The Cathedral Catholic Dons (4-0), the 2008 California state bowl champs, looking to repeat the stellar season of last year, faced off against the tough Carlsbad Lancers (1-3) at Cathedral. The Dons used a strong rushing attack to open up the passing game, led by Johnny Marshall who carried the ball 18 times for 78 yards to lead Cathedral Catholic to a 38-7 win. Opening up big holes for Marshall was Senior Offensive Tackle Alex Crosthwaite, the # 26 rated tackle in the country who has committed to play for CAL next year . After a very defensive first quarter with both teams turning it over Cathedral got their act together. In the second quarter Brewer found his mark throwing TD passes of 18 and 70 yards to take a 17-0 lead at halftime. In the 3rd quarter Cathedral again went on the offensive, taking care of Carlsbad’s defense and scoring on a one-yard run from Jonny Martin and a 28-yard pass from Max Brewer to Corrie Garcia. Max Brewer would add one more TD pass in the 4th and Carlsbad would get into the end-zone thanks to some impressive runs by Ryan Lendrum who finished the game with 40 yards on 4 carries.

For the game, Carlsbad’s QB Blake Vandenkolk was 2 of 10 with 3 interceptions. Quarterback Max Brewer was 9 of 13 with four touchdown passes and one interception. Two of his completions went to junior wide receiver Chance Early for 80 yards and one TD. He is currently getting interest from Iowa. Carlsbad’s starting running back Michael Taele who is averaging 153 yards a game, was held to just 55 on 15 carries. Cathedral pounded out 151 yards on 38 carries as a team. Cathedral has a tough road ahead if they plan to get another state bowl game bid, as three of their remaining six games are against undefeated Eastern League foes.

Dillon Baxter is an extremely talented running back out of Mission Bay High School in San Diego, CA. A standout of the class of 2010 Dillon has a verbal commitment to USC and has immense talent and promise for his future in football.

According to XX1090 Dillion is “built like an every-down back that can take continual punishment. He runs excellent routes and has soft hands which will give him more opportunities in the open field. He’s got the hands of an all-purpose back, could play receiver, but can also take the pounding that the traditional back goes through on a daily basis.”

SportsForce is constantly adding new athlete profiles to our site across all sports. We would like to take the opportunity to showcase our newest athletes each week to help them get the visibility they deserve.

Trevor McKinley is a right handed pitcher out of Steele Canyon High School. He is a member of the class of 2010 and plays club baseball for the San Diego Gamers.

Marie Bradvica is an outfielder, catcher and plays first base for the Carlsbad High School Softball Team. She plays for The Next Level Club team and is class of 2011.

If you’ve visited the Girls Lacrosse page recently you have noticed quite a few new faces. Many of the athletes attended the SportsForce 7v7 Tournament on September 12th in San Diego at Cathedral Catholic High School. Girls from over 20 different high schools enjoyed play and great competition. The tournament grew past it’s original capacity of 45 girls and fielded 8 teams and 5 goalies for a total of 61 girls! The tournament included top tier Varsity level athletes participating from San Diego, Orange County, and Los Angeles High Schools including La Costa Canyon, Torrey Pines, Coronado, La Jolla, Westview, Scripps Ranch, Carlsbad, Foothill, Los Alamitos, Great Oaks and Redondo Union to just name a few. Check back with the SportsForce blog for a full recap of the event. In the meantime, visit our Girls Lacrosse section to see some profiles.

Aside from a more focused and active warm up routine, other prehab techniques included strengthening the muscles that surround a joint. Knees, shoulders, ankles, and hips are the joints that most often become injured in sports. Ligaments and tendons are the parts of the body that connect our bones to each other, and our muscles to our bones. These structures themselves cannot be strengthened, so we are responsible for protecting those structures that are placed under a lot of wear and tear, by building strong muscles that surround them.

Knees, for example, twist and bend and straighten with high torque and force. To protect the ligaments in the knee (especially the ALC and MCL), athletes need to have strong quadriceps and hamstrings. Exercises that can help are lunges, squats, step ups, dead lifts, knee drives, etc. Another important aspect to consider is the form in which you bend your knees. The knee should never bend forward over the toes, and should never collapse inward toward your other leg (into a valgus position). When performing lunges and squats, pay attention to and correct any form issues you may have so that you are training those muscles to keep the joint aligned while performing in your sport.

Shoulders are prone to dislocation and separation, especially for throwing athletes. The shoulder cuff is made up of four muscles that keep the shoulder in its socket. The muscles are very small, so training and strengthening them should not use much weight. A good way to do this is to focus on external rotation exercises using small dumbbells or resistance bands. These can be done overhead or out to the side. Another beneficial movement is scapular retraction which is done with exercises like rows along with the stretching of the chest by placing hands on the outside of a doorframe and stepping through the doorway.

To prevent broken or sprained ankles, the three tiny ligaments on the outsides of the ankles must be protected. The muscles to strengthen are the muscles of the calf and foot. These are easily strengthened using a four way resistance band, or heel- toe walking. Although simple, these muscles are important to strengthen.

The hips are prone to tightness and straining. To prevent this from happening, the athlete must have a strong core. Core exercises are extremely important to every sport because they provide the base of balance and support for the rest of the body. The core can be strengthened in many ways. It is important, however, to realize that the core includes not only abdominals, but the back as well. Good back exercises include supermans, roman chair, and exercises on a swiss ball, alternating leg and arm extensions.

So to keep yourself safe, out of the training room, and on the field, it is important to concentrate and put forth a real effort to protecting the body that performs all the intense movements that make you a good candidate for collegiate athletics. If your body is injured, it can’t perform, so make sure to take pride in exercising properly by warming up well with a focused dynamic stretch routine, and good form in a lifting routine to strengthen the muscles that will protect your joints from injury.

You’re at the top of your game, running faster and jumping higher than ever before. You’ve been training hard and have been talking to prospective college coaches. You are ready to take your dream of being a collegiate athlete to the next and final phase. All those workouts, all those aches and pains will add up to this. There are only five minutes left in your last season’s game, and as you finish up your high school career with your dreams in plain sight, you watch your team from inside the training room, with your leg elevated, and the chill of the realization that you’re done with sports for the next few weeks, or months, or even more? Or is that just the chill of the ice surrounding your stiff joint?

Injury is an unpleasant and unfortunately common occurrence in athletics no matter what in the sport. The high demands of sprinting, jumping, kicking, throwing and more take a toll on muscles and joints. The twisting of a joint or the overstretching or tearing a muscle or ligament is extremely painful, can require surgery (which takes time for healing—time that the athlete is not working out and getting stronger), but can be prevented. Most athletes are aware of the fact that warming up and stretching properly are beneficial to injury prevention and the effectiveness of the athletes’ performance, but what they may not realize is that there are programs that can be incorporated into a normal workout that can actually strengthen and protect athletes as well. This blog is meant to give insight to a proper, focused warm up, and some key “prehab” techniques that can and will help athletes if they take the time to do them.

Warming up before working out is usually the time athletes take to go through the motions and appease their coaches and catch up with their teammates before getting into the workout. It usually consists of jogging a lap slowly and standing with their legs spread wider than shoulder length while the kids laugh and sway and catch up on last night’s tv shows or sport center highlights. I know, because as a dual collegiate athlete myself, that’s what I did. Whenever the coach glanced toward us, I’d bend down a little to appear to be “preparing” for our session.

After numerous injuries and taking classes like anatomy and physiology and kinesiology, I learned the importance of a good warm up in preventing those injuries I faced. Warming up is important because it raises the temperature of the body by pumping blood. Therefore, an athlete should break a sweat in their warm up. Once the body temperature is up, the muscles have enough blood flowing in them to loosen up to optimal performance lengths. To further optimize that, and slowly prepare muscles for activity, dynamic stretching should be used.

Static stretching is standing around in a circle holding a stretch for a count of 10, and is pretty ineffective, especially since the athletes probably aren’t even really paying attention to the stretches. Dynamic stretching is much better for pre-activity because it involves some focus; keeps the body moving, blood pumping, and temperature raised; it lengthens muscles that are sport specific by maximizing the range of motion; and studies show that it prepares your neuromuscular system as well, which means that your muscles will be able to contract harder, making you stronger. Examples of good dynamic stretches can be leg swings, hopping, skipping for height, arm swings, high knees, walking quad stretches—and anything else that involves movement and stretches the muscles.

Look for part two for more active ways to prevent injury.

Kenny Stills of La Costa Canyon is the XX1090 Athlete of the Week. Kenny is a wide reciever for the Mavericks and part of the class of 2010, one of the strongest classes La Costa Canyon has seen in years. Kenny maintains a 3.2 GPA and some impressive stats as listed on the XX 1090 website “…as a junior, he helped lead La Costa Canyon High School to the CIF-San Diego Section D-I championship, leading all of San Diego in receiving yards with 1,274 on 64 receptions and scored 16 touchdowns. He was named First Team All-State Underclassman by GoldenStatePreps.com.”

SportsForce CEO Andrew Beinbrink was interviewed by AM 830 KLAA , Home of the Angels, about the SportsForce mission. Take a moment to listen to the interview and learn a little more first hand.

The XX1090 Athlete of the Week is Brennan Clay of Scripps Ranch High School. Brennan is a Running Back for the Falcons. As listed on the XX1090 website Brennan is “…a very muscular and compact back and very high-effort kid that has tremendous change of direction and above-average speed. He will be extra dangerous because he is a stellar pass receiver and dangerous in space.”

The following is a guest post by Rex Grayner, President/Founder of Student-Athlete Showcase, LLC

Let’s face it, moms and dads: Saving $100,000 (or more) for Junior’s college education is not a realistic possibility for most of us.

Even if your 529 plan hasn’t tanked, or if you have the money stuffed under your mattress right now, how can most of us write that kind of check in this unpredictable economic climate? The solution may be in the right arm of your varsity pitcher or the left foot of your midfielder.

Attention high school athletes: If your dream is to play at the college level, and you want to help mom and dad with this nightmarish bill, there’s likely a home (and money) for you – if you have the right game plan.

Only 5% of America’s high school varsity athletes ever don a college uniform; 95% never play beyond high school. But, competing for these opportunities has become serious business in light of rising college expenses and more competitive scholarship requirements.

In the past 15 years, college recruiting has changed dramatically, much in part to the advances in recruiting technology, video and the internet. The old adage “if I’m good enough, they’ll find me” is long gone. College coaches have tighter budgets, more rigorous admissions standards and their jobs are on the line virtually every year, so the emphasis on winning now is more prevalent than ever.

It used to be that an athlete’s senior year was the most significant season. Nowadays, despite efforts by the NCAA to strictly regulate when a college coach can begin courting a student-athlete, coaches have discovered ways to evaluate athletes and develop relationships with prospects well before the junior year. As a result, prospects are verbally accepting scholarship offers, in many cases, before the coach is even permitted to pick up the phone and call them.

So, if you’re a parent of an athlete who aspires to compete at the collegiate level and (just maybe) get a chunk of that education paid for, here are four keys to your recruiting success:

Read the rest of this entry »

This summer has been full of nothing short of amazing volleyball. Both Boys and Girls wrapped up the Junior Olympic National Championships recently with intense competition from top teams around the country. The JO’s serve a great showcase for many of the top teams and players to hundreds of college coaches from around the country. It gives college coaches a tremendous opportunity to see top caliber competition and players ability can perform under press.

Congratulations to the Nebraska Juniors 18-1 in the Girls 18 Open Division for winning their way to 18 Open Gold Division Champions. Also congratulation is in order for AVA TX 18 Performance as the Girls 18 National Gold Division Champions.

On the Boys end 18s Orange in the Boys 18- Club division and Riptides OC 18 Asics in the Boys 18-Open division won JO National Championships.

The summer isn’t complete without hundreds of various prospect camps and instructional camps that are held throughout the country. Often college programs host summer prospect style camps to build direct relationships with players and for student-athletes to showcase their skills in front of schools they are interested in. Also top caliber coaches and former and current college players put on their own instructional camps for aspiring players to learn and improve their all-around skill level and approach to the game.

As the high school season approaches we wanted to rewind the clock and remind you who were the top teams from last high school season. ESPN FAB 50 rankings named Archbishop Mitty High School #1 for girls volleyball and Mira Costa High School as #1 for boys volleyball. Can both these teams keep their title in the upcoming seasons? It will be tough competition.

FAB 50 Final Rankings

Girls: http://myespn.go.com/blogs/highschoolvolleyball/0-5-10/ESPN-RISE-FAB-50.html

Boys: http://proxy.espn.go.com/highschool/rise/fab50?sportId=10020070&seasonType=1

Finally the high school girls volleyball season will be taking off in less than a month and it will be exciting to who emerge as the top players and teams to watch.