m proud of you,” the male said.

“Thank you,” Denson replied.

The AP wrote a story the next day using the quote I got from Denson and the interaction I observed. Here is the link to the AP’s story.

Also, here’s the link to my gamer from the Aug. 15 game, which features a section about Denson at the end. This is what I wrote (the tweet above was added to the story):

Helena outfielder and cleanup hitter David Denson came out as gay, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Saturday night. Denson is the first openly gay player actively playing for a team affiliated with the MLB.

Denson joins former major leaguers Billy Bean and Glenn Burke as the only affiliated baseball players to ever come out, according to the Sentinel. Bean and Burke came out after their careers ended. Bean helped Denson reach out to the Sentinel, the newspaper reported.

Denson isn’t the first professional baseball player to come out. Sean Conroy, a pitcher for the independent Sonoma Stompers, came out in June.

Through Saturday, Denson has a .255 batting average with four home runs in 159 at-bats for the Brewers this season.

On July 31, I covered the Idaho Falls Chukars’ game versus the Ogden Raptors. The game was mostly ordinary, except for one thing. I’ll let the note from my game story explain it:

Ogden made an odd defensive move whenever Chukars’ right fielder Brawlun Gomez came up against a left-handed pitcher Thursday. Raptors’ center fielder Deion Ulmer and left fielder Matt Jones switched positions.

Ogden manager John Shoemaker said the Los Angeles Dodgers’ organization is using its Rookie-level teams (Ogden and the AZL Dodgers) to experiment with defensive alignments. Thanks to scouting reports, the Raptors discovered that the right-handed Gomez pulls the ball to left field almost every time he faces a left-hander. Therefore, Ogden wanted Ulmer — a rangier outfielder than Jones — to play left.

Today, Aug. 7, Chris Mosch of Baseball Prospectus wrote an article on defensive shifting, and he cited the note above from my game story.

Now, full disclosure, Mosch and I are friends and former colleagues from my days with the Daily Emerald, the University of Oregon’s student newspaper. The only reason he knows about my story is because I told him after the game on July 31.

That said, Mosch hadn’t seen that tactic utilized before. Switching outfielders is a brand-new idea in baseball at this point, so Mosch saw some genuine news value from my note. He wasn’t just giving a friend a shout-out.

Here is Mosch’s story.

For the July 11 issue of the Post Register, I wrote a profile on Idaho Falls Chukars 18-year-old shortstop Marten Gasparini, who was born and raised in Italy. Here’s the link to the post on ChukarsExtra.com, and the full text for the story is below.

Marten Gasparini yearned for some home cooking.

He had just moved away from home. His parents were excellent cooks. He could barely make pasta.

College freshmen can relate to Gasparini’s pain. They can’t relate to much else.

Gasparini was in Burlington, N.C., for the start of his professional baseball career — 4,500 miles away from his native Italy.

A year earlier, Gasparini signed a contract with the Kansas City Royals, about a month after his 16th birthday. His $1.3 million signing bonus is still the European amateur record.

The shortstop has been with the Idaho Falls Chukars (a Kansas City Rookie-level affiliate) this entire season. Gasparini, 18, has struggled 23 games in, but he’s confident he’ll turn it around. He’s confident his community back home will remember him for more than the $1.3 million.

“The community is really going to appreciate my actions the moment I get to the highest level,” Gasparini told the Post Register. “At the moment, big number or not, I’m still in the minor leagues.”

Gasparini saw the 1999 baseball movie “For Love of the Game” around the age of 8. Before that, he knew hardly anything about baseball. Shortly after, Gasparini’s father bought him a baseball bat, and Gasparini discovered a club baseball team near his hometown of Alture.

Baseball isn’t a huge sport in Italy, but its relative obscurity helped attract Gasparini.

“Not from a hipster point of view, but yeah, it was something different,” Gasparini said. “As a 10-year-old, I wanted to do something new. It was a breath of fresh air.”

All of these factors led him to embrace America’s pastime.

Seven Italian-born players have played Major League Baseball, according to Baseball-Reference. One of them, Alex Liddi, currently plays for the Northwest Arkansas Naturals, Kansas City’s Double-A affiliate.

But Alex Maestri, an Italian pitcher formerly in the Chicago Cubs organization, was more responsible for Gasparini’s path.

Maestri once played for the Italian Baseball Academy. A 13-year-old Gasparini learned this and got in touch with then-Cubs scout Bill Holmberg, who is currently the Academy’s director.

“As soon as I saw him at 13, I knew we had a chance to create a superior player if we could work with him for a couple years,” Holmberg told Baseball America in 2013.

At 14, Gasparini joined the Academy, and he quickly caught the eyes of major league scouts.

Before he signed his contract with the Royals, some MLB scouts considered him the best European prospect they had ever seen, according to Baseball America. His MLB contract reflected that.

Gasparini’s $1.3 million signing bonus shattered the previous European record of $800,000, given to German outfielder Max Kepler by the Minnesota Twins.

“I did not expect anything like that coming,” Gasparini said. “People go crazy about it, but I try not to think about it. I try to take care of my family — my brother, my sister, my dad, my mom. What I earned is for them.”

The money helped ease his transition to the United States, despite Gasparini’s inability to cook much more than pasta and chicken (“Not pasta with chicken, though. [Italians] don’t do that,” he said). The Academy helped Gasparini learn English, and he was fluent by the age of 16.

“The excitement to be here as a professional baseball player overcame the fear of being in a new country,” Gasparini said.

The 6-foot, 165-pound Gasparini hit .191/.225/.250 (batting average/on-base percentage/slugging percentage) in 68 at-bats with Burlington last year, but his slash line skyrocketed to .455/.500/.727 in 11 at-bats with the Chukars last summer.

Gasparini, ranked Kansas City’s 20th best prospect by FanGraphs.com before the season, has hit .233/.295/.349 with Idaho Falls this season (through Thursday).

But Gasparini’s slow start doesn’t concern his organization.

Royals’ senior coordinator for player development John Wathan is impressed with Gasparini’s speed and defensive tools (strong arm, good instincts), despite 12 fielding errors this season.

“He’ll be a good player one day,” Wathan said.

Idaho Falls hitting coach Andre David is encouraged by Gasparini’s development, namely with hitting fastballs and breaking balls. However, David said Gasparini needs to lay off tough pitches more often (Gasparini has 35 strikeouts, tied for the most in the Pioneer League) and get less down on himself after a bad performance.

The soft-spoken Gasparini said he’s more comfortable two seasons into his professional career. His accent is hardly noticeable, especially when he utilizes his vast English vocabulary. And the baseball struggles don’t worry him. He’s 18, and like David, he believes he’s developing.

Gasparini still misses his parents’ home cooking, though.

“I kinda got spoiled in Italy,” Gasparini said. “But that’s such a minor thing. It says a lot about how comfortable I am here in the United States.”

On Sunday, July 5, I finished creating player profiles on ChukarsExtra.com for every Idaho Falls Chukar* on the active roster.

Here’s a link to the main page.

Those profiles included biographies, up-to-date season statistics, positions and photos for every Idaho Falls player (the ones without photos joined the club after opening day, when those head shots were taken).

ChukarsExtra.com was reconfigured in June, right before the Chukars’ season started. On July 5, the site had 250 page views, by far the most in one day since the site relaunched. As I write this at 11:30 p.m. on July 11, the site has 570 total page views.

Of those 250 views on July 5, 226 came from the main player profile page and the individual pages for each player (203 views came from two player pages, Brian Bayliss and Stephen Milligan’s).

My post on the Chukars Extra Facebook page only reached 25 people, but 172 or the 250 page views came through Facebook, likely from a family member of Bayliss and/or Milligan.

*The Chukars are a minor league baseball team affiliated with the Kansas City Royals. They are a short-season Single-A team, or Rookie-level, in the Pioneer League.

Last month, I attended a USA Football Heads Up clinic held in Rigby, a town just north of Idaho Falls. The clinic aimed at educating local coaches about proper football tackling techniques and other strategies to increase the sport’s safety.

But people have criticized the Heads Up program for sugarcoating the inherently dangerous nature of football.

My story addresses the goals of the clinic and the difficult mission to make a dangerous sport safer.

Here’s the link. The first section of the story is below:

RIGBY — Concussions ended Scott Criner’s football career.

Saturday, Criner helped teach coaches how to prevent that same fate.

Criner is the head football coach at Rocky Mountain High School, and he’s Idaho’s lone USA Football Master Trainer. He helped organize Saturday’s USA Football’s Heads Up Football Player Safety Clinic at Rigby High School.

The clinic’s lead speaker was Terry Summerfield, the head football coach at Barlow High School in Gresham, Ore., and a USA Football West Coast Regional Master Trainer. He lectured more than 20 local coaches about football player safety, from hydration to proper tackling techniques to concussion awareness.

Summerfield’s guidance included a crucial point.

“We know we can’t completely take the head out of the game,” Summerfield told the coaches.

Saturday’s clinic was a small part of the Heads Up Football program, which is attempting to tackle a complicated question: How do you make an inherently dangerous sport safer?

“Let’s do everything we can to reduce and try to eliminate the helmet from making contact,” Summerfield said in an interview. “We can’t completely, but let’s take it away from the initial contact. … That’s about teaching. It’s about education.”

Skyline High School baseball player Cole Mecham lost his father, Arden, two years ago. He hasn’t cut his hair since.

Here is my story on the impact of Arden’s death on Cole, and why he hasn’t cut his hair since.

Cole posted this tweet the day my story was published:

Update (7/9/15): As of July 9, the post for this story on the PR Preps Facebook page had reached 22,512 people, with 4,515 post clicks, 494 link clicks 743 total Likes (from the post and shares), 38 total shares and 37 total comments.

Here’s an excerpt:

On Saturday, Feb. 16, 2013, Cole went snowboarding with friends at Grand Targhee Resort in Alta, Wyo. Arden, a dispatcher for the oil transportation company Maxxon Energy, was days into a business trip in Watford City, N.D.

Cole, a Skyline freshman at the time, opened his phone on the ride back to Idaho Falls that afternoon. It wasn’t working. Later, he’d find out his mother, Darcy Mecham, suspended the phone.

Cole’s house was full of neighbors, friends and family when he arrived. Everyone had serious looks on their faces. Darcy Mecham and her mother, Laree Lundberg, asked Cole and his four siblings to sit on the couch. Laree told them.

Arden was dead.

Cole burst into tears, screaming, “No, no, no.”

That morning in North Dakota, Arden was driving westbound on Highway 23 in Lundberg’s Honda Accord (his car was in a shop). Reed Logan of National Oilwell Varco was driving a truck eastbound.

As Arden’s and Logan’s vehicles approached the crest of a hill, Logan’s rear tires slipped on the icy highway. The truck swerved into Arden’s lane at about 55 miles per hour, striking the front right side of the Accord, according to the crash report obtained by the Post Register. Arden’s vehicle spun into a ditch.

Arden died there at approximately 9:23 a.m. He was 37.

Earlier this year, Challis and Mackay high schools formed a baseball team with players from both schools. It is the first baseball team in the history of either school, both in the lowest classification (1A) of Idaho high school sports.

I initially reported on the formation of this team, and my story in the Post Register can be found here.

I also did a brief recap of the team’s first game, in which it was no-hit. That story can be read here.

And finally, I did a feature on how the team was performing with almost a full season under its belt. That story can be found here.

Here’s an excerpt of that final story:

Co-ops are fairly common in Idaho high school sports. Over the past five years, there has been an average of 26.2 co-ops per season in Idaho, according to data provided by the Idaho High School Activities Association. One of the four District 6 co-ops from 2009-14 was Challis-Mackay wrestling (2009-10 and 2011-12 seasons).

But these teams have come and gone. Many co-ops are heavily populated by one school, so when the smaller school graduates players, its representation in that sport often disappears. The Challis-Mackay wrestling team, for instance, graduated Mackay seniors, and Kevin Mora transferred from Mackay to Challis for his senior season in 2013. Now there’s only a Challis wrestling team.

The IHSAA only authorizes co-ops for two seasons, so if both co-op schools maintain players for more than one season, they would need to renew the team after the second year. Most co-ops fail to reach this point.

[Coach Ryan] Millick said his team has enough players for at least three more years.

Challis-Mackay currently has 14 boys from Challis and three from Mackay (Challis’ Josh D’Orazio is out for the season with a torn meniscus). Two players from Challis — Eric Rose and Tyler Hughes — had never played baseball before this year. Most hadn’t played the game since elementary or middle school in Babe Ruth leagues.

“This is my first time playing baseball since like eight years ago,” Mackay senior Naylan Whitworth said. “It’s fun to get into a sport I haven’t played in a while.”

Last month, I explored high school club rugby in eastern Idaho. The sport is fresh in the state, but especially in eastern Idaho, so I reported on the new teams and the growth of the sport in this area.

Here’s the story that appeared in the Post Register, with an excerpt below.

The Idaho Falls Girls are one of six high school girls team in Idaho, and they’re one of four teams that formed this year. The other three are Rocky Mountain, Eagle and Rigby, all boys teams.

Chet Blasucci, a defensive line coach for the Rigby football team, started the Royals Rugby Club. Like [Carly] Smith, Blasucci played rugby in college (at Utah), but his reasons for starting the club largely revolved around off-field issues.

Two of the players Blasucci coached on the gridiron got in legal trouble in the offseason.

“Let’s just say they needed a place to go, something to do,” Blasucci said. “Being bored isn’t always a bad thing, but it’s not always a good thing.”

By starting a rugby team, Blasucci could kill two birds with one rugby ball. He could coach a sport he loves while limiting the opportunities certain football players had to get into trouble.

The Rigby High School administration has supported the Royals, as well, even though rugby is not governed by the Idaho High School Activities Association. The entire Royals roster is made of of Rigby students, and the school allows the Royals to use its fields for practices and game.

Jumper Jason Kirby, top, practices with members of the Rigby Royals Rugby Club on their lineouts Wednesday at the Rigby Indoor Sports complex. (Pat Sutphin / psutphin@postregister.com)
“We’re just happy to get kids involved in whatever they want,” Rigby athletic director Bob Moon said.