Col. Gregory Otey endeared himself to the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce this week by endorsing the effort to form a standalone Jacksonville school district and also by seeing off former Mayor Tommy Swaim with a couple of well-choreographed audio visual gags.
Speaking at the chamber’s quarterly meeting Tuesday, the Little Rock Air Force Base commander said that when airmen learn of a new posting, they immediately go online to research the area schools before deciding where to buy or rent a home.
Of the reenergized efforts to privatize, build and renovate airbase housing, Otey said, “We’ve got to be sure privatized housing works this time.” The ribbon cutting for the first 10 new homes completed was held later that day. (See picture, p. 7A.) Otey, who has both of his children in Pulaski County Special School District Schools, commended the work of “Daniel (Gray) and some of the folks here,” to improve existing schools and get a Jacksonville district.
At the end of Otey’s slide presentation — flow charts, faces, aircraft and new projects like the Joint Education Center and the new planned Base Exchange — was a video of an officer calling to congratulate Swaim on his service as Jacksonville mayor.
This was just hours before the mayor was to hand off the job to Gary Fletcher.
“Just wanted to thank you, sir,” said the video officer. “I remember when your dad was mayor.”
Then he covers the phone speaker as he was told it was not Swaim’s father but rather Swaim all that time — 22 years.
Swaim smiled broadly through that and another gag, and the audience laughed appreciatively.
“Was he around when Orville flew?” one asked.
“We are surrounded by a community that cares,” Otey said.
Otey said the 19th Air Mobility Wing has 50 C-130s, 14 of them the new J-model, with another expected next week.
That includes planes currently deployed in the Middle East and around the world. That includes the 41st Airlift Squadron, which is all C-130Js.
Otey said 15 percent of the planes, on average, are deployed every day.
The 314th Airlift Wing, also at the base, has 33 C-130s, and seven of those are C-130Js.
Otey also reminded the chamber that the air base directly or indirectly puts more than half-a-billion dollars into the economy of central Arkansas, much of it in the Jacksonville and Cabot area.
High winds and ice-cube-sized hailstones Tuesday afternoon beat crops in eastern Lonoke County like a rented mule.
In all, 26,000 acres or more of Lonoke County’s crops were damaged or destroyed in a matter of minutes in a year when farmers already have suffered floods and near-drought conditions, according to Jeff Welch, county extension service chief agent.
Keith Lewis’ cornfield is a 100 percent loss, Welch said. Corn stalks are broken over and ears are gouged by hail.
“The bright spot was going to be the corn,” Welch said. “About 1,600 acres of corn were damaged in this area. For specific growers, it’s a disaster.”
While the Schafer Road/Hwy. 31 intersection was the epicenter of the storm, the area affected was about four miles wide and 10.5 miles long from near Furlow all the way to the airport at Carlisle.
“The damage varies from 10 percent to 100 percent,” Welch said.
Extension agricultural agents will meet with farmers Monday in the most affected area to help them plot a future course.
For instance, the beat-down corn had headed and it could be harvested for silage, but it might be more cost effective to plow the crop over, preserving the expensive nutrients and replanting, soybeans perhaps, Welch said.
The question will be whether the price for the silage would be greater than the cost of refertilizing the fields.
“As far as I know, none of the farmers had hail insurance,” Welch said. “We are going to have some real severe financial losses.”
The beans and leaves were stripped off some soybean plants, leaving only stems poking out of the earth, he said, and if rice was clipped, that crop will have reduced yields.
The Monday meeting will be at 8 a.m. at the Scott Mitchell farm shop on Hwy. 31, Welch said. “About 27 farmers are the real audience.”
“The hidden story is that a lot of people live in that area, many of them elderly, that will have to replace shingles or had car damage.”
At the home of Melvin Schafer and the adjoining, the hail broke windows, gouged the vinyl siding and hammered the fins on the central air conditioner.
A car and a truck had hail damage.
Also throughout the area, farm ponds — not commercial fishponds — “turned over” in the storm, mixing the colder, putrefied matter from the bottom of the ponds and tying up oxygen. In some cases the turnover caused huge fish kills, according to Hugh Thomforde, the extension water specialist.
Typically, this problem occurs only in ponds deeper than six feet, while the average commercial fishpond is about three-and-a-half-feet deep, he said.
Before new Jacksonville Mayor Gary Fletcher could finish his thoughts about filling his vacant council seat, John Ferrell was nominated, seconded and approved by a near unanimous vote on Thursday.
Alderman Terry Sansing abstained, calling the whole affair a slap in the face of the city residents and the new mayor.
“It was unfair to the other five candidates who applied for the position and unfair to the citizens to not have a voice,” Sansing said.
“It was just more of the same back room politics that I thought we were getting rid of,” Sansing added.
There are now two aldermen on the council not voted in by the people.
Ferrell will hold his seat for the next 18 months. Kevin McCleary, who was appointed after the death of Alderman Robert Lewis, is serving an unelected near-four-year-term.
Besides Ferrell, who is a plant manager for Ashland, five other residents from Ward 4 submitted resumes to council members.
Those candidates were Mary Twitty, Beckie Brooks, Marcia Dornblaser, Jerry Meharg and Charlie Brown.
Sansing told the council, “I know a special election will cost us some money, but we have six candidates that would like to be on this council. Let the citizens choose.”
Alderman Bob Stroud, who nominated Ferrell, asked the city attorney about the law in this case.
City Attorney Robert Bamburg responded that the statute says the council shall appoint residents to fill vacant seats. “But the council may also refer any question to the residents,” Bamburg added.
Sansing responded, “The law allows it, but is it morally right?”
“I’ve got nothing against John (Ferrell), and he may turn out to be the best candidate, but I’ve never been in favor of the council filling seats. There needs to be an election.”
Fletcher wanted the council to wait until the first meeting in August, explaining that the city attorney would miss the next meeting and this would give people time to look over the resumes.
Stroud said the council didn’t need the city attorney present to fill the seat and nominated Ferrell. It was seconded by Alderman Marshall Smith, following by Sansing’s discussion of the matter and then the vote. Sansing also voiced concern that many of the candidates weren’t at the meeting.
“They were told not to come, that it was only up for discussion and that no action would be taken,” the alderman complained.
“It just wasn’t fair. It’s not how a council voted in office by the people should be acting,” Sansing lamented.
Aldermen Reedie Ray and Avis Twitty were absent.
After the vote, Fletcher congratulated Ferrell, who was at the meeting, and told him that arrangements would be made to swear him in before the next council meeting.
According to his resume, Ferrell has lived in Jacksonville since 1973 and worked at Ashland for more than 40 years. His wife, Nola, taught at Arnold Drive Elementary School for 35 years.
“I sincerely feel the varied background of my career path and other public service organizational involvement and my strong desire to serve make me a strong, viable candidate,” Ferrell wrote in his resume.
He sent in his resume six days after Fletcher defeated Alderman Kenny Elliott in a June 2 run-off for mayor.
In other council business:
Fletcher pulled his request to create an education advisory council, saying he wanted to review it and make sure everyone had a voice on the panel. He stated he wanted to add a base representative to the group.
Under the pulled proposal, Fletcher wants the group to include two members from the Jacksonville Education Foundation, two members from the Jacksonville World Class Organization, two members for the Chamber of Commerce education committee, two citizens at large and one city council representative.
The focus of the group is to “serve and focus efforts on the acquisition, creation, examination, exploration, and potential enhancements of a quality education system” for the city.
The council approved a resolution authorizing a “contract of obligation” between the city’s wastewater utility and the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality.
Thea Hughes, wastewater utility manager, explained that this was just an update of the contract the city already has with ADEQ. “In lieu of a performance bond, the utility can enter into a contract of obligation, and that contract must be updated every few years,” Hughes explained.
The contract locks the utility into covering the cost for any corrective action, closure or post-closure care of its solid waste disposal or processing facilities.
In his monthly report to the council, Fire Chief John Vanderhoof stated that his department responded to 98 rescue calls, 52 still alarms, 20 general alarms and had 229 ambulance runs in May.
The chief estimated fire loss for May at $7,700 and fire savings, based on the quick response of firefighters at $202,300.
TOP STORY > >Prospects seem grim for better highways
By JOHN HOFHEIMER Leader senior staff writer
There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and there is no such thing as a free road and highway program either.
That’s why state Sen. John Paul Capps, D-Searcy, Metroplan executive director Jim McKenzie, Jacksonville attorney Mike Wilson and 16 others are serving on the Arkansas Blue Rib-bon Committee on Highway Finance to find permanent funding to at least keep the state’s streets, roads and highways repaired and maintained, and if there’s money enough, to build new ones—finish the North Belt Loop, for instance.
Capps, who has a long-standing interest in highway issues, is the chairman.
The state Highway and Transportation Department projects its needs over the next decade at $23 billion, with antici pated revenues of only $4.1 billion. That means they expect to have about one of every six dollars they need.
Highway Department Director Dan Flowers told the group the state needs an additional $200 million a year just to maintain current conditions.
The only news here is that the needs category has increased by $4 billion, while the projected revenues haven’t budged an inch.
And that’s just state highways and interstates. There’s no complete data yet about the costs of maintaining or building city streets and county roads.
All agree more money is needed and while there are variations on a theme, basically that comes down to increasing taxes or fees or taking money from other state programs, such as prisons and education—each of which is generally conceded to need more, not less, funding.
Capps said he expects to have figures on the amount of money that could be raised through various methods when the commission reconvenes July 15 for its third meeting.
Among the tax-or-fee proposals are including a severance tax on lignite, using taxes collected on Internet sales, toll roads, raising property taxes and a hike in the state fuel tax.
Raising additional revenues is difficult in Arkansas, where the state Constitution puts “structural handcuffs” on the state’s ability to raise excise taxes. It requires a three-quarters majority of both houses to raise taxes, according to McKenzie.
McKenzie in the past has promoted regional mobility authorities with the power to levy taxes on fuel or elsewhere upon a vote of the people, the money then being available for roads and highways in the areas that voted for them. For instance, central Arkansas could pass such a tax, and then apply the revenues to roads and highways within its area.
“If folks want good roads, they are going to have to pay more,” McKenzie said. “It an immutable law of economics.”
Wilson said one reason for the financial difficulty was that revenues were flat, but “the costs are almost exponentially rising. Up and up and up. In 20 years they’ve increased 10 times. Cost of asphalt is many times greater than 10 years ago.
“It’s going to have to be some sort of tax,” Wilson said. “There’s no way around it. A motor fuel tax, property tax, they’re all distasteful and unpopular. We could (divert to highways) all sales taxes on tires and tire parts and cars, but that would be way short of what they need and it makes a hole in general revenues.”
“Virtually all the money locally comes from the tax on the number of gallons, not the price” at the pump, Capps said. Thus, when gas prices go up and people drive less and buy less fuel, less money is available for highways.
“Every state is going through this very same thing,” Capps said. “It’s a national issue but we have to address ours at the state level.”
He said the commission also must look into the future. Raising gas and diesel taxes would be a temporary fix if in the future vehicles run on electricity or are hybrids, for instance.
“We have been underfunding for decades,” McKenzie said. “Highways are being funded by an inelastic tax. The thing that goes up with inflation is cost of building and maintaining roadways, particularly last four of five years, cost has spiked with the run up (in price) of oil, steel, asphalt and concrete.”
There is worldwide competition for those resources, he said.
“Purchasing power’s going down. There’s been no federal increase since 1993. The state had a modest one.”
“Build roads and you have to maintain them forever,” McKenzie said. “It’s the same for cities and counties. We need to equitably fund city, county and state roads, now and in the future.”
“The stimulus (highway money) is like taking an aspirin,” said Wilson. “When it wears off, the headache comes back. We have to be innovative and creative. We can’t print money or raise gas-taxes 40 cents a gallon.”
The new Jacksonville mayor and the human resource director will meet Monday afternoon to better define the job descriptions for the city engineer and the city planner.
Human resource director Jill Ross said this was the first time Jacksonville had both positions filled. The city planner was hired when Jacksonville had no city engineer, but the city used the guidelines of the city engineer’s job description to guide the city planner.
Both positions became filled when Gary Fletcher took over the Jacksonville mayor’s office Tuesday evening.
His campaign manager, Jim Durham, became the city’s director of administration, which moved then-administrator Jay Whisker to the city engineer position, which he once held.
Chip McCulley, who was hired when Whisker left the city engineer post for a job in the private sector, stays on as the city planner.
The finances for the job rearrangements were worked on at the June 24 city council meeting, when aldermen reallocated money set aside for the vacant economic development director’s position and reauthorized the city engineer position.
When all was said and done, Durham had a salary of $73,500, Whisker makes $72,765 and McCulley continues to make $63,000.
But, as one resident asked recently, what do they do? And are taxpayers getting their money’s worth.
Fletcher has said that there is plenty for all to do and has said Whisker will focus on annexation and growth issues, while McCulley will work closely with code enforcement and condemnation issues.
Sherwood also has a city engineer and a city planner, although the city planner is not an employee but on contract.
According to the job descriptions, provided by the human resource director, the director of administration directs and coordinates administration of the city in the absence of the mayor in accordance with policies determined by the city council.
The director of administration oversees the public works department and may be called upon to appoint department heads and staff, interpret policy and provide direction, assist in preparing the annual budget and helps plan for the future development of urban and non-urban areas.
He also supervises activities of departments performing functions such as collection and disbursement of taxes, law enforcement, maintenance of pubic health, construction of public works and purchase office supplies and equipment.
The city engineer, according to the job description, directs and administers the city’s physical and social development, which involves the preparation, installation and adjustment of plans of the city’s improvement and construction of public works.
Duties of the city engineer are carried out with wide latitude, judgment and discretion.
The city engineer advises the mayor, the city council and planning commission on matters relating to planning and development that include public-works improvement programs and projects. He oversees the planning, design, construction and estimating of city public-works projects.
Ross said when McCulley was hired, the city used the city engineer guidelines, but didn’t require the candidate to have an engineering degree.
Retired Air Force Master Sgt. Parnell G. Fisher is humble about his accomplishments, but he concedes that “the Silver Star doesn’t come routinely.”
Fisher, a 32-year resident of Jacksonville, was awarded the Silver Star and Distinguished Flying Cross for his gallantry in action during the Vietnam War.
The Silver Star is the third-highest military decoration that can be awarded to any member of the armed forces.
Notable recipients include former President Lyndon B. Johnson, 2008 presidential candidate John McCain and Arkansas’ own former governor Sid McMath.
The Distinguished Flying Cross is awarded to those in the Air Force who distinguish themselves while in flight.
Fisher used a hand-drawn diagram to describe the events that earned him his medals.
On Dec. 18, 1966, Fisher and his team were dispatched to drop flares over Vung Tau to illuminate the sky “so the U.S. troops on the ground could see their targets.”
Fisher served as the load master on that C-130 flight and “would manually eject the flares instead of using those machine ejectors, which were really too slow.”
Then he says he heard one of the flares’ timers go off prematurely in the back of the plane. The timer flew off and hit the flight engineer in the head, knocking him out.
Fisher says he knew that he had “10 seconds to find and eject the flare from the plane before it would ignite into a 22,000-candle-power flame. That thing is hot! That thing will burn underwater. One will light up this whole neighborhood.”
“Ten seconds, if you count, is not a long time,” he continued, “especially when you’re working in the dark like we were… I had to find the flare, get it out and let it go. But it didn’t quite work that way.
“Right when I got it out the door, the chute deployed and the slip stream takes it back and it gets caught underneath the edge of the door. Now the flare itself is underneath the rear stabilizer and it’s ignited,” he said.
So Fisher leapt into action. “I went for my knife… and I’m hanging out of the plane, trying to cut the shroud lines attaching the chute to the flare,” he explained.
“I had to get past the big eight-foot canopy of the chute to get to the lines… it took a while to cut all of them, but I did,” Fisher said.
“I think anyone under those circumstances would have done the same thing. It needed to be done, and it needed to be done quickly,” Fisher said.
His wife, Vermond, said that until recently, “he never really talked about it.”
He met his wife in Hampton, Va. They married in 1959 and have lived in Jacksonville since he retired from the Air Force in 1977.
Fisher was born in Benton. He says he spent exactly “22 years, six months and 22 days in the military,” calling it “short compared to what most guys serve.”
Though he received his medals for his heroics more than 40 years ago, he says he has received much more attention in recent years.
Fisher is finally willing to share his accomplishments with others. He recently took out all of his medals and certificates from storage to have them framed and hung in Jacksonville’s Museum of Military History.
Fisher speaks more freely about his heroics now because he says he gets asked more questions.
“It’s not that I didn’t want to think about it, it’s just that, although I’m told it’s really a feat to be proud of, I just felt I’d be bragging if I talked about it,” he said.
Each year, the Los Angeles City Council honors one distinguished veteran on Memorial Day.
Fisher’s sister, Margaret, who works for the city council, nominated him to be this year’s honoree. He was selected even though he lives in Arkansas.
He was so private about his war record, in fact, that his own sister had never heard the specifics of his actions until she heard him speak this year at the Puente Hills Memorial Day ceremony in California.
When speaking of his sudden recognition across the country, Fisher remain modest about his accomplishments.
“It was nothing to write home about,” he insists.
The Fishers plan to devote a wall in their home to Parnell’s collection of wartime trophies.
Though Fisher is now retired from the military, he remains active at Little Rock Air Force Base, where he’s the shop supervisor and lead technician at the Automotive Skills Development Center, which repairs vehicles for airmen.
The most dangerous thing about state-sponsored gambling is that its underlying attitude of “easy come, easy go” is infectious.
The Arkansas Lottery Commission and its supervising lawmakers proved that again this week when they authorized the state lottery director to hire two friends from South Carolina at a combined salary of $450,000 a year. Lottery proceeds, they reasoned, are free money and there will be plenty of it, so why not?
Ernie Passailaigue, the director whom Arkansas hired away from the South Carolina lottery last month, advised lawmakers who were hearing complaints from voters and some of the media about the high salaries for lottery officials that they should pay no attention to their constituents. The average Arkansan just does not know enough facts about the lottery to understand why the high salaries are necessary, he said. When people are buying scratch-off and Powerball tickets, all the criticism and suspicion will subside, he assured them. The Legislative Oversight Committee, with only one member voting no, gave Passailaigue authority to hire the two South Carolinians at the pay he suggested, which is far more than the handsome salaries they are getting back in the Palmetto state, and to authorize him to hire a staff of 75.
Passailaigue is probably right that four or five months from now people caught up in the euphoria of striking it rich will not care much about his $324,000 salary and the $225,000 he plans to pay the assistant directors for internal operations and for marketing, who have been doing those jobs for him in South Carolina.
That is why we should consider it now in the unfiltered light of reason. It smells to the heavens.
Let us recapitulate how we got here. After Gov. Beebe signed the lottery enabling legislation this spring and the governor and the presiding lawmakers appointed the nine commissioners to run it, everyone got to talking about speeding the process so that people could be betting as soon as possible. Every day lottery that tickets are not being sold scores of students will be missing out on going to college, they said.
Since Passailaigue, a longtime South Carolina politician, had advised them on writing the lottery law, why not hire him? He had lost out on getting the lottery job in North Carolina in 2006 and he was looking. He said he could hit the ground running and would come for a $100,000 raise. So Arkansas has the third highest paid lottery director in America, behind Tennessee and
Georgia. California, New York, Illinois, Florida? Their lottery chiefs don’t come close.
But the new director said if he was going to start the lottery quickly he would need the most knowledgeable people, so he suggested his two top assistants in South Carolina. The Lottery Commission considered them a steal at $225,000 each.
Passailaigue had already hired Arkansas Lottery Commission Chairman Ray Thornton’s former public relations aide for $105,000. So the lottery now has, or soon will have, a staff of four at a payroll of nearly $900,000 plus health and pension benefits, and it has 71 to go.
Are they worth it? We can’t say for sure, but running a lottery requires no genius. You don’t have to understand the curved space-time continuum or even be able to solve a quadratic equation. Scientific Games Corp., which will get one or both game contracts after the bids are in, will do all the product development and the other hard stuff. Scientific Games and G-Tech Corp. run virtually all the lotteries in America.
Arkansas’ top three lottery officials will each earn more than all but six lottery officials in the western hemisphere. All the high salaries are in the South. The big rich states keep it in perspective and put lottery officials in the same pay ranges as other government administrators.
Whoever runs them, lotteries tend to get up and running in four to six months, which is when Passailaigue says he will get it done. North Carolina did it in three months and two days, and they didn’t have Ernie Passailaigue.
Thornton, Passailaigue and Rep. Robbie Wills of Conway, the speaker of the House and chief sponsor of the lottery law, all said it was important to get key officials and pay them well so that the state will not be losing millions of dollars a day that could be spent on scholarships.
But what is the rush? Arkansas has tens of millions of dollars in unspent scholarship funds already because the money has gone unclaimed. The legislature lowered the grade-point requirements for getting and keeping scholarships starting this fall, but no one who qualifies for and needs a scholarship will have to stay home during the next year because lottery tickets aren’t for sale by Oct. 29.
The commission and the lawmakers also approved Passailaigue’s request that Arkansas immediately join Powerball, the big multistate game with the huge jackpots. States always have to join the big multistate games, either Powerball or Mega Millions, because the promise of unearthly wealth is what gets people, especially the poor, coming back every payday to invest in kingdom on earth.
That is what people want to bet on, true, but they made it sound like an economic boon to the state. In truth, however much Arkansas people bet on Powerball half of it will be sucked out of the state for national prizes. Arkansas will get to keep half of it, which will be distributed, part for scholarships and the rest to the vendors, administration and the state treasury to help defray the costs of state government.
SPORTS>> Let us be your one-stop source for Lingerie Football League action
By KELLY FENTON Leader sports editor
Ask any sports editor at a community newspaper what the biggest time of year is, and he won’t hesitate. (If he tells you summer, because that’s the only practical time to take a vacation in this business, you should start looking for a new sports editor immediately.)
What every sports editor will answer is high school football season. Friday nights from early September to early November and beyond are dedicated to one thing almost exclusively: the boys on the gridiron.
Which is why it pains me so to realize that I won’t be covering high school football this fall. Why? Well, I just visited the Lingerie Football League Web site and I’m back to tell you – some five and a half hours later – that the LFL has scheduled its games for Friday nights, beginning Sept. 4.
It was not an easy decision for me because nothing stirs me like the panoply of prep football – the crisp nights festooned with a dewy sliver of moon, the drum line of the band, the players stampeding through the “Beat the Buffs” banner to the thunderous ovation of the fans, the cheerleaders’ desperate rush to the sidelines ahead of the players that puts one in mind of the running of the bulls in the streets of Pamplona, the game itself, the late nights at the office trying to find the perfect lede to capture the action.
Alas, I will miss all of that this fall. Fear not. Intrepid sportswriter and high school football maven Jason King (whose midweek predictions last fall proved correct a stunning 18 percent of the time) drew the short straw and will continue to provide our readers with prep coverage in each of our Saturday editions throughout the fall.
Meanwhile, our promise to you: Simply the most comprehensive coverage of lingerie football in Arkansas.
When the Dallas Desire and the Denver Dream hook up in October, we’ll be there. When the Bliss (Chicago) battle the Temptation (Los Angeles) or the Seduction (San Diego) visit the Euphoria (New England), we’ll provide the insight and analysis.
Our coverage will consist primarily of photos, though the accompanying story will provide such critical details as who started the hair pulling brawl, whether those green garters the Miami Caliente sport beneath their teal shorts is gauche and, space permitting, the final score.
Mostly it will be pictures, though.
Please don’t think this is prurient in the least. Our interest is twofold: We love football and we abhor chauvinism.
You thought we wouldn’t cover an athletic event simply because, instead of middle-aged men in long pants and jerseys, it is young women in shorts and halter-tops?
You don’t know us very well.
I have learned this much from my visit this morning (and early afternoon) to the LFL Web site: The game will consist of seven girls in halters and shorts competing against seven other girls in halters and shorts on a 50-yard field.
Scoring is the same as in men’s football, though there is no kicking, and extra points must be converted via a run or pass.
Interestingly, the Web site goes out of its way to identify the end zones as being eight yards deep. I’m not sure how that tidbit adds to my understanding of the game, or even how deep an NFL end zone is, but so be it.
Anyway, it will be full-contact, and the girls will wear padded protection but not to the point that it distracts those viewers tuning in just to see skimpily attired young women. And as much as we’d like to think otherwise, there are bound to be such people.
But not us. We’re there for the love of the game.
I just see one potential problem with the new league. Given man’s basically piggish behavior, will we be able to distinguish the teams to the point that all-important rivalries are allowed to form, or will we view them all as an amorphous mass of young pretty women in shorts and halter tops?
To that end, I propose, as one of the top LFL journalists in the field today, that the league form two distinct conferences — one devoted to scantily clad purveyors of prurience and the other to properly attired purveyors of purity.
The Prude Conference would be made up of teams whose uniforms consisted of long, preferably flannel dresses with high collars and ruffled sleeves. I’m thinking of the Pittsburgh Puritans, for instance, or the Chicago Chaste. Or perhaps the Scranton Scolders.
Anyway, those are just some ideas for a later date. Let’s see how the first season plays out and we can tweak it from there.
Tune in to these sports pages this fall for all the action.
Jacksonville Gwatney Chevrolet finally solved the mystery of Benton knuckleballer Jayce Mitchell on Friday afternoon, and not a second too soon.
The soft-throwing reliever set down the first seven Chevy Boys he faced before Gwatney broke through for three runs in the seventh. That proved the difference in a 7-4 win for the Chevy Boys, who improved to 2-0 in pool play at the Gwatney Fourth of July Classic.
Patrick Castleberry and A.J. Allen kept up the Gwatney home run barrage. Each knocked one out on Friday. Castleberry belted a slam and Seth Tomboli added a long ball on Thursday night in a win over Little Rock Blue, bringing the team’s total to four through the first two games of the tourney.
Gwatney carried a 7-2 lead into the seventh but a sudden spate of wildness following a brilliant outing by starter and winner Clayton Fenton nearly cost them. Fenton had walked no one, but hit the first batter he faced in the seventh. Tommy Sanders walked both batters he faced in relief and Jared Toney came in and walked in a run. But with the tying run at the plate, Toney retired the next three batters. The final out of the game was recorded when first baseman Jason Regnas made a long stretch and a back-handed, short-hop scoop of shortstop Terrell Brown’s throw.
Benton grabbed the early lead with a pair of singles and a double steal in the first. But Gwatney erupted for three runs in the second. Tomboli reached on an error on the center fielder, Sanders singled and Allen followed with a three-run no-doubter blast over the scoreboard in left-center.
Castleberry led off the third with a home run to make it 4-1. That appeared to be more than enough for Fenton, whose curve ball had Benton batters lunging all afternoon. After allowing the two singles in the first, Fenton gave up only two more hits through the sixth. Benton closed the gap with an unearned run in the sixth.
But Mitchell’s knuckleball had completely stymied the Gwatney bats from the fourth inning on. Brown became the first base runner to reach base off Mitchell when he drew a leadoff walk in the seventh. Brown stole second and third and scored on Castleberry’s single. That gave Castleberry eight RBI in his past two games.
Toney lined a single to right, then moved to second on a wild pitch. Tomboli brought them both home with a single to left.
Fenton went six innings, allowing four hits and two earned runs. He fanned six and hit a batter.
Gwatney finished with eight hits, two each by Castleberry and Tyler Wisdom.
Gwatney finishes pool play today at 4:30, when it takes on Sylvan Hills Optimist Club.
Not even three home runs could keep Sylvan Hills out in front in the first round of the Gwatney Fourth of July Classic.
Ty Van Schoyck’s grand slam in the top of the sixth inning gave the senior Optimist Bruins their only lead of the game at 8-5, but an eight-run rally in the bottom of the inning allowed Benton McClendon’s Appliances to prevail 13-8 on Thursday at Shireman Field in Dupree Park.
Hunter Miller took the loss after and up-and-down day on the mound for Sylvan Hills. Miller gave up five hits through the first five innings, but began to feel the heat in the bottom of the sixth when Benton got to him for five more hits and an 11-8 lead.
Head coach Mike Bromley brought in reliever Justin Cook, but a passed ball resulted in two more runs coming across to extend Benton’s lead to five and set the final margin.
The Bruins fell behind 5-1 before Geno Jameson began their comeback with a solo home run in the fifth.
Van Schoyck’s slam over the wall in left capped off a six-run sixth that gave Optimist Club an 8-5 lead. Earlier in the inning, Austin Spears had cut Benton’s lead to one with a two-run shot to left. Walks to Mike Maddox and James Pepin and a single by
Ryan Dillon loaded the bases and set up Van Schoyck.
The Bruins went scoreless through three innings until Jameson set up the first SH run when he reached on a passed ball strikeout in the top of the fourth.
Austin Spears drove him in two batters later with a double to make it 4-1. It was only the second hit of the game for the Bruins at that point, following a leadoff double by Van Schoyck in the top of the first inning.
Miller’s pitching was solid in the early going, but a pair of errors gave Benton a 1-0 lead in the first. He recovered to send Benton three up, three down in the bottom of the second before McClendon’s scored three runs off three hits and three walks in the bottom of the third.
Van Schoyck was 2 of 4 with a grand slam, a double and four RBI. Austin Spears was 2 of 4 with a home run, and double and two RBI. For Benton, Austin Pheiffer and Riley Hobbs were each 2 of 4.
The Bruins played Little Rock Blue yesterday in the second round of pool play in a game played after Leader deadlines. They take on Gwatney today at 4:30 before the tournament concludes with bracket play Sunday.
Gwatney Chevrolet didn’t have to hit too many balls hard to score their runs in an 11-3 win over Little Rock Blue on Thursday evening at Dupree Park.
And of those balls that were tagged, most of them came off the bat of catcher Patrick Castleberry. The Jacksonville High junior-to-be belted a grand slam and two doubles, scored three times and drove in six more in the opening round of pool play at the Gwatney Chevrolet Fourth of July Classic.
Ten walks and a hit batter and a two-run home run by Seth Tomboli provided most of the remainder of Gwatney’s offense and pitcher Michael Harmon did the rest. Harmon struggled at times with his control, walking four and hitting three, but allowed only two hits — back-to-back singles in the fifth.
Gwatney got the early lead when Terrell Brown walked leading off the game, stole second and eventually came home on Castleberry’s sacrifice fly. Tomboli, Daniel Thurman and Jason Regnas walked to begin the second inning before Tommy Sanders beat out a slow roller down the third base line to make it 2-0. Brown then lifted a shallow pop up behind short that was caught on the edge of the outfield grass. But the shortstop fell down on the play, allowing Thurman to race home from third.
The big blow of the game came two batters later after Devon McClure was hit with a pitch to load the bases once more. Castleberry lifted a 1-0 offering high into night sky. The towering shot came down well beyond the scoreboard in left center and the grand slam staked Gwatney to a7-0 lead.
Harmon set down the first six Blue batters he faced, recording four of his 10 strikeouts over that span. He ran into trouble of his own making in the third, hitting the first batter, and then making an errant throw on a bouncer hit back to the mound. A ground out made it 7-1.
Gwatney added a run in the fourth and Castleberry missed out on another RBI opportunity when Brown was picked off first.
Castleberry laced a double down the line in left, and then scored on a pair of wild pitches.
Harmon walked the first three Blue hitters in the fourth, but escaped damage with a pair of strikeouts — one on a 3-2 count — and a foul pop to first. None of the first 20 batters Harmon faced hit the ball out of the infield and only six put the ball in play.
But after a one-out walk in the fifth, Blue got solid consecutive singles to load the bases. Blue scored on a slow bouncer that Gwatney third baseman Jared Toney made a nifty play on when he charged, short-hopped the ball and threw across as the runner from third came in. A wild pitch made it 8-3.
In the top of the sixth, Gwatney got three more. Brown reached on an error and Castleberry doubled him home with a long drive to the fence in straightaway center field. With two outs, Tomboli made it 11-3 with a two-run line drive home run to left.
Harmon finished it off with a 1-2-3 sixth.
Gwatney finished with only seven hits — three by Castleberry and one each by Tomboli, Regnas, A.J. Allen and Sanders.
The tournament concludes pool play today before advancing to the semifinals and championship games on Sunday.
On the whole, we don’t begrudge anyone, the deserving or the undeserving, a well- paying new job in these parlous economic times. We only trust that it was not achieved at our — that is, the public’s — expense.
Yesterday brought news that two of Arkansas’ top school administrators had landed new jobs in the private sector. It was not clear that it was a step up financially for either man, each of whom was making a quarter of a million dollars a year, but the posts were clearly lucrative and far less demanding than their old jobs laboring for the Arkansas taxpayers.
Lu Hardin, the embattled former president of the University of Central Arkansas, whose public tenure is still the subject of a criminal investigation, today becomes president of Palm Beach Atlantic University in Palm Beach, Fla. It describes itself as a Christian college dedicated to teaching the liberal arts from a “Christ-based” vantage point. The chairman of the Board of Trustees described its new president as “ a person of great character and ability as well as a man of great faith.”
Ken James, who a month ago had announced his resignation effective July 1 as director of the state Department of Education, becomes the chief operating officer of America’s Choice, a private company that has enjoyed some $24 million in contracts with the Department of Education since James became the director.
There is no evidence and indeed no suspicion as far as we know that the consulting contracts and James’ new job were linked in any way. But the circumstance on its face is troubling, which is why the revolving door is often prohibited by law. Not in Arkansas, unless it is demonstrated convincingly that a new job is somehow contingent upon the business that the public administrator and the company have conducted in the past.
In the analogy above, Hardin would be the undeserving and James the deserving candidate for promotion or an easier style of living. Lu Hardin had his formidable qualities — raising money, championing higher athletic goals, promoting the school (and, even more formidably, himself), but his lies, deceptions, greed and overweening ambition cost the university dearly. It will take the school years to overcome his legacy. But the modest religious school in Palm Beach apparently knew what it was getting.
Hardin’s old friend and boss, Rush Harding III, the chairman of UCA’s board of trustees, said he told the search team in Florida everything that Hardin had done, the evil as well as the positive. The good regents there thought his beneficial qualities were exactly what the school needed. (It is a struggling NCAA Division II school athletically and it may have loftier ambitions for the Palm Beach Sailfish. Hardin got the UCA Bears into Division I, although it took lots of money and some tricky and perhaps illegal accounting to get it done.)
James, on the other hand, has distinguished himself as superintendent of Little Rock schools and as the state’s chief school officer. He has fewer detractors than almost anyone in high office in Arkansas. He was an architect of the late school financial reforms that resolved the longstanding Lakeview school equity case. The governor, lawmakers, school administrators and union representatives all sing his praises as a leader of uncommon intelligence and ability. Who could begrudge him a time to relax in the comfort of a corner of the private sector where competition barely exists?
But the sour taste of this arrangement is inescapable. When James announced he was leaving as director of the Education Department to explore other careers, which he did not identify, his reticence had a reason. It would have the appearance of quid pro quo. For four years, America’s Choice has gotten a contract from the department in the neighborhood of $6 million a year to supply consulting and training for school districts that are in distress owing to their financial condition and low student achievement. Even if there was not an employment deal — and we are quite confident there was not — it does not look good to the public that the official has served.
This has been a common occurrence in Arkansas government. State utility and in-surance commissioners and attorneys leave their state positions to take good jobs for the industries that they have been oh so gingerly regulating. Term-limited legislators take jobs lobbying for industries and trade groups that they have favored with their votes on legislation. Progressive states have imposed a prohibition of one to three years on the revolving door to eliminate the temptation and the appearance of back scratching.
It would have imposed a hardship on Ken James, but his sterling reputation would have been intact.
Gary Fletcher was sworn in as mayor of Jacksonville on Tuesday, and he’s set himself an ambitious agenda for the next 16 months before he must face the voters again in November 2010.
As he finishes the uncompleted term of outgoing Mayor Tommy Swaim, who stepped down yesterday, Fletcher wants better schools for Jacksonville and has made a strong case for separating from the Pulaski County Special School District.
He has gone before the school board and sought an agreement on drawing up boundary lines for the proposed north Pulaski County school district. He believes local control of the schools would provide better educational opportunities for all students.
Parents, especially, have despaired over the quality and lack of discipline in the schools, as well as the dilapidated conditions that make it even more difficult for students to learn.
The school board has agreed to build a new middle school, thanks in no small part to Fletcher’s hectoring, as well as pressure from local groups that have tired of the board’s foot-dragging.
Much work remains to be done: Attracting middle-class families once again who flocked here in the 1970s by bringing in more jobs and creating better housing and more parks for young and old. Fletcher says he’s rolled up his sleeves and wants to work for Jacksonville 24/7. This is a job he’s pursued for nearly a quarter of a century, and he wants to do at least as well as his predecessor.
If Fletcher succeeds on the education front and works toward revitalizing Jacksonville, including the Sunnyside Addition, and reducing crime, his first short term could be the start of a more ambitious program that he could complete in a full second term. The community wishes him well.
There will be something for everyone this Fourth of July weekend.
The Jacksonville High School stadium on Friday is where the city celebrates “With Liberty and Justice for All,” the 2009 Patriotic Spectacular honoring our country’s finest men and women.
The entertainment starts at 6:30 p.m. with country, opera, Christian and contemporary music. A Kids Fun Area will be open at 7 to 8:15 p.m. with Radio Disney, face painting, inflatables and more. The dramatic musical, “With Liberty and Justice for All,” will begin at 8:15 p.m. on the main stage with talent from church choirs, youth choirs, dancers and actors.
The Patriotic Youth Choir will sing and re-enact from Indian and pioneer days.
Jacksonville’s new mayor, Gary Fletcher, will be Abe Lincoln. Many other city officials also have roles in the musical and re-enactments.
Community Hero awards will also be given to American Idol Kris Allen, civic employees and other professionals. The evening will end with a spectacular fireworks display by lawyer Hubert Alexander.
The Jacksonville High School Band Booster Club will sell concessions. Admission is free. The Advertising and Promotion commission, churches, businesses and civic clubs, sponsor the event.
Sherwood will have its Fourth of July celebration starting at 6 p.m. Saturday at Sherwood Forest. There will be music and entertainment, presentation of colors, and hot dogs and drinks while they last. It’s free and open to the public. Fireworks start at 9 p.m.
Ward is expecting about 5,000 spectators for its annual Fourth of July fireworks display. But the festivities begin before dark with a parade at 4 p.m. followed by the opening ceremony complete with an honor guard at 5 p.m.
The activities include a tractor pull and car show. Hamburgers and hotdogs will be served. Legacy, a band from Cabot, will perform.
In Cabot, the celebration is on Friday at Mt. Carmel Baptist Church at Hwy. 89 South and Hwy. 321. A patriotic program is scheduled for 7:30 p.m., followed by fireworks at 9 p.m.
In the community of Floyd, on Hwy. 31 between Beebe and Romance, the Fourth of July festivities start at 10 a.m., with a parade that includes horses and floats, and lasts until the end of the fireworks at the ballpark off Hwy. 305 that start at dark.
In between are ball games, horseshoe games, sack races and egg toss games.
Food is available from concession stands that are open all day. But families may also bring their own grills and cook or bring picnic lunches to the ballpark where the annual daylong celebration has been held since the early 1980s.
The celebration at Beebe City Hall starts at 6:30 p.m. with a performance by Elvis impersonator Tony Witt. Fireworks start at dusk.
Zion Hills Baptist Church invites the community to its 14th annual Church and Community Picnic at 6 p.m. Sunday.
There will be basketball, volleyball, horseshoe toss and many other outdoor activities if weather permits. Hamburgers and hotdogs will be served, along with popcorn, homemade desserts and ice pops. There will also be a designated activity area for children.
The church is located on Zion Hill Road near Hwy. 89 and Hwy. 107, approximately seven miles west of Cabot.
For more information, contact that church office at 501-988-4989. Bring your lawn chairs and sunscreen, and invite friends.
The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission recently supplied the Ward Library with eight new Shakespeare fishing rods and reels for the public to check out.
Fishermen in Ward who need to borrow a fishing pole for the day need look no further than their local public library.
The Game and Fish Commission has supplied the library with eight rods and reels for patrons to check out.
Librarian Vanessa Ford said, “They have to have a library card to check out a pole. To get a library card you have to have a bill with your name and address and a photo ID.”
Fishermen need to supply the line and hooks. The fishing poles will have barcodes attached for check out. The fishing gear will be ready for anglers to borrow starting Monday.
She added that children younger than 18 years old are required to have a parent sign for them to receive a library card.
Children have to be at least 10 years old to be in the library without an adult or parent present.
The program is geared toward families. “They will be able to check out two per family for three days,” Ford said.
She said Ward resident James Davidson, a technician with the Game and Fish Commission, stopped in the library and asked about setting up the free fishing gear loan program.
She said a Game and Fish Commission employee will stop by the library periodically to maintain the rods and reels.
The Ward Public Library is located at 405 Hickory St., Suite 100 across from the city gym.
Not too far from the library is Busby Lake. The lake is located across the railroad tracks from the Hwy. 367 and Hwy. 319.
For more information about the new program contact the library at 941-3220.
There’s an old rock home on a small lot at 101 Lakeshore Drive which Tommy Dupree wants the city to buy so the Reed’s Bridge Historical Society can convert it to a visitors and interpretive center for the Civil War battlefield.
Over the past 10 years, the city has helped expand the battlefield site by purchasing more than $215,000 worth of property for the society, but this purchase fell on deaf ears last Wednesday.
Dupree asked the council to fund the $42,000 purchase, but no alderman made a motion and the request died. It was the third time in about four months that Dupree has approached the council about this property.
“The house is solid and in good shape,” Dupree told the council.
He said he walked through the home with Fire Chief John Vanderhoof, who restores old homes, and they thought the building could be converted to a visitor’s center for about $40,000 to $45,000.
“The floors are good and solid and so are the trusses. It won’t take a lot to fix it up. Most of the repair and conversion work would be self-help,” Dupree said.
“We’ve got the lumber and the manpower and can get some funding and grants for the work, but there’s just no money out there for acquisition of property,” he added.
“This will be about the only way we’ll be able to have a center on the site, and it would make development of the area go faster,” Dupree said.
But Alderman Bob Stroud disagreed, saying the home was termite infested, and offered to walk through the property with Dupree to show him the problems.
“For $42,000, it isn’t going to happen. I want you to go forward, but not with this,” the alderman said.
Alderman Terry Sansing also had problems spending the money.
“Times are tough. Tax income is slowing down and money is tight. We can find better use for these funds than buying this structure,” Sansing said, reminding Dupree that the council had been very “generous with city money on park purchases.”
“We’ve contributed about $215,000 over the past 10 years,” Sansing said. “And your group has done a good job at getting additional funding and help, but we just need to put this money to better use.”
The property owner originally wanted $56,000 for the property based on appraisals he had done. The city appraised the lot at $33,000, and former Mayor Tommy Swaim talked the owner down to $42,000.
In other council business:
The city council saluted Mayor Swaim for his 22.5 years of service and invited him back to Thursday’s meeting to receive his special retirement clock.
Aldermen shifted funds in the 2009 budget to allow for personnel changes planned by incoming Mayor Gary Fletcher.
Fletcher plans to make Jim Durham the city administrator and move Jay Whisker, the current city administrator, to the city engineer position, a post he previously held, and keep Chip McCulley as city planner.
To do so financially, the council shifted $100,000 it had budgeted for an unfilled economic development position to cover the expenses of bringing Durham on board, and reauthorized the city engineer’s position.
The city administrator will be paid $73,500, the city engineer’s salary will be $72,765 and the city planner will get $63,000.
The council approved the final plat of the Odell Residential Development, which will consist of four homes on 0.86 acres near North James Street.
Aldermen appointed Paul Payne to the Residential Housing Facilities Board. His term will expire in 2012.
The Pulaski County Sheriff’s Department arrested seven people Monday on prostitution-related charges along Hwy. 161 south of Jacksonville.
“We’ve had several calls from people who live out there, telling us where they were working and what they were doing,” sheriff’s department spokesman John Rehrauer explained.
“We did a saturation sweep to address the problem and we’re pretty happy with the results,“ he said.
“Working together, we can rid the area of this problem,” Sheriff Doc Holladay noted.”
Belinda Myers, 28, of 801 Cotton St. in North Little Rock was arrested in the Prothro Junction area for prostitution, possession of drug paraphernalia and failure to pay a fine from the North Little Rock District Court.
Jonna Rogers, 24, 39 Lake view Road, Greers Ferry, was arrested on Hwy. 161 in the Rixie area for prostitution.
Arrested for patronizing a prostitute were Darrell Penn, 58, of 1314 Southeastern Road, Jacksonville; Kelsa Slaughter, 69, of 605 Candlewood Cove, Cabot; Cameron Phillips, 27, of 304 South J.P Wright Loop, Jacksonville, and Morris Williams, 24, of 7800 Downing Circle, North Little Rock. Williams was also arrested for contempt of court.
Laura Wilkerson, 33, of 10111 Lanehart in Little Rock was arrested for promoting prostitution and on a fugitive warrant from the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office in Florida for outstanding grand theft charges.
“These folks have been in the system before,” he said. “They got court dates. We want people to understand that if the problem continues, we’ll be back,” Rehrauer said.
Jacksonville residents have not been complaining to police about prostitution on South Hwy. 161 in the city limits, Capt. Charles Jenkins said.
“We’ve made arrests down there,” Jenkins said, but they are few and far between. “We’re not getting the level of complaints that the county is getting. We have a lot of patrols that go up and down that road,” he said. “Our presence may curtail that activity.”
At 5:04 p.m. Tuesday, Gary Fletcher was sworn in as Jacksonville’s mayor.
Justice of the Peace Bob Johnson swore in Fletcher in front of about 200 friends, family members and well-wishers at the community center.
Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce president Phillip Carlisle told the audience that the swearing-in ceremony for a new mayor was truly historical. “We haven’t done this in 23 years,” Carlisle said.
Fletcher told the crowd he felt a bit guilty becoming mayor. “The apples are ripe and on the trees for me to just pick and hand to you,” he said, complimenting the work of former mayors Tommy Swaim and James Reid. “They have been great.”
He said shadowing Swaim the past week has been like “following a rock star on a farewell tour. Those are big shoes to fill.”
Fletcher said he’s questioned whether he is strong enough to do this job, but has found solace and strengthen in biblical verses and his unwavering belief in God.
The new mayor told the crowd at the community center, “You are more than citizens of Jacksonville. You are my family and I love you. You are the greatest people in the world.”
He added that often when a new mayor comes in lines are drawn. “Lines divide people. I plan on drawing a big old circle so we all get the credit.”
Fletcher will oversee his first city council meeting Thursday and is asking aldermen to create a nine-member education advisory group.
He will be Abe Lincoln in the Patriotic Spectacular at Jan Crow Stadium on Friday.
SPORTS >> Cook tunes up for Scrapp Fox with a victory
By JASON KING Leader sportswriter
If Friday’s modified feature at Beebe Speedway is any sign of what’s to come at this weekend’s Scrapp Fox Memorial, there should be no shortage of excitement.
Curt Cook took his third modified win in the past five races with an aggressive pass on defending track champion Randy Weaver on lap 20 after starting seventh on the grid.
The driver known as Mr. Hollywood methodically worked his way through the field by holding a smooth line on the inside in the early going, but as the laps ran out, so did Cook’s patience. He banged wheels with Weaver in the middle of turn three to take the lead, and managed to keep control of his 601 machine coming out of turn four on the final lap when the four-time modified track champion decided to return the favor.
Weaver earned the top-qualifier spot by winning his heat, and stayed out front early on by holding off a racy Todd Greer. Greer eventually fell into the clutches of veteran Mike Bowers and Tyler ‘Rocketman’ Stevens in the Barker’s 2FAST machine.
While Weaver committed to the high side throughout the 24-lap event, Cook edged past several good cars by out-breaking them on the inside line in the corners. That set up a great battle between the two, and Cook finally caught the leader on lap 14. He got a number of looks inside, but the “Big Show,” as Weaver is known in racing circles, used the momentum of the outside line to stay out front until Cook stuck it hard into turn three to take over first.
The only yellow flag of the night came out on lap two, when Stevens and former state IMCA champion Donnie Stringfellow of Heber Springs, touched in turn two. Stevens continued, but Stringfellow went around to bring out the caution.
Bryant’s Casey Findley qualified third for the feature, but his car did handle as well in the main event. Bowers made his way around the former track champ on lap seven, followed by Cook and Stevens two circuits later.
Weaver claimed second, while Bowers finished third and Stevens fourth. Greer held on to round out the top five, with Findley sixth. Cabot pilots David Payne and Jason Flory finished eighth and 10th respectively. Other local entries included the 458 car of Beebe’s Sammy Chamberlain, who finished 12th, while Jacksonville area driver Cory Dumas finished 13th in the 51F car.
Jacksonville’s Mike McDougale won the hobby stock feature after starting third. McDougale wasted no time claiming the lead, passing points leader Bobby Blankenship and Robert Weston of Cabot on lap one. While McDougale dominated up front, Jeff Porterfield put on a show in his 44P machine. Porterfield started seventh on the grid, but sliced through the field, reaching second-place Weston on lap five. He couldn’t catch McDougale in the closing laps, however, and settled for second in front of third-place Weston.
Bald Knob’s Archie Conway, Jr. took the win in the economy-modified division on Friday. Conway started third and worked his way to the front by lap three of the caution-marred race, with Allen McElroy claiming second and Ryan Moore third.
Jerry Massey finished fourth, while Beebe driver Ryan Redmon narrowed the gap between himself and points leader Robert Woodard with a fifth-place finish. Woodard was collected in one of the many wrecks during the race and limped to an 11th -place finish.
Despite his misfortune on Friday, Woodard stayed at the top of the standings with 1,253 points, ahead of second-place Redmon’s 1078.
Hensley driver Willie Gillam didn’t let a disqualification following the street stock heat slow him down on Friday. Gillam took top-qualifier by winning the only street heat of the night, but his win was disallowed after failing post-race inspection.
Gillam started in the back of the small six-car field, and took the top spot over from Randy Eakin on lap three of the 12-lap feature.
In other divisions, Derek Goshien took the win in mini-stocks in the B5 machine over Greg Jackson and Paul Shackleford, while track staffer Shorty Wofford won the second powder-puff race of the season.
Heat qualifying for the seventh-annual Scrapp Fox Memorial will begin on Thursday, with the 35-lap, $2,000-to-win feature this Friday.
It was a long, mostly dismal weekend for Gwatney Chevrolet American Legion. The senior Chevy Boys were routed twice by Searcy in games in which they led or were tied in the late innings.
The junior team went 1-2, taking 13-3 and 19-1 shellackings at the hands of Searcy and routing North Little Rock 12-4 on Saturday in a game in which shortstop Jacob Abrahamson turned a triple play.
The junior Chevy Boys led 3-1 in the fourth inning on Friday at Searcy, but surrendered six runs in the fourth and five in the fifth in a 13-3 loss.
Devon McClure and Chris McClendon had RBI singles for Gwatney.
But the junior boys bounced back to trounce North Little Rock on Saturday. After trailing 2-0, Gwatney sent 15 men to the plate in the third and scored nine to put it away. Abrahamson had a single, triple, two runs and two RBI.
The Colts put their first two on in the fourth when magic struck for the Chevy Boys. Abrahamson snagged a hard liner at short, stepped on second and threw to Brandon Russell at first to complete a triple play.
Gwatney added three more runs in the fifth to finish off a 12-4 win. McClure had two hits and two runs and Zach Traylor had a single, two runs and two RBI.
The senior Chevy Boys fell behind 2-0 to Searcy on Friday, but Marshall Shipley’s RBI double in the second and Patrick Castleberry’s RBI single in the fifth tied it.
Searcy, though, erupted for eight in the fifth.
In Sunday’s rematch at Dupree Park, Gwatney fell behind 5-0 in the third, but rallied for six runs in the bottom half of the inning to take a one-run lead. They held on until Searcy tied it with a run in the fifth, then scored three in the sixth and four in the seventh.
Gwatney got doubles from Castleberry, Seth Tomboli, Jared Toney, Michael Harmon and A.J. Allen, and singles by McClure and Daniel Thurman in its six-run third.
Gwatney juniors and seniors hosted Cabot last night in a game played after Leader deadlines. The seniors host the 20th annual American Legion Classic this Thursday through Sunday at Dupree Park.
The juniors begin zone tournament play this weekend at Burns Park.
Two five-inning games met with very different results on Sunday when Conway MBNC visited Kevin McReynolds Field to play the Sylvan Hills Optimist Bruins in an afternoon American Legion junior doubleheader.
The Bruins took a narrow 4-3 win in the opener before Conway busted Game 2 wide open to claim a 12-1 win.
Michael Lock threw a complete-game for the win in Game 1. Lock gave up eight hits and a walk while striking out seven in 104 pitches.
Conway took the initial lead with a pair of runs in the top of the second, but the Bruins responded in the bottom of the frame.
Cleanup hitter Austin Spears led off the inning and was hit by a pitch, and advanced to third on a double to left field by Blake Rasdon.
Brian Chastain drove Spears in with a single to left center, and Jake Dillon singled in Rasdon to tie the game. Cormier then gave Sylvan Hills the lead when he singled to left, driving in Chastain to make it 3-2.
The Bruins added an insurance run in the bottom of the third. Spears doubled to left, and scored three batters later on a single by Chastain.
Conway’s two-hole hitter tried to spark a rally in the top of the fifth inning when he hit a solo home run to lead off the inning, but Lock forced a groundout and two pop ups to right fielder Rasdon to end it.
Chastain was 2 of 2 with two RBI. Spears was 1 of 1 with a double and two runs scored. Rasdon and Dillon also recorded hits for Sylvan Hills.
There wasn’t much for Bruins fans to cheer about in Game 2, with the exception of a solo home-run by Greg Atchinson in the bottom of the fourth inning for Sylvan Hills’ only score of the game.
Four different hurlers tried slowing down the MBNC bats to little avail. Conway put two runners on with singles and scored them both on errors in the top of the second before adding three runs in the third to take a 5-0 lead. It then put the game out of contention with a seven-run spree in the top of the fourth inning.
In all, the Bruins pitching gave up 12 hits. The defense behind also committed five errors, while the SH offense managed only four hits.
The Bruins hosted Maumelle last night for a game played after Leader deadlines. The senior Bruins also played Maumelle last night.
Mother Nature’s record versus area modified race fans is now a perfect 7-0.
The seventh running of the Scrapp Fox Memorial Modified Championship at Beebe Speed-way was originally slated for June 13-14, but rain throughout the week postponed the two-day, $2,000-to-win modified race until this Friday. It will now be just a one-day event.
The postponement hardly came as a surprise. Rain has forced a delay in the original start date every year in the race’s seven-year history. There were three postponements in 2004 alone.
New promoters Harold and Kevin Mahoney are already well versed on the rain curse. The Mahoneys took over the track late last year just before the Scrapp Fox race, and Harold’s memory of the day before is still vivid.
“We had water up to the flag stand,” said Mahoney. “That was Thursday at noon. I started pumping the water out of there, and we ran it that Friday night.”
With hot, dry weather in the area for several weeks now, the track has gone through its traditional metamorphosis to dry-slick conditions, but the beginning of the season was a struggle from week to week during a rainy spring.
“What happened was at the first of the season, we would have three or four inches of water to pump out every week,” Mahoney said. “The dirt I have here is not solid clay, it has some sand mixed in with it. So if it gets wet too deep, it just breaks up.”
The track held up well last Friday, and even stayed tacky for most of the evening. Mahoney said that even with the added cars this weekend, track conditions should not be a concern.
The qualifying heats will be scored on passing points. Drivers will be put into groups of six or eight, depending on the total number of entries, and each group will run two heats. The second heat will be the invert heat, meaning the cars will line up in reverse order from the first heat. Drivers will be rewarded passing points for every spot they advance.
The drivers with the most passing points will qualify for the A-main, while those that lost passing points or did not acquire enough will be forced to run in a last-chance consolation in order to make the field.
It will be a full slate of action on Friday. Along with the Scrapp Fox race, there will be hobby stocks, factory stocks, mini stocks, as well as a fireworks show. Admission prices will be the same as a regular weekly show.
A strong contingent of drivers is expected, including last year’s winner and four-time defending modified track champion Randy Weaver. North Little Rock driver Mike Bowers is expected, along with Bryant’s Casey Findley and Heber Springs driver Donnie Stringfellow. Local legend Wayne Brooks of Bald Knob is also expected to run in the 7B car.
As far as picks from the promoter himself, Mahoney is predicting last week’s winner, Curt Cook, in the 601 machine.
“That’s tough, but if it gets dry, look for that 601 car,” said Mahoney. “He’s won three here, and I know he’s won two or three at (Conway County Speedway in Plumerville). He slipped by Weaver last week. He planned on it getting drier, and I guess he just had his setup right.”
If you like gambling — lots of Arkansans clearly do — you hit the jackpot with the gambling amendment last year. The Arkansas lottery will expand the legal options to gamble far beyond what we suspect most voters expected. Only two years ago, Arkansas ranked among the two or three states where gambling was most scarce. In another two years, it will be among the states where it is most plentiful.
That is only a supposition, but see what the new gambling law has wrought in the few weeks of its existence. The speaker of the House of Representatives, who directed the drafting of the lottery enabling law, revealed this week that the law was written in a way that would allow the state lottery to ignore a 132-year-old state law that prohibited certain forms of gambling. Keno, for instance.
It was there all along if you studied pages 52 and 57 of the act, which sprang on the General Assembly in the closing days of the session this spring and was passed by both houses and signed into law within days.
It turns out that Ernie Passailaigue, who was the director of the South Carolina lottery, had privately helped the Arkansas team draft the Arkansas law. He chafed at the restrictions that the conservative South Carolina legislature put on the lottery there. The Palmetto state lawmakers forbade keno, a particularly addictive form of chance where people bet on randomly generated numbers that appear on blowing balls, either on a TV screen or from a computer. You can lose a lot of money on them fast.
As soon as the Arkansas Lottery Commission got set up it offered Passailaigue a chance to run a lottery in Arkansas for a $100,000 raise and the chance to run games that were crimes in South Carolina. He had sought the job in North Carolina when that state started a lottery in 2006, and he leaped at the sweet Arkansas offer.
The Arkansas attorney general said keno was prohibited by law, but he apparently had not read the new lottery law. Speaker Robbie Wills said the drafters first considered keeping the prohibition but then inserted words to make it and some other games prohibited by the old law lawful if the Lottery Commission wants to implement them. It just did not use the word “keno.”
Gov. Beebe said he hoped the lottery agency would not start keno because he did not think people were counting on it when they voted to legalize a lottery. The lottery agency will genuflect to the governor now, but you can be sure that eventually it will authorize every game that the law can be construed to permit. That is the history of lotteries. When lottery participation and revenues sag, the lottery will seek more glamorous games to keep the money coming in.
Passailaigue said he would hold off on keno a while until he hears from enough legislators that they wanted to legalize it. (Southland Racing Corp. will start offering keno soon at its mini-casino at West Memphis.)
Passailaigue also would like to give Arkansans a chance to play Texas Hold ’Em, a form of poker on the web. He foresees the day soon when people can sit in front of monitors in a restaurant or a bar anywhere in Arkansas, little casinos every one, and bet on the numbers every five minutes. Isn’t that what everyone in Arkansas wanted? Progress on every front.
Local outdoor pools have opened their doors for the summer, providing much-needed relief for parched area residents.
Splash Zone, located at 201 W. Martin St. in Jacksonville, is open from 11 a.m. until 7 p.m. Monday through Friday, and from noon-6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.
It costs $4 per person to swim. Twenty-punch passes are available for purchase, saving patrons $20 over 20 visits.
Cabot Municipal Pool, located at 502 Richie Rd., is open seven days a week from 1-6 p.m.
Entry costs $3 per person, and those under four years old or over 60 years old swim for free.
Season passes are $75 per person or $125 per family. Visit the Veterans Park Community Center to purchase passes.
Sherwood boasts three outdoor pools, all under the direction of the Bill Harmon Recreation Center.
Indianhead Pool is located at 33 Deerfield Dr., Fairway Pool at 800 S. Fairway Ave. and Thornhill Pool at 2201 Thornhill Dr. All three pools are closed on Monday, open from 12-6 p.m. on Wednesday, from 1-6 p.m. on Sunday and from 12-8 p.m. on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
At all three pools, entry is $4 per person. Family passes are available for $100 for families of five or fewer members.
Beebe City Pool, located at 709 Ballpark Rd., is open from 12:30-5:30 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Friday and from 10:30-5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. The pool is closed on Sunday.
It costs $4 per person to swim. Season passes are available for $45 per person and $125 for families of five or fewer members.
The Lonoke School Board hired an architect and its usual construction manager Tuesday night in preparation for building an entirely new high school for as much as $10 million.
State and federal funds would help pay for the project.
The board hired Lewis Architects of Little Rock and Marvin Delk Jr. to oversee the process.He served as construction manager for the new Lonoke Middle School and the field house.
The new high school will include 19 classrooms plus three science labs, art room, band room, choir room and four workforce development program rooms as well as administrative spaces for the principal, counselor and health center, according to Superintendent John Tackett.
The Lewis presentation, by Steve Elliot and Clayton Vayden, showed both a one-floor and a two-floor layout, with both attached to the existing front facade of the high school.
Board member Mike Linton questioned whether or not it would be cheaper to preserve the front part of the existing school or to raze it with the rest and start from scratch. Elliot said it would probably be a little cheaper to build all new, but that some communities are attached to their landmarks.
“It has a lot of historical value so alumni can drive by and reminisce,” Tackett said Tuesday.
The new Lonoke High School, with 61,598 square feet of educational space eligible for state match, could be as cheap as $8.5 million, but the district has as much as $10.2 million available for the project.
The funding includes $4.1 million from the recently sold second-lien bonds, $4.9 million match from state partnership funding and $1.3 million from stimulus money. Delk said he believed the entire project could be built for $105 per square foot or less.
By comparison, the new high school at Maumelle in the Pulaski County Special School District is budgeted at about $50 million, an estimated $120 a square foot.
In other business, the board agreed to pursue a relationship with the Metropolitan Career-Technical Education Center and to contract with Sub Teach USA to provide substitute teachers next year, including training, record keeping, notifying, all for $3,762.
Tackett told the board that the Army Junior ROTC program is considering the district’s application for a program. He said the application included letters of support from members of the Arkansas Congressional delegation.
SPORTS >> New NP coach nears completion of football staff
By JASON KING Leader sportswriter
First-year North Pulaski football coach Rick Russell is preparing his new team for 7-on-7 scrimmages in mid-July before two-a-days start in the first week of August.
Russell, who took over from Tony Bohannon in the spring, is still in the process of familiarizing himself with the new faces, as well as building a coaching staff from the ground up.
“I’m still getting to know the kids,” said Russell. “They are good quality kids, and they are com about the participation of the kids through the summer.”
Close to 40 players from freshmen through seniors have been reporting for summer drills on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. The Falcons will begin summer 7-on-7 league play in Cabot on July 14. The drills have focused on agility, and strength as the players have spent plenty of time in the weight room.
Russell credits much of his smooth transition from his former Jacksonville High School, where he served as defensive coordinator under Johnny Watson and later Mark Whatley, to his defensive coordinator, J.B. Pendergraft.
Pendergraft is best known to longtime central Arkansas football fans as a star running back for the UCA Bears back in the late 1960s, but has also coached in the college ranks as a defensive coordinator at Southern Arkansas University.
“He kept things going in the spring,” said Russell. “He got me to the right players when I needed to get to them. He just made it so much easier. From checking their grades to handling a lot of the logistics, he’s been a great help.”
Russell is also bringing some more of the Red Devil flavor to the home of the Falcons with new running backs/secondary coach Terrod Hatcher, who was a star running back at JHS from 2003-05.
“Anybody can be a good coach,” said Russell. “There’s books and videos and everything else out there for people to use, but these are men of character. They put kids first. They’re all about promoting kids.”
Russell said the only spot left to fill on the staff is receiver coach. He has a strong prospect but the deal has not yet been finalized.
As a new football coach at a program which has struggled to just five wins in six seasons, Russell is taking more of a business-as-usual approach.
“We’re not looking back,” said Russell. “All we’re doing is looking forward. We want to get better each and every day. A coach once told me that you either get better everyday or worse everyday, but no one stays the same. The way these kids have been working, we should be a competitive football team.”
SPORTS >> Gwatney rides arm of Harmon, Bruins’ errors to 9-1 victory
By JASON KING Leader sportswriter
When your ace pitcher struggles, it can make for a long evening.
Just ask Sylvan Hills.
Optimist Bruins hurler Nathan Eller had been enjoying a good summer on the mound until Thursday at Dupree Park, when Gwatney Chevrolet lit him up for 10 hits in a 9-1 run-ruled win in an American Legion senior zone game.
Only four of those runs were earned. Sylvan Hills committed four critical errors, including two in the bottom of the third inning that resulted in four unearned runs. The only earned run of the inning was a single by Devon McClure that plated winning
Jacksonville pitcher Michael Harmon to give Gwatney a 7-1 lead.
Doubles by Jason Regnas and Harmon clinched the final two scores needed in the bottom of the fifth to end the game early.
Harmon kept the Bruins off the bases for the most part, giving up only two hits and a walk that resulted in one earned run. He also had five strikeouts.
The Chevy Boys did their job behind him with only one error in the top of the third inning when shortstop Terrell Brown couldn’t get to an infield dribbler by Casey Cerrato in time and made a rushed throw to Regnas at first.
They made up for the bobble moments later when Regnas and second baseman A.J. Allen caught Cerrato in a rundown for the third out.
Jacksonville also took advantage of three hit batters and a walk.
Brown sent Eller’s second offering of the game over the left center wall to set the tone for the Chevy Boys in the bottom of the first inning. Eller recovered to retire Jacksonville with two of his four strikeouts for the game, but Gwatney added another run in the second inning. Allen singled and advanced to second on a single to center by Regnas, but an error on the play allowed Allen to coast home to make it 2-0 after two.
Daniel Thurman started the deciding frame off for Jacksonville in the bottom of the third with a single to left. Allen was hit by a pitch, and an error on an infield grounder by Regnas scored both of them.
A walk to Seth Tomboli and a single by Harmon loaded the bases, and another error, this time on an infield grounder by Brown, scored Regnas and Tomboli to put the Chevy Boys up 6-1.
Regnas led off the bottom of the fifth with a double to right center, and Harmon drove him in with a double down the first base line. A single by McClure scored Harmon to make it 9-1 to end the game on the eight-run rule.
The Bruins’ only score of the game came in the top of the second inning when Gino Jameson reached on a walk and came in three batters later on a groundout by Eller.
Regnas was 2 of 2 with a double, two RBI and two runs. Harmon, along with earning the win for Gwatney Chevrolet with a complete-game effort, went 2 of 3 with a double, an RBI and two runs. McClure was 2 of 4 with two RBI.
SPORTS >> Hooten’s picks Panthers, Wildcats in league
By KELLY FENTON Leader sports editor
Hooten’s Football Magazine picked Cabot and Harding Academy to win their conferences, but the annual prep publication had little love left over for the other Leader-area teams.
The Panthers earned Hooten’s nod despite returning only nine of 22 starters off last season’s 9-2 team. Among those returners, running back Michael James, noseguard T.J. Bertrand and linebacker Spencer Neumann were named to Hooten’s 7A Super Team, while defensive back Joe Bryant and quarterback Seth Bloomberg were listed among the unheralded stars.
James, Neumann and Matt Bayles comprise what Hooten’s listed as the best backfield in 7A.
Cabot was ranked third overall in 7A.
Jacksonville, which lost a lot of talent off the offense but which returns nine starters on defense, was picked to finish fifth in the 6A East and was ranked 10th overall in 6A.
The Searcy Lions, under first-year head coach Tim Harper, was picked to finish ahead of only Little Rock Hall in the 6A East and was ranked 13th overall. Running back Hayden Mercer was tabbed as an unheralded star.
First-year head coach Rick Russell’s North Pulaski Falcons were picked to finish last in the 5A-Southeast after losing 15 of 22 starters.
Sylvan Hills, which was listed as having the best linebackers in all of 5A, was picked second in the Southeast Conference behind Monticello. The Bears were tabbed ninth overall in 5A.
Running back Juliean Broner made Hooten’s Super Team, while quarterback Jordan Spears, defensive end Nic Brewer and linebacker Michael Robinson were all listed as unheralded stars.
John Shannon will begin Season 3 at Beebe with as little experience returning as he’s had since he took over in 2007. Only eight starters return, though one, Spencer Forte, was named to the 5A Super Team, while running back/safety Victor Howell was named an unheralded star. The Badgers are picked fourth in the Southeast, 17th overall.
Lonoke, coming off a 10-2 season, but with only seven starters back, was tabbed third in the 2-4A Conference, while fullback/defensive end Morgan Linton was a member of the 4A Super Team. Running back Brandon Smith and receiver/defensive back Todd Hobson were named as unheralded stars.
The Jackrabbits, under first-year head coach Doug Bost, are ranked 12th overall in 4A.
Harding Academy, with unheralded stars in quarterback Seth Keese, running back Tyler Gentry and center Matt Calhoun and Super Team defensive lineman Montgomery Fisher, are picked to win the 2-3A Conference and are ranked sixth overall.
Riverview, entering its second year as a varsity program, was picked fourth in the 2-3A after reaching the playoffs in its inaugural season. Grafton Harrell, Ben Overstreet, Stetson Evans, Chance Hunton and Chayse Parson were listed as unheralded stars.
SPORTS >> Taming the beast as important as talent at U.S. Open
By KELLY FENTON Leader sports editor
Over five days last week, professional golf once again proved itself to be the greatest spectator sport around.
If you don’t like golf or have never played it, I fully respect your right not only to disagree with me, but to consider me a daft old blue-hair with an undetectable pulse who has probably never witnessed the spectacle of a NASCAR race.
Guilty on all charges.
There are people who will miss the births of their children to watch a soccer match on a 12-inch black and white TV and who will just as vehemently tell you their sport is king. I can’t see it, but then, my blindness hardly negates their assertion. If so many people are that passionate about a thing, then I am happy to concede its worth. (The lone exception may be the fervor with which a couple of people at our paper defend heavy metal music)
It’s been said before but it bears repeating: In no other sport (bowling maybe?) is the battle solely with yourself. Tiger goes out and shoots a 64? Nothing you can do about it but try to shoot 63. It used to be that a golfer could stymie an opponent if his ball ended up between his opponent’s ball and the hole but that was abolished in 1952. Now, it’s just you against the course and yourself.
There is, of course, no bigger enemy than your own self-doubt, an animal which often remains caged and quiet in the early rounds of a major tournament, begins to grumble and rattle the bars along about Round 3 (if you’re still in contention), then lurches to break free of its chains on Sunday.
Everyone knows the beast is lurking, but it is something that mostly goes unacknowledged because NO ONE wants to admit to losing a battle of nerves within himself. I tried for a while to convince others that my incessant yips were not actually yips at all but merely the result of a faulty putting technique. But I too often betrayed myself by everything from offering large sums of money for gimmees to standing over two-foot putts while groups behind played through to actually laying down on the green and sobbing
That is why people who have played the game are so riveted by the late holes of a tight major. How do these guys hold up under the immense pressure, which is heightened, it seems to me, by the pall of silence that awaits each and every one of their shots?
As much as it sometimes seems so, you begin to realize these guys are not robots. When Ricky Barnes eagled the 4th hole in the third round to go five clear of the field, he was playing carefree, in-the-zone golf. He barely missed a 15-footer for birdie on the following hole. Barnes, who also parred the sixth hole, had made only one bogey over the first 40 holes of the tournament and had gone 30 holes without one.
Over the next 24 holes, Barnes bogeyed 12 times. Meaning he went from a 2.5 percent bogey rate to a 50 percent bogey rate.
What happened? The beast got free. You could see it not just in the numbers but in the swings he was making. His already quick, near-lunging swing got quicker and lungier. His putting suddenly began to look familiar. He was using my stroke!
Meanwhile, there was NBC analyst Johnny Miller speaking those words which shall never be spoken: choke, fold, nerves. You knew he would, and it’s what makes him among the best sports analysts around. It’s also what makes him resented by many of the pampered pros.
I remember one time hearing CBS analyst Gary McCord say, in the heat of a Sunday battle, “these guys are throwing up all over their shoes out there.”
The eventual winner himself, Lucas Glover, began to collapse at precisely the same point as his playing partner Barnes began his implosion. Seven under after the 41st hole, Glover went bogey, double-bogey, bogey, though he did play a bogey-free back nine, which included three birdies.
But the final round included three bogeys on the front nine and another on 15 to put him 4-over for the day.
It is that succumbing to nerves that makes us at home recognize these guys for what they are – fallible humans. They may play a game, as Bobby Jones famously said of Jack Nicklaus, “with which I am not familiar,” but one thing we as fans can relate to is that urge to throw up on our shoes.
Glover, 71st-ranked player in the world, was suddenly faced not only with his own imploding game but with the looming spectacle of crowd darling Phil Mickelson roaring back to tie him with an eagle at 13.
Yet Glover managed to wrestle the animal back into its cage and hit the shot of his life on 16 and cashed in a birdie to give him the lead. There it remained over the final two holes, allowing Glover to make a six-foot par save on 17 and a tricky two-footer for the win on 18.
Yes, they may be playing a game with which we are not familiar. It is what is going on above their shoulders that we can relate to and what makes turning away from a final round at a major unthinkable.
The bats of Cabot Centennial Bank went completely silent from the fourth inning on, but fortunately for them, those same bats made a bunch of noise early.
Though Centennial Bank had only one base runner after the third inning, a five-run second proved more than enough for a 6-2 victory over North Little Rock at Burns Park on Thursday night.
Cole Nicholson tossed a five-hitter and struck out 10 as Cabot rolled to its sixth consecutive win. The streak follows a four-game losing skid and improved Centennial Bank to 10-6 on the season.
After going quietly in the first, Cabot sent nine batters to the plate in the second and took advantage of three Colt errors. Matt Turner got things started with a solid single back through the box and Powell Bryant was hit with a pitch. Ben Wainwright delivered Turner with a line single and Tyler Erickson’s base hit loaded the bases.
A wild pitch scored Bryant and advanced Wainwright to third. Chase Thompson dropped a looping single into right to plate Wainwright and make it 3-0. With two outs, Andrew Reynolds singled to right to score Erickson and Thompson.
With Nicholson carrying a 1.33 ERA into the contest, that 5-0 lead appeared more than sufficient, but for good measure Cabot tacked on a run in the third. Turner tripled over the center fielder to lead things off and came across when Brandon Surdam reached on an error. Tyler Erickson walked and it began to look like a mercy rule was imminent. But only one of Cabot’s final 13 batters reached base and Drew Burks was erased on a double play after drawing a leadoff walk in the sixth.
Nicholson was cruising along with a one-hitter before allowing a walk and a single with one out in the fourth. A double steal put both runners in scoring position, but Nicholson got his fifth and sixth strikeouts to end the threat.
But after beginning the fifth inning with his seventh strikeout, Nicholson ran into his only trouble of the night, allowing a single and a walk. With two outs, Andrew Hahn ripped a two-run double down the line in left. But Nicholson retired seven of the final batters he faced for his third win of the season.
Cabot finished with six hits — five in the second inning. Turner had two of those and scored twice while Reynolds drove in a pair of runs with a base hit. Leading hitter Sam Bates did not play on Thursday and Burks, who had just returned from the high school All Star game in Fayetteville, didn’t start.
Cabot played error-free in the field, while North Little Rock committed four errors.
Cabot travels to Maumelle today.
NLR JUNIORS 7, CABOT 2
Chad Wisely was mowing them down early on Thursday night, retiring 10 of the first 11 batters he faced. But the Colts tied the game in the fourth, took a one-run lead in the fifth and blew it open with a four-run sixth before the game was called for time.
A walk to Bryson Morris, a base hit by Justin Goff and RBI singles by Nathan Cash and Tyler Carter put Cabot up 2-0 in the first, but Cash and Carter were stranded and Centennial Bank got only two base runners past first base the rest of the way.
Wisely pitched around a two-out walk in the first, then got some defensive help with a nice charge and throw by shortstop Tyler Cole in the second. Cabot wasted a golden opportunity in the second after Taylor Barnhill tripled to right leading things off. With one out Brandon Surdam walked, but Morris hit a bouncer to the shortstop near second base and he turned it into a 6-3 double play.
Cabot also wasted a leadoff single by Goff in the third and leadoff walks in the fourth and sixth innings. Cabot hit into three double plays.
Wisely set down eight in a row before surrendering back-to-back singles with one out in the fourth. Two walks forced home a run and another came in when Cabot failed to execute a rundown on a runner caught off third base. Wisely pitched out of further damage, recording a pop out and a ground out, but the Colts had knotted it at 2.
An infield single, a bunt single and a walk loaded the bases and ended the day for Wisely. Reliever Jordan Lyons did a good job in retiring the three he faced in the inning, but a sacrifice fly gave the Colts the lead.
They scored four times on three hits and two walks in the sixth.
Cabot managed six hits, two by Goff. Wisely allowed four hits, four walks and three earned runs and took the loss.
Michael Jackson was a star for almost half a century, singing smooth soul music that had universal appeal. It was the music of the black urban masses, but watered down so that prepubescent-suburban youngsters and teenagers from Burbank to Beijing could dance to it.
Jackson, who died Thursday at the age of 50, probably from abusing prescription drugs, was vaguely aware that the music that had made him a millionaire was transplanted here on slave ships. It evolved into jazz and blues, created by poor blacks in the Arkansas-Mississippi Delta who had moved up North, like his parents, transplants in Gary, Ind.
But the pop star may best be remembered as a dancer as innovative and entertaining as Fred Astaire. Jackson was inspired by the moves of the late, great James Brown, but expanded them in a way that became as memorable and unique as Michael Jordan slam-dunking.
Jackson’s fans will always remember his moonwalk, along with his bizarre plastic surgeries and courtroom spectacles.
Jackson was tainted by child sex-abuse charges and had tried to change his complexion to appear white. Despite his millions, he was not known for supporting hospitals or schools in urban ghettoes — but his success made his fans proud, especially those back home. Jackson, like Elvis, could become a more valuable commodity because of his sudden death.
The Arkansas Court of Appeals labors in obscurity, reviewing how the trial courts perform in the daily grime of criminal justice and how well the agencies of government follow the law. From time to time that work makes the court an indispensable tribune for the people. The court met that duty Wednesday when it voided the state government’s permit for utilities to build a huge coal-burning power plant at McNab in the wilderness of southwest Arkansas.
The six judges said the state Public Service Commission had flagrantly ignored the law in 2007 when it gave Southwestern Electric Power Co. (Swepco) a Certificate of Environmental Compatibility and Public Need to build a 600-megawatt generating plant to serve customers in Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas. It will share the power with electric cooperatives. The name of the permit suggests that the state government found that the plant was badly needed and that it would be perfectly compatible with the habitat and with people’s health. But the judges, all of them, found that the commission had followed procedures that assured none of that.
Actually, the evidence mustered at the commission’s hearings suggested that none of it was true. There were ample sources of electricity for many years to come without building an expensive poison-spewing plant, and the toxic residue from burning coal would harm the immediate environment and the world’s. The plant would spew 5 to 6 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, and one little molecule of the stuff hangs around the heavens for 50 to 200 years to heat the planet. Is it hot enough for you already?
But the Public Service Commission — two of the three commissioners, at least — said in 2007 that no agency of government in Little Rock or Washington had ever said how much carbon dioxide was tolerable so it was going to ignore the carbon peril. All the other poisons from the plant would be within acceptable bounds, the commissioners said. At its main hearing the commissioners refused to consider other options to a new generating plant and refused to allow a commercial generator in Union County to intervene to show that it could supply the power. It operates with cleaner natural gas and could supply the 600 megawatts of power the utilities said they would need a few years from now.
In a narrow sense, the Court of Appeals struck down the permit on a technicality. That is how the utility will spin it. The judges observed that Arkansas law requires all the issues — the need for more electricity, the options for meeting it, all the environmental effects, and the location and impact of the transmission lines — to be addressed in a single case.
But the commission broke it up into three separate cases. In the first, which dealt with the question of whether a big new plant was needed to meet future power demands, there was little public notice and no one participated except the utilities and the commission’s staff, which pretty much went along with what Swepco wanted. That has been the attitude of all of the government: the attorney general, the governor, the state Department of Environmental Quality and the state Pollution Control and Ecology Commission.
The judges were sharply critical of the laissez-faire approach of government entities that were charged by law to look out for the consumers and for everyone whose lives would be touched in some way by the plant. Judge Josephine Hart was particularly caustic about the attorney general, who by law is supposed to fight for the interests of the public. She said the office had simply gone along, “thus abdicating its responsibility to protect the interests of the people of this state.”
Unless the Arkansas Supreme Court overturns the Court of Appeals, which we think is unlikely, they will all get a fresh chance to do right when the commission conducts new hearings.
Inmates carrying sawed-off shotguns once patrolled the grounds of Arkansas prisons, keeping other prisoners in line with fear and intimidation. The few guards kept order with five-foot-long leather straps and a device that sent an electric charge through an offender’s toe and genitals.
Forty years ago, a federal judge declared Arkansas’ prisons an unconstitutional “dark and evil world,” and it took more than a decade for the system to break free of federal supervision. But a spate of recent allegations — including an inmate left naked and covered in his own feces for days who nearly died — have state officials studying a past they had hoped was behind them.
“We’ve got to stay on top of it because we don’t want to get back into federal court on this one,” said state Sen. Bobby Glover (D-Carlisle), who heads a panel overseeing the prison system. “We don’t want our prison system being held unconstitutional.”
No state official compares the prison system of today to what it once was. But in the past several months, several misconduct allegations have surfaced behind the gates. Investigators say guards at one facility received lap dances from a nurse while on the job. Two convicted murderers escaped by wearing handmade guard uniforms. Guards shot and killed a man who officials said had fled a contraband checkpoint.
Gov. Mike Beebe said he won’t call for state prisons chief Larry Norris to be fired because he believes problems in Arkansas are similar to those in other states. Norris joined the state prison system in 1971 and became director in 1993. Beebe said through a spokesman that he has “full faith” in his ability to run the 15,000-inmate system.
The tortured past of Arkansas’ prisons dates to the early 20th century. In 1933, the state closed its penitentiary in Little Rock and moved all the prisoners to the Cummins and Tucker prison farms, where privileged inmates guarded the others.
For the next 30 years, inmates died from killings and disease as gambling, alcohol and rape permeated the farms. Some prisoners reported being beaten at random by their inmate guards, while food — no matter how poor — remained in short supply.
One inmate often ate “cornbread and molasses for breakfast and a bowl of peas for lunch, and had had to ‘skim the worms off of the top of the bowl before eating them,” an Arkansas State Police report said.
By 1966, then-Gov. Orval Faubus ordered the State Police to investigate allegations of extortion, misuse of state property and inmate drunkenness. Severe riots broke out at Cummins. Two years later, human skeletons found at Cummins were alleged to have come from inmates beaten to death and secretly buried there.
“We have probably the most barbaric prison system in the United States,” then-Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller said.
Bob Scott, Rockefeller’s prison liaison, said the governor realized how bad the system had become during a visit to Cummins, when his bodyguard had to give up his pistol to a murderer he arrested 10 years earlier.
“You can control anything with fear,” said Scott, now 75. “The attitude in Arkansas at the time was ‘out of sight, out of mind’ — just don’t bother us with the details.’”
U.S. District Judge J. Smith Henley took the first step toward reform in 1965, when he ordered guards to stop using corporal punishment. In 1969, he found portions of the state prison system unconstitutional, setting up his historic 1970 decision to put the entire state prison system under federal control — a first for the nation.
The prisons added school classes, increased the number of guards and improved facilities before coming out from underneath federal supervision in 13 years. Still, problems inside the prisons have persisted.
In 1995, state police revealed that a smuggling ring had brought drugs, weapons and alcohol onto death row. That same year, a federal judge ordered prison officials to place more guards at Cummins after a lawsuit claimed the state had violated inmates’ rights by failing to adequately protect them from fellow prisoners.
An inmate escaped from Cummins in 1999 and killed a farmer and later another man in a traffic crash. A federal grand jury indicted former prison guards in 2001 for allegedly shocking three inmates on the testicles and elsewhere when they were disruptive.
In 2003, a Justice Department report said officials at two state prisons at Newport were “deliberately indifferent” to prison conditions and inmates with serious medical problems. In one case, an inmate who complained of chest pains after open-heart surgery “was given Tylenol and sent back to his housing unit.”
Problems continued into 2007. Prison guards were fired for using excessive force against inmates, and other employees lost their jobs or resigned over a probe into bootleg computers that inmates at Tucker had built to watch pornographic films.
Scott said state prisons today are better than those four decades ago but likely still lag behind others in the nation.
“Anytime you have men cooped up like animals, you’re going to have problems,” Scott said. “What taxpayers need to face up to is that prisons ought to be designed to make a person better having been there, not worse. The way they’re designed now, it’s very unusual for someone to come out better.”
Hundreds of people from around the state gathered Thursday night to see Jacksonville Mayor Tommy Swaim and his wife Judy off into retirement.
The event, sponsored by the chamber of commerce, was at the Jacksonville Community Center, which was one of the first major building projects tackled by the mayor 15 years ago and still considered one of Jacksonville’s jewels.
The evening of food, fun, hellos and goodbyes included speeches from old bosses, local politicians and even the vice mayor from Fort Smith, a hilarious videotape of Swaim looking for work at Walmart, Wendy’s, Little Caesar’s and other areas about town after he retires on Tuesday, and the presentation of a fishing boat, motor and trailer for the mayor to enjoy during his retirement.
Banker Larry Wilson—who was on the city council with Swaim before he became mayor and stayed on the council for about 15 years afterward—told the crowd that when Swaim took over the mayor’s office, the city “was in dire financial straits.”
“Let me you tell you, every payday around here was exciting,” Wilson said.
“And a new evil entered in the name of Vertac. Tommy thought he could have it licked in two years. He missed,” Wilson said, laughing.
It took Swaim and the city 12 years to clean up the Superfund site that put Jacksonville on the national stage in a negative light.
Activist Ralph Nader came to town to stir up everyone into “a lather with misinformation.”
“We even had misguided citizens march on the governor’s mansion carrying a casket and implying we were killing people,” Wilson said. “It was a very difficult time. But Tommy remained steadfast and went toe-to-toe with state and federal agencies to get the cleanup done in a safe and complete manner.”
Wilson said the key to the mayor’s success is his leadership skills. “His greatest attribute is the example he sets for other employees. He is usually the first one in the office, hardly takes a lunch and then its usually just a candy bar at his desk, took very few days off and hardly went on vacation. He wanted to be a good steward for the city,” Wilson said.
Wilson said the city is completely opposite from what it was when Swaim first took office.
“Many cities in the state are now suffering financially, and we are in great shape. Thanks to the mayor,” he said, adding, “Enjoy your retirement, but when you get tired, we’ll find you a job back here.”
Realtor Doug Wilkinson, the mayor’s boss before he got into politics, said he remembered back in the late 1970s that he and Swaim would be sitting around griping about the city’s problems and wondering what could be done. That’s when Swaim decided to run for the city council and then for mayor.
“I was losing my best salesman, and I had mixed emotions when he decided to run for mayor, but the city needed him more than I did. So I was the first to jump on his bandwagon,” Wilkinson said.
Alderman Bob Stroud said Swaim was not a politician, but a technician. “A technician,” Stroud said, “is a person skilled in the technique of an art or work—and Tommy was skilled in using the office of the mayor to make this city better for you and me.”
Don Zimmerman, executive director of the Arkansas Municipal League, gave the crowd an example of how much Swaim loved Jacksonville.
“He could have been president of the National League of Cities. We wanted him to be, but he opted not to run. He said, ‘I don’t want to be away from Jacksonville that much,’” Zimmerman recalled. “That’s how much he loves this city and this state.”
Mike Gaskill, mayor of Paragould and a good friend of Swaim, read letters of support and congratulations from Rep. Vic Snyder, Sen. Mark Pryor and Gov. Mike Beebe.
George Sturgill of Lockheed-Martin came all the way from Washington to present the mayor with a model of a C-130J.
The air base has more than 20 of the new cargo planes and more are coming.
Other speakers included Alder-man Kenny Elliott, Fort Smith Vice Mayor Gary Campbell, former North Little Rock Aldermen Martin Gibson and Phillip Carlisle.
What caught the mayor speechless was when his son Shane got up and told his dad that a group of businesses had a surprise for him behind the stage. When the stage curtain opened, there stood a 14-foot fishing boat loaded with the mayor’s granddaughter, a great-granddaughter, a motor and trailer.
“Being a mayor has been a blessing to me and my family,” Swaim told the appreciative audience. “Your friendship means so much to me.”
He said if he had a chance to do it again, he wouldn’t change anything. “If I did, I might have missed each and every one of you, and I wouldn’t want that.”
TOP STORY >> Area farmers fear drought after deluge
By JOHN HOFHEIMER Leader senior staff writer
Just a month ago, fields and ponds were flooded and Lonoke County farmers wondered if they’d ever get the rest of their crop in.
Now, after a dry week in the upper 90s, some wells already are sucking water out of the aquifer and they’re teetering on the brink of drought, according to Jeff Welch, Lonoke County‘s chief extension agent.
“We’re at 98 degrees (for several days) and no rain and we really dry out in about five days. The topsoil dries the out, but if the seed had absorbed moisture, it will swell, germinate and die in the heat and drought,” Welch said.
“At this point we’re 100 percent planted on soybeans, although we got very late start,” he said. “We expect yield reduction in rice, soybeans and cotton. Most of the corn was planted on time and we’re irrigating corn as fast as we can to make sure that we maintain yield protection.
“Crops with shallow roots easily succumb to drought and heat. Other crops may be in full irrigation soon,” he added.
On the positive side of the ledger, fuel prices dropped from last year. “Our costs are somewhat minimized by the cost of fuel,” he said, “and fertilizer prices have declined. That presents a potential to capture profits.”
Lonoke County farmers have about 3,200 acres in cotton, just more than one-third the acres planted in cotton last year.
Corn acreage this year is about 20,000 acres, up from 17,000 acres in 2008.
Farmers have planted about 88,000 acres of rice this year, but much of it was planted late, which will result in a decreased yield per acre, Welch said.
Farmers have about 124,000 acres of soybeans in the ground, about what they had last year, but because flooding kept them from planting at the best time, the yield should decline some.
“Prices have held up. For soybeans, corn and rice, we have acceptable prices,” he said. Cotton is dismal, so the Pettus gin is closed, leaving only the “New” gin at Coy.
Arkansas’ senior senator, Blanche Lincoln, is an important and perhaps even critical player in the drive to repair the nation’s clumsy and extravagant health-care system and to guarantee care for everyone. We tend to think that it is a good thing for us and the country that she has such a role, but sometimes we have had misgivings.
At times in the past few months, her remarks about health reform have conveyed a trifle too much deference to the health industry, including the insurance companies.
Like all the other senators on the Finance Committee, she receives huge contributions from the medical and insurance industries, more than $500,000 in the current election cycle (she is up for re-election next year if you hadn’t heard).
You worried that she might put their interests ahead of the consuming public that is served so poorly by the current system.
She had abiding concerns about setting up a public insurance option that would compete with Aetna, Blue Cross, United and the few other insurers. The government plan, she feared, might drive costs down so much that the companies couldn’t compete and make a profit.
But then the good senator Lincoln resurfaces. Yesterday, the senator’s Web site carried a statement of the principles that guide her in the Finance Committee’s work on a comprehensive health-care plan. She said she would accept nothing less than a plan that gives every Arkansan, every person in the United States, access to affordable and high-quality health care.
She said she was evaluating the options that will achieve that, including a public insurance plan and nonprofit cooperatives, the government-sponsored nonprofits that she and a few others, principally Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota, were touting last week as a way to avoid more direct government involvement in health care.
No one knows what these cooperatives would look like, how much capital they would need from Washington and how they would differ from Blue Cross and Blue Shield, which already has three-fourths of the private market in Arkansas, or from the self-insurance plans that Arkansas and a number of other states operate. (Blue Cross no longer calls its state companies cooperatives but not-for-profit mutual insurance corporations.)
We take Senator Lincoln at her word. She will demand that everyone be covered at a price they can afford, that medical costs will be reined in, that people with pre-existing conditions will not be denied coverage as all the private plans do now for those seeking individual coverage and that people will be assured coverage when they are between jobs.
We do not grasp how that can be achieved without a public plan that carries the might to demand discounts and lower prices from providers and force the oligopoly of private carriers to compete. We are satisfied that if Lincoln does not find the competition compelling she will support the public plan, too.
People are her first priority in this historic effort, she said Monday. We take that to mean that despite its bundles of campaign money the insurance industry isn’t. That is good enough for us.
Pulaski County Special School District’s board members narrowly voted last week to appropriate $1 million in federal stimulus funds for a new Jacksonville middle school.
Although the money is just a fraction of the cost of a new school, it is an important step toward building the first school in Jacksonville in 35 years. But it’s not clear if there will be money available to build the new middle school. What stands there now is dilapidated and polluted with asbestos. (See picture above.)
It’s a shocking site: No children should have been exposed to such hazardous materials. The school district should have torn down the school decades ago, but then the board has never shown much concern for the needs of Jacksonville-area children.
But apart from the largely symbolic gesture of allocating $1 million, or less than one-tenth needed for the project, the board missed an opportunity at its emergency meeting Friday to declare its support for quality education in Jacksonville. Instead, the board chose to reprimand city residents and The Leader for their efforts to give students better educational opportunities and better facilities.
The board’s lack of purpose was never more evident than at Friday’s meeting. Not once did the board mention the students of Jacksonville. Board members instead complained about being “pushed around” by residents and this newspaper. Board member Charlie Wood was for building a new middle school until he was against it because he didn’t want to be pushed around, he said.
This is the same board that chased off deputy superintendent Beverly Ruthven, an excellent educator and administrator, in favor of mediocrity and grandstanding.
PCSSD has treated Jacksonville like a third-rate city by ignoring the community’s school problems for too long. In a letter of reprimand sent in April to PCSSD board members, the director of the Arkansas School Boards Association questioned the board’s lack of professionalism and competence.
The letter warned the board to straighten up its act and pointed out that it was because of its reckless behavior that a bill was introduced in the last session of the legislature to allow the recall of incompetent school board members who sit on the PCSSD board. This is the same board that let financial shenanigans and outright thievery run unchecked for too long.
Many school district administrators, most notably middle school principals Mike Nellums and Kim Forrest, have criticized the board’s decision to combine the former Jacksonville boys and girls middle schools. Both principals have conveniently been moved out of Jacksonville. Like Iran’s ayatollahs, the district does not tolerate dissent.
The debate over the board’s middle school consolidation plan has been heated. It is a plan that calls for the use of trailers to alleviate overcrowding classrooms, something the board did not tell the community about until just a couple of weeks ago. Jacksonville’s board member, Bill Vasquez, who supported combining both schools, does not respond to questions about the PCSSD’s plans for Jacksonville. He apparently feels he does not have to answer to Jacksonville residents and has all but disappeared.
The students suffer when school board members no longer want to communicate with their communities. Board members should be scrutinized because their decisions are executed with taxpayer money. More importantly, education policy affects communities on many levels.
Cabot has far surpassed Jacksonville in terms of educational quality. Airmen from Little Rock Air Force Base are flocking to Cabot because the schools are better there.
PCSSD could learn some valuable lessons from Cabot schools. School board meetings there operate professionally. Board members are well-spoken and topics often include funding new schools every couple of years. Instead of crowded classrooms, Cabot schools are focused on building state-of-the-art facilities for their students.
Petty issues that constantly plague PCSSD are never a problem at the Cabot board meetings. By comparison, the PCSSD board seems amateurish.
Jacksonville should appreciate that Cabot has helped to meet the educational needs of Air Force families living in Cabot, although children enrolled at Arnold Drive Elementary on the base attend a substandard school, despite promises by the PCSSD board that improvements will be made.
Teachers should take their civics classes to PCSSD board meetings to see for themselves what happens when democracy fails us. Civics students might do a better job running the district than those board members, who didn’t learn much when they were in school.
Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula of Jacksonville, who was shot three times earlier this month as he stood outside a military recruiting station in Little Rock, underwent surgery Tuesday morning to remove shrapnel from his back.
He had the operation at St. Vincent Infirmary Medical Center in Little Rock, said his mother, Sonja Ezeagwula.
Ezeagwula went home from the hospital Tuesday afternoon.
There are still as many as 50 pieces of shrapnel in her son’s back, she said.
Ezeagwula, who graduated from Jacksonville High School last year, has shrapnel all over his body, and often the pain medication doesn’t lessen the hurt.
He has shrapnel in his lung, his neck and down his back.
“He’s in a whole of pain,” his mother said after the surgery. “He’s in more pain than he was at first. He has to lie on his stomach and face.”
She said a nurse changes his dressing once a day and his mother changes it at night.
Ezeagwula, 18, and Pvt. William Long, 23, were standing outside the Army-Navy recruiting station on Rodney Parham Road on June 1, when Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, 24, drove up in a black pickup truck carrying a Chinese semiautomatic rifle and started firing.
Long died from a single bullet.
He and Long had worked there only for a week as temporary recruiters before they were supposed to head out for their next assignment.
Ezeagwula told The Leader that he played dead during the ordeal until the alleged shooter, aka Carlos Leon Bledsoe, drove away.
After Muhammad drove off, the Jackson-ville teenager started crawling back toward the recruiting office.
As he lay wounded, he called his mother on his cell phone to tell her he was all right, but she didn’t answer.
As they put Ezeagwula in an ambulance, a sergeant called the private’s mother to tell her he’d been shot.
He doesn’t remember some of the details of the shooting. But his mother says that when Muhammad reached for his rifle, her son thought it was a prank.
He put a large pillow behind his back during a press conference on June 9 at the Armed Forces Recruiting Station on Main Street in Jacksonville.
Ezeagwula, a heavy-machine operator, is thankful that the military has given him a career and he wants to continue to serve.
He hopes to become a drill sergeant one day, he said.
Long was buried June 8 at the Arkansas State Veterans Cemetery at 1501 W. Maryland Ave. at the edge of Sherwood.
Ezeagwula did not feel well enough to attend Long’s funeral.
State Trooper Tim Ghoshon’s vow to ticket his mother, Addie Gibson, for not wearing her seat belt inspired one of the ads Arkansas State Police are running to remind motorists to buckle up.
State Police officials last week unveiled a series of television spots they’re running in advance of the state’s new primary seat belt law, which takes effect at the end of the month.
Under current law, not wearing a seat belt is a secondary violation, meaning motorists could not be pulled over for that offense but could be ticketed if they were stopped for some other reason.
In one of the spots, Gibson portrays a driver pulled over by her son, a state trooper.
“If I would give my own mother a ticket, I wouldn’t think twice about giving you one,” the trooper in the ad says.
Gibson, a 49-year resident of Jacksonville, said the TV commercial was inspired partly by a story she used to tell about her son, who died from leukemia in 2005 at the age of 40 after serving in law enforcement for 13 years.
Gibson said Ghoshon had twice warned her about not wearing her seat belt when driving to his house.
The third time, he told her, “Mom, you have been told to wear your seat belt. If I catch you out somewhere without your seat belt on, I’m going to write you a ticket,” Gibson recalled.
“And he was serious, he was not smiling,” she explained, “because, if he was in law enforcement, he was expecting for his family to do the law first and then spread it out. He was really expecting for the family to do what they were supposed to do.”
“One of the troopers from the Arkansas State Police headquarters called me because he was at Tim’s funeral and heard me tell the story. Because they’re getting ready to enforce the seat-belt law, he said, ‘Well hey, why don’t I just get her and we can do a commercial?’,” Gibson said.
She agreed to do the commercial as a way to memorialize her son and also let people know that the seat-belt law will change.
Gibson, who is chairwoman of the Concerned Citizens of Jacksonville, is always trying to make people’s lives better.
The Concerned Citizens of Jacksonville is a multi-purpose organization doing whatever they can to assist the Jacksonville community, she said.
The group regularly maintains Johnson Cemetery on Military Road. “We always try to make sure it’s cleaned up,” Gibson said.
On her own, Gibson speaks to the elderly about the local health services available to them. “I have a lady that I take to the doctor free of charge,” Gibson said.
Gibson is also an active member of Keep Jacksonville Beautiful and the Jacksonville Housing Authority.
Considering her humanitarian record, it’s no wonder she was willing to lend her image to the seat-belt campaign.
The spot in which she stars is among several others the State Police are airing around the state, dubbing the new restrictions as a “law you can live with.”
Col. Winford Phillips, director of Arkansas State Police, said he hopes to educate motorists about the new law with the ads. But State Police officials also said that there would not be any “grace period” where drivers would be given warnings instead of tickets.
“If you’re stopped for some other violation or you’re seen not wearing your seat belt, there will be some sort of enforcement action taken,” said Maj. Ed Wolfe, highway patrol commander for the state’s eastern region.
Phillips said he didn’t expect the department would see a spike in tickets issued for seat-belt violations and said police weren’t looking at it as a new way to make money.
“The reason for this law is not to generate revenue or to write tickets,” Phillips said. “It’s to have the law enforced and followed by the citizens of the state.”
Civil rights groups remain wary of the new law, warning that it could open the door to harassment of minority drivers by police.
Dale Charles, head of the Arkansas NAACP, said he expected to see an increase in the number of black and Hispanic drivers pulled over around the state because of the new law.
“We still feel this is the worst law that’s been passed with no data collection, no system set up to monitor the overzealous use of the process when it relates to African Americans,” Charles said.
Sen. Hank Wilkins IV, who sponsored the seat-belt law, defended the measure and said that not everyone from the NAACP opposed it.
Wilkins also noted that he backed a companion bill requiring the state to set up a hotline for callers to report complaints of racial profiling.
Gibson says that, regardless of color issues, “the law is a great idea” and that those breaking the law should be punished. Now, “whoever gets into [her] car, the car does not move until everybody has their seat belt on.”
And she thinks that her son would be pleased about the changes. If he were alive, “he’d be enforcing the law even more because it’s becoming law.
“Even before the seat-belt law came or even thought about being a law, he was telling us, ‘Once you get in your car and sit down, the first thing you do is grab your seat belt and put it on.’ That was his thing.”
In a matter of a few weeks, central Arkansas went from a whole lot of rain to nary a drop and from spring temperatures to triple-digit heat indices.
In May, the area received 13.06 inches of rain, 259 percent more than normal. But through Tuesday, June’s rain total was just 0.96 of an inch, less than a third of the nearly three inches the area normally gets in June.
As this hot spell began on June 16, ground water and green vegetation helped hold down readings a few degrees. However, with the ground slowly drying out, temperatures eventually edged upward.
But the heat indices have been over 100 degrees since last Wednesday.
On Monday, much of the state was in the upper 90s to around 100 degrees. Heat index values reached 107 degrees at Little Rock, 106 degrees at Hot Springs and 105 degrees at Russellville (Pope County). Elsewhere, values were generally between 100 and 105 degrees.
By mid-day Tuesday the heat index value in the local area was between 108 to 110 degrees.
As June comes to a close, the National Weather Service says there are signs of at least some relief. A high will wobble into the southern Plains and a clockwise flow around the high will drive weak cold fronts into Arkansas from the north.
FRONT ARRIVING
A front coming in midweek should trigger isolated thunderstorms during the afternoon/evening hours, and will be followed by slightly cooler air Thursday and Friday. It appears another front will head into the region Sunday.
Some severe weather may accompany these fronts. The probability of strong to damaging winds tends to increase as temperatures go up, according to the weather service. There is more potential for rapid cooling as precipitation forms, giving storm downdrafts more strength.
While the heat is not expected to end, and rain is not expected to be widespread, the fronts will help break the monotony of an otherwise stagnant pattern, weather officials say.
While it is hot, people need to be careful, said Ed Barham of the state Health Department. Day after day of heat could take its toll, especially on those who work outdoors or are away from an air-conditioned environment, Barham said.
On average, there are 400 heat-related deaths a year in the country The 1995 heat wave in the Midwest contributed to 716 heat-related deaths.
The heat wave of 1980 was an especially hard one for Arkansas, when 153 heat-related deaths occurred. Since then, heat has caused the deaths of 235 Arkansans. Last year, seven Arkansans died from the extreme hot weather, Barham said.
EVERYONE AT RISK
Dr. Richard Nugent, medical leader, southeastern health region, said, “While the elderly, people with health problems, and very young children are the most vulnerable, heat can affect anyone—even strong, healthy athletes.
“Our bodies are cooled primarily by losing heat through skin and perspiration. Problems occur when we are unable to shed excess heat. When our heat gain exceeds the amount we can get rid of, our temperature begins to rise, and heat-related illness may develop,” Nugent said.
The human body has an internal thermostat that is designed to help maintain proper body temperatures. However, sometimes extreme heat can cause the body thermostat to malfunction, which can result in one or more of the following conditions:
Heat rash is a skin irritation caused by excessive sweating during hot, humid weather. It can occur at any age but is most common in young children. Although heat rash occurs because of exposure to extreme heat, treating heat rash is simple and usually does not require medical assistance. Other heat-related problems can be much more severe.
Heat cramps usually affect people who sweat heavily during strenuous activity. This sweating depletes the body’s salt, magnesium and water. The low salt and magnesium levels in the muscles may be the cause of heat cramps. Heat cramps may also be a symptom of heat exhaustion.
Heat exhaustion is a milder form of heat-related illness that can develop in exposure to high temperatures and inadequate or unbalanced replacement of fluids. It is the body’s response to an excessive loss of the water and salt contained in sweat. Those most prone to heat exhaustion are elderly people, people with high blood pressure and people working or exercising in a hot environment.
Heat stroke occurs when the body is unable to regulate its temperature. The body’s temperature rises rapidly, the sweating mechanism fails and the body is unable to cool down. Body temperature may rise to 106°F or higher within 10 to 15 minutes. Heat stroke can cause death or permanent disability if emergency treatment is not provided.
Most heat-related deaths occur when high temperatures overcome the body’s natural ability to cope with heat. The elderly, very young children and persons with chronic medical conditions (especially cardiovascular disease) are at the highest risk. Elderly people should avoid staying shut-up indoors during heat waves without using air conditioning. More than half of the 700 heat-related deaths in the 1995 Chicago heat wave could have been prevented with an air conditioner in the home, according to a published study.
Experts say fans are apparently not effective against heat illness during intense heat waves. If you cannot afford an air conditioner for your home, spend more time in other air-conditioned environments. Access to air conditioning for even a few hours a day is protective.
Those who work, exercise or participate in strenuous activity, such as sports or gardening for an hour or more during intense heat may lose or sweat up to two quarts of water.
TAKE PRECAUTIONS
If you must pursue intense activity during hot weather, follow these safety tips:
Drink plenty of water; fluid replacement is crucial to avoid heat risks. Drink more water than usual before exercising or working in the heat. (If you are elderly or taking medication, ask your doctor about fluid intake recommendations.)
Schedule your strenuous activity during the coolest time of the day.
Monitor how you feel. If you have difficulty maintaining your regular pace, slow it down.
If you know someone who may be at risk for heat-related problems, check on them frequently.
Also do not forget about pets.
Never leave your pet in the car. Though it may seem cool outside, the sun can increase the temperature inside your car to 120 degrees in a matter of minutes even with the windows rolled down. If you need to run some errands, leave the furry ones at home.
Water, water everywhere. Whether you’re indoors or out, both you and your pet need access to lots of fresh water during the summer, so check the pet’s water bowl several times a day to be sure it’s full.
If you and your furry friend venture forth for the afternoon, bring plenty of water for both of you.
Hot weather may tempt your pet to drink from puddles in the street, which can contain antifreeze and other chemicals.
Antifreeze has a sweet taste that animals like, but it’s extremely toxic. When you’re walking your pet, make sure it doesn’t sneak a drink from the street.
Be cautious on humid days. Humidity interferes with animals’ ability to rid themselves of excess body heat. When we overheat we sweat, and when the sweat dries, it takes excess heat with it. Our four-legged friends only perspire around their paws, which is not enough to cool the body.
To rid themselves of excess heat, animals pant. Air moves through the nasal passages, which picks up excess heat from the body. As it is expelled through the mouth, the extra heat leaves along with it. Although this is a very efficient way to control body heat, it is severely limited in areas of high humidity or when the animal is in close quarters.
Bring them inside. Animals shouldn’t be left outside unsupervised on long, hot days, even in the shade. Shade can move throughout the afternoon, and pets can become ill quickly if they overheat, so keep them inside as much as possible. If you must leave your pet in the backyard, keep a close eye on it and bring it in when you can.
SPORTS >> Junior Optimist cashes in to post Legion victory
By JASON KING Leader sportswriter
Sylvan Hills gave itself plenty of opportunities with eight hits, and Cabot’s pitching helped the Bruins along with nine walks, all of which came in the final three innings.
The junior Optimist Bruins made the most of those gifts on their way to a run-ruled 9-1 win in five innings over Centennial Bank on Monday afternoon at Kevin McReynolds Field.
Blake Hannon took the win for Sylvan Hills with a complete-game effort at the mound. Hannon gave up a walk and allowed two hits. He also fanned four along the way.
Cabot starting pitcher Taylor Barnhill kept the Bruins at bay in the first two innings, but the bottom of the third was a sign of things to come. Sylvan Hills took a 2-1 lead after three, and added three more scores in each of the final two frames.
Chad Wisely relieved Barnhill in the bottom of the fourth, while Weston Conard closed for Centennial Bank in the fifth.
It was bases on balls that closed the deal for the Bruins in the bottom of the fifth, although Austin Spears led off the inning with a solo home run over the left centerfield wall to give Sylvan Hills a 7-1 lead.
Justin Cook followed with a single but was picked off second by Conard. The next five Bruins batters walked, though, to secure the final two runs needed to push the game past the eight-after-five run rule.
Centennial Bank’s only score came in the top of the third inning. Tyler Cole led off the inning with a walk, and Zach Uhiren plated him two batters later with a double to left field.
Sylvan Hills leadoff Cain Cormier singled, and an outfield error allowed him to reach third. A passed ball scored Cormier to tie the game. Trey Sims walked, and scored on a double down the third base line by Lance Hunter to give the Bruins a 2-1 lead after three.
The Bruins’ lead quickly grew in the fourth when Hunter smashed a triple that bounced off the left centerfield wall to drive in three runs after Michael Lock had singled and Cormier and Sims had walked to load the bases.
It was 8-1 after Hunter scored on a passed ball.
Hunter was 2 of 3 for Sylvan Hills with a triple, double, and four RBI. Spears was 2 of 3 with a home run, and Cormier was 1 of 2 with two walks, good for a RBI and two scores. Sims was 1 of 1, but reached three other times on walks, all of which ended up as scores.
SPORTS >> 2009 Hogs provide a lot of fond memories
By NATE ALLEN Nate Allen Media Services
FAYETTEVILLE — Though all eight qualifying SEC teams advanced into the 2009 NCAA Regional postseason anyway, the supposedly irrelevant league tournament seldom has seemed more relevant.
At least, to the two SEC teams which reached the College World Series in Omaha, Neb.
Eschewing the conventional wisdom that the SEC regular season champ would be better off losing early in the league tournament to refresh for NCAA Regionals, the LSU Tigers won it all in Hoover. They have been winning ever since.
They swept their Regional and Super Regional in Baton Rouge and swept their four-team College World Series bracket in Omaha to reach the national championship series against Texas.
Texas is the unbeaten winner of the other CWS four-team bracket.
The Arkansas Razorbacks, the SEC’s other College World Series team, likely owe their Omaha trip to the SEC Tournament.
Without their 2-2 SEC Tournament showing it’s hard to imagine the Hogs catching fire like they did in the postseason.
Starting with a nine-run eighth-inning to overcome first-round foe Washington State, 10-3, the Razorbacks won the Norman Regional, including two wins over favored host Oklahoma.
They then swept favored Florida State in the Super Regional in Tallahassee before stunning favored Cal State-Fullerton, 10-6, at the CWS. They followed all that by winning a thrilling 4-3, 12-inning epic against Virginia.
Who knows? Perhaps if not bracketed with LSU, which was simply better than these Hogs, Arkansas might be the team this week playing LSU for the national championship.
Texas is awfully good, but those were awfully good Cal State-Fullerton and Virginia teams the Hogs beat in Omaha.
The Arkansas team that embarrassed itself in being swept at home in its final regular-season series against Ole Miss — the last two losses were 9-3 and 16-3 surrenders — was not the same inspired team that stormed out of Hoover.
Arkansas did lose its last SEC Tournament game 11-1 to Vanderbilt. However, in that game, as in the 14-5 elimination game with LSU last Friday in the bracket final, Arkansas ran out of pitching, not moxie.
Those 8-5 and 10-7 victories over SEC East champion Florida in Hoover and an exquisitely played 10-inning 2-1 loss to Georgia, restored confidence in Hog futures.
Coach Dave Van Horn made the move in Hoover that saved the season. For it was opening the SEC Tournament that Van Horn decided the best way to replace shortstop Scott Lyons, injured during the Ole Miss series, was to move senior second baseman Ben Tschepikow to shortstop and install freshman reserve Bo Bigham at second.
Both parts of the revised tandem made the All-SEC Tournament team and starred when Tschepikow fractured his ring finger after being struck by a Virginia pitch.
These 41-24 Hogs will be remembered for sweeping the Regional in Norman, sweeping the Super Regional in Tallahassee and becoming Van Horn’s first of four teams (two at Nebraska and his 2004 Hogs) to win games at the College World Series.
None of those memories, however, would have been possible without that supposedly irrelevant conference tournament in Hoover.
SPORTS >> Cabot Legion seniors finally starting to put it all together
By KELLY FENTON Leader sports editor
I hadn’t intended to put any pressure on Jay Darr or jinx his team when I offered the opinion a few weeks back that Cabot Centennial Bank appeared to be a fully-loaded club capable of doing some pretty good things this summer.
He laughed, shook his head and reluctantly agreed that, yes, this senior Legion club had plenty of firepower and was stocked with starting pitching. But he also said at the time that his bunch had developed an early feast-or-famine tendency when it came to scoring runs.
And that was true. Cabot, which at the time was coming off a semifinal appearance in the prestigious Fat City Tournament in Nettleton, was 4-2 and had scored three runs twice, four runs once and 12 and 14 on two other occasions.
The evening I spoke to Darr, Cabot would score only three runs against a tough Nathan Eller of Sylvan Hills in a 4-3 loss. That was the first of four consecutive losses for Centennial Bank, a streak during which the offense functioned just fine while the defense collapsed.
It reached a head last Friday in a loss to Sheridan’s junior team in the first game at the Wood Bat Classic in Sheridan. It appears that may have been the wake-up call. Cabot hasn’t lost since, outscoring its next four opponents 36-7 to winits second straight Wood Bat crown.
Centennial Bank ran its winning streak to five on Monday night with a 16-10 win over Sylvan Hills.
It’s good to see Darr’s club playing up to its potential. The Cabot high school team, comprised of mostly these same players, underachieved at times in the spring before putting it together for a run to the state semifinals.
Darr said one through seven in his lineup was solid and there’s no question about that. Joe and Powell Bryant, two speedsters who struggled offensively at times in the spring, are both over .300. Matt Turner has been an RBI machine, leading the team with 18. Once Ben Wainwright gets going, which he’s sure to do, Centennial Bank will have a six-hole hitter second to none.
Wainwright is scuffling along at just .214, but this is a guy who belted six home runs for the Panthers and is a consistent masher.
Andrew Reynolds has developed into a solid two-hole hitter and Ty Steele leads the team in on-base percentage and is second with 18 runs.
All of that provides a potent nucleus, even if you exclude the lineup’s lynch pins — Sam Bates, back from Crowder College and bigger than ever, and All Star outfielder Drew Burks. These guys rarely get cheated and almost always hit it solid. Bates is hitting .467 with 15 RBI and 20 runs, meaning he has had a hand in 35 of Cabot’s 118 runs this season.
The pitching is deep. The question becomes, Is it deep enough to survive the state tournament grind come early August. The trio of Cole Nicholson, Tyler Erickson and Andrew Reynolds gives Darr a reliable, often dominant starting staff.
In particular, the young Nicholson — only a junior-to-be — has been fierce on opposing batters. He struck out 13 batters in his only loss of the season and opponents are hitting just .165 against him. His ERA has dipped to 1.33. Most impressive is his 34-6 strikeouts-to-walks ratio.
Reynolds is 2-0 with a 2.88 ERA. Only Erickson has struggled at times among the three regular starters.
It gets a little thin beyond those three, though Josh Brown and C.J. Jacoby are capable of good things. Brown has won three games and gone the distance twice.
The defense can be spectacular and shoddy. It cost them games against Sylvan Hills and Little Rock Blue.
And here’s a stat that can’t make Darr too happy: Of the 74 runs Cabot pitching has surrendered thus far, 22 of them are unearned.
The team has gone from 4-6 to 9-6 over a four-day span and has played without Burks in three of those games. Burks is in Fayetteville for the All-Star baseball game.
Shore up the defense, get Wainwright going at the plate and Erickson on the mound, find a fourth starter and this team might well live up to its potential come early August.
Alycia Shaw may be only 6 years old, but her long jump of 9 feet, 4 inches is currently the best jump in the state this year among 7- and 8-year-olds.
Shaw is one of 17 area athletes who qualified last weekend for the AAU national qualifying meet in Joplin next month.
The meet in Joplin will be followed by the AAU nationals later this summer in Iowa.
Shaw jumped 7-11.50 at the Arkansas District Qualifier at Scott Field in Little Rock last Friday and Saturday. That mark led the Primary division.
Khaila Jones of Searcy qualified for four events at Joplin — all with the best marks at the district meet. Jones, a Sub Youth athlete, posted the best times in the 100 and 200 meters and the best jumps in the long jump and the triple jump.
Jacksonville’s Daijah Harris posted best times in the Sub Bantam 100 and 200 and the second best mark in the long jump to qualify for Joplin.
Deja Hale and Tatiana Washington also qualified for three events. Hale will compete in the Sub Youth division in the 100, 200 and long jump, while Washington qualified in the Youth division in the 100, 200 and long jump.
Alayah Stirgus and Lakaia Massey each reached the regional in the Bantam division and will compete in the 100, 200 and long jump.
Nikia Williams, Mya Graham and Amber Lockhart qualified in the 100 and 200 Sub Midget division, while Taylor Palmer advanced in the Sub Youth 100 and 200. Graham will also compete in the long jump. Also in the Sub Midget division, Kiarra
Harris qualified in the long jump and the shot put.
Taylor Person posted the best time among qualifiers in the Midget division of the 1,500-meter walk race and was second in the shot put. Nykeya Mosby, also in the Midget division, qualified in the long jump and the 1,500-meter walk race. Jasmine Owens also reached Joplin the 1500-meter walk race in the Midget division. In that same division, Kiarra Harris, Lockhart, Williams and Makala Clayton qualified for the 4x100 relay.
Ebony Cox qualified earlier this month in the Intermediate 200 meters.
At Joplin, all 17 athletes will be attempting to qualify for the AAU Junior Olympic Games at Drake University in Des Moines in August.
Khaila Jones, sister of current University of Arkansas long jumper Whitney Jones, is the current long jump national champion in the Midget division.
The athletes will be at Burger King in Jacksonville this Friday and Saturday raising money for the trip to Des Moines.
Cabot Centennial Bank has found something to break up the monotony of the long summer baseball season — adversity.
It began with a 7-6 loss to Sheridan junior in the first round of the annual Sheridan Wood Bat Classic when Cabot was faced with a depleted pitching staff, and continued on Sunday when head coach Jay Darr had to sit out the tourney championship due to the Arkansas Activities Association’s athletic dead period.
Through all of that, Cabot (8-6) found a way to win its final four games, including a 4-1 victory over Gurdon in the championship game, on the way to capturing its second consecutive crown at the Wood Bat Classic. Centennial Bank benefited from complete game performances by Cole Nicholson, Josh Brown, Andrew Reynolds and Tyler Erickson from Friday through Sunday, and a heads-up job of substitute coaching on Sunday by Cabot junior assistant coach Chris Gross, who didn’t even know he’d be taking over head coaching duties until late Friday.
“Chris did an excellent job of leading them,” said Darr, “He’s been an assistant with the junior team, which means he hasn’t worked with the senior bunch hardly at all. It was a team effort all the way. Our pitching and offense were clicking.”
The dead period prohibits contact between any coach connected to a high school in the state and their athletes for two weeks.
Because Darr volunteer coaches for the Cabot High School Panthers baseball team under Jay Fitch, the AAA said he was subject to the rule. The dead period also affects junior legion coach Andy Runyan, who also teaches and coaches two sports at CHS.
If all that weren’t enough, Cabot on Sunday didn’t have Drew Burks and his .389 average for either of its games. Burks played Thursday through Saturday, but reported to Fayetteville on Sunday to take part in High School All-Star week, where he will play for the East All Stars in the East-West baseball game at Baum Field on Wednesday.
An 11-4 win over Sylvan Hills early Sunday put Centennial Bank in the championship game, where they took on a stout Gurdon team. Gurdon had knocked off zone dominators North Little Rock in the semis.
Erickson got the nod to throw the title game, and came through with a complete-game, five-hit performance. Ty Steele led the way offensively, going 3 of 3 at the plate. Sam Bates, Matt Turner and Joe Bryant all recorded RBIs for Centennial Bank.
Cabot outscored its opponents 42-13 through five games at the Wood Bat Classic.
“The guys were going through the summer league motions. We just weren’t playing as a team,” said Darr. “I challenged them after we lost on Friday. I told them that we could be a sound team, but we weren’t living up to our potential. They responded.
Our pitchers shut down their opponents, and everyone stepped up to the plate and hit well.”
The rebound began with Cabot’s second game of the tourney in a 4-1 win over Pine Bluff/White Hall. Cole Nicholson went seven innings and allowed only four hits, and Burks provided the offensive punch with a 3-of-4 performance, which included a home run. Joe Bryant went 2 of 4 with a double, an RBI and a run. Bates was also 2 of 4 with a run.
Cabot hammered Hot Springs 17-1 on Saturday behind Sam Bates’ two doubles and three RBI. Joe Bryant was 2 of 3 with a double and an RBI, while Turner was 2 of 2 with two RBI and two runs.
Brown went the distance in the run-ruled contest, allowing only three hits through five innings.
A nine-run fourth inning propelled Centennial Bank over Sylvan Hills in the semifinal matchup on Sunday. Reynolds got the win after giving up five hits and three earned runs, while striking out seven.
Matt Turner led the offense with a 3-of-5 showing, driving in four. Joe Bryant was 3 of 5 with a double and two runs, while twin brother Powell Bryant was 2 of 4 with an RBI.
Darr said he hopes the prestigious crown will give his up-and-down club some momentum for the rest of the summer.
“I think now that they see what we can do and what we are capable of accomplishing, anything else will seem like a failure,” said Darr. “This team has a lot of pride, and I think that will continue for the rest of the year.”
SYLVAN HILLS
A solid start to the Sheridan Wood Bat Classic ended in disappointment for Sylvan Hills over the weekend.
The Optimist Bruins seniors handily beat Stuttgart 8-0 in the first round on Thursday and held on to beat a stubborn Benton team 4-3 on Friday, but fell 10-2 to Maumelle and 11-4 to Cabot in their final two matchups at the annual tourney. Sylvan Hills is 10-6 on the season.
“Anytime you get to use wood bats, it’s a good experience,” said longtime Bruins coach Mike Bromley. “You find out what kind of swing you have with a wood bat. You can get away with a lot of stuff with a metal bat that you can’t with wood. Plus, I think the kids enjoy using the wood bats.”
Jordan Spears led the way against Stuttgart with a two-run home run. Korey Arnold earned the win at the mound, and also contributed offensively with two hits. Casey Cerrato had a hit and also reached two other times on walks, and Gino Jameson finished with a double.
Nathan Eller threw a strong game against Benton on Friday, allowing only three hits. Those hits all came late, and Benton rallied in the seventh inning after the Bruins claimed a 4-0 lead early.
Sylvan Hills got all four of its runs in the top of the second, and held Benton scoreless until the bottom of the fifth inning. The Bruins gave up one run in the fifth, and two more in the seventh before closing the deal.
After falling to Maumelle on Saturday, the Bruins gave up nine runs on just three hits in the fourth inning in a loss to Cabot in the semis on Sunday.
“We’ve got to start making the routine plays,” said Bromley. “If you’re making the routine plays, you give yourself a chance to win. If you can’t, you’re in trouble. We’ve been kind of up and down so far. Some games we play pretty good, other games we don’t do very well.”
