Almost four years since cardiologists told him, "You'll never play football again," and less than a year after undergoing open heart surgery, Portland (Ore.) Jesuit High senior Xavier Coleman earned the Division I football scholarship he always dreamed of.

Portland State recruit Xavier Coleman underwent open heart surgery in July 2012 -- OregonLive.com

Coleman's remarkable recovery, sandwiching three state titles in basketball and track between a dominating freshman football campaign and a return to the gridiron this past fall, is chronicled wonderfully by the Beaverton Leader's Connor Letourneau.

"I looked into miracles earlier in high school and I'm like, 'Nah. That's not how things happen,'" Xavier told Letourneau. "But after this whole thing, I really do believe in them."

And for good reason. After fainting twice over a span of a few days as a Jesuit freshman in December 2009 and his subsequent diagnosis of a congenital heart defect (bicuspid aortic valve), doctors reportedly ruled out football indefinitely for the burgeoning prospect.

"Why?" Coleman asked his mother Christine after flipping a few chairs and punching a couple walls. "That's my dream he's talking about! Why is this happening to me?"

That didn't stop him from leading the Crusaders to back-to-back Class 6A state championships as the starting point guard on their basketball team or running a leg on the winning 4x400-meter relay squad this May as part of Jesuit's 6A track and field title.

Still, football is Coleman's true passion, and the gridiron is where he found his real salvation. Despite his success on basketball courts and in sprinting lanes, he constantly worried about his heart condition, the Beaverton Leader story explained.

"Who at the age of 15 is thinking about dying?" Christine Coleman added. "But he did."

Sure enough, Coleman's June 2012 sonogram returned the image of an enlarged heart that worked at just 40 percent capacity. While initially resisting the idea of open heart surgery, Coleman eventually relented to its reality.

On July 20, a Stanford University Medical Center surgeon conducted a nine-hour procedure that sawed through Coleman's chest -- and opened the possibility of a return to football. Reading Jesuit football coach Ken Potter's playbook while recovering in the hospital, Coleman circled Game 7 of his senior season as his target return date.

When doctors cleared Coleman to play just three months later, an injury to his starting cornerback enabled Potter to start the once highly coveted recruit opposite Oregon-bound wideout Thomas Tyner in an Oct. 19 game against Beaverton (Ore.) Aloha High.

Move over Deion Sanders, you’ve got company on the commentator/high school football coach circuit.

Keyshawn Johnson is returning to football in Southern California as a prep position coach — Getty

As first reported by the Orange County Register, former Jets, Buccaneers and Cowboys wide receiver Keyshawn Johnson is returning to competitive football, but will not do so in any playing capacity, but rather as an assistant prep football coach. The once dominant wide receiver will team up on coaching responsibilities for the wide receivers at Orange County powerhouse program Mission Viejo.

Fittingly, Johnson’s future coaching teammate is a pal from his past as well: Rob Johnson, the former NFL and USC quarterback who threw passes to Keyshawn Johnson when the pair starred for the Trojans together.

If nothing else, those two wide receivers coaches are going to shatter the largest net worth among tag teaming position coaches in prep football history.

Mission Viejo’s coach, Bob Johnson, told the Register that Keyshawn Johnson would work at all of the team’s Tuesday and Wednesday practices to allow him to continue fulfilling his NFL analyst duties for ESPN on the other side of the country in Connecticut. The elder Johnson, who is the father of Rob but unrelated to Keyshawn, also said that Keyshawn Johnson would be present as a coach for at least half of Mission Viejo’s matchups during the 2013 season.

Sometimes you get it right and sometimes you get it wrong. This time, Prep Rally got it wrong.

New South Carolina football commitment Arden Key — Rivals.com

Earlier on Tuesday, Prep Rally posted a story about a Georgia defensive end named Arden Key who committed to play at South Carolina. The story was written largely to highlight a rather questionable choice of words that Key was reported to have said in announcing his commitment, namely the following: “The academic part, you have to try to fail.”

Prep Rally reported that quote based on what was attributed as a direct quote by Key to South Carolina news outlet Palmetto Sports. The quote was clearly attributed to Palmetto Sports.

Normally, that would be fine and dandy. The issue here is that the quote apparently was given to Palmetto Sports and other outlets. And, as it turns out, the quotes given to a reporter from 247 Sports were critically different from those on Palmetto Sports, which omitted a key phrase that changed the context of the quote (unless Key gave the quote completely separately twice in almost identical fashion, which is possible but seems fairly unlikely).

This is the original quote in its full context, at least according to 247 Sports:

“It has a great vibe,” he said. “There wasn’t really anybody there, but you could tell when people are there what it would be like. It’s kind of a mixture of the city and the country. The academic part, they make it easy. In order to do bad at South Carolina, you’ve got to try to fail.”

As noted by Lost Letterman (which also fell prey to Key's quote from Palmetto Sports), the key difference in the two quotes is “they make it easy.” The ‘they’ in this case is clearly the University of South Carolina, and more particularly, the school’s multi-million dollar Dodie Anderson Academic Enrichment Center.

Prep Rally noted that there was a possibility that Key was referring to “The Dodie” the entire time. That’s certainly a more legitimate point for Key to support, even if it does in turn raise questions about athletes and their own commitment to academics relative to the general student body.

As it turns out, Key may in fact be quite committed to academics. Earlier Tuesday, the 247 writer who initially posted a story about Key’s commitment tweeted out an additional quote, from an interview article he wrote shortly after Key’s initial visit to Columbia.

“I liked the academic center,” Key told 247 Sports’ Wes Mitchell. “The academic center makes you want to study.”

The issue, of course, was that not nearly as many people read Mitchell’s work on 247 Sports as read the Palmetto Sports story. That may be in part due to its rapid dissemination on other mainstream sports sites including The Big Lead, where Prep Rally first discovered Key’s remarkable (albeit apparently adjusted or misrepresented) quote.

When the media and general public discuss dangerous collisions in prep sports, they tend to focus on football. There’s good reason for that: Players start from a dead stop and accelerate until they make impact, setting the stage for blazing fast and dangerous impact. Still, this myopic focus on football obscures other dangerous sports like lacrosse, where players tend to accelerate while already in motion before colliding with opponents and teammates.

Imagine those lacrosse hits without pads, and one gets a sense of just how brutal prep rugby can be, especially when it’s played in the Southern Hemisphere, where rugby is local football, in a literal sense.

Watch enough rugby and it becomes clear that it, and not American football, provides the most brutal hits to young athletes. Case in point: The video you see above, which was captured in New Zealand.

As noted by a number of different global outlets and brought to Prep Rally’s attention by the soccer blog 101 Great Goals, the massive blind side hit featured in this particular clip was delivered by Ruslan Casey, a high school athlete at Wanganui (N.Z.) Collegiate School on Hamilton (N.Z.) St. Paul’s Collegiate School ‘s Kip Fawcett. The force delivered by Casey is absolutely astounding, making it a minor miracle that Fawcett could even collect himself and get up off the turf after being drilled into it.

Hits like this don’t come every day in rugby, but they do come more often than one might think. Before anyone criticizes Casey, it’s worth noting that his hit was completely legal, as he took off toward Fawcett from yards away while Fawcett was heading toward the touch line (think goal line). It’s not Casey’s fault that Fawcett turned to deliver a pass just as he arrived on the scene with force.

Obviously, such a blind side hit would draw a penalty in American football, not to mention scorn for the player who delivered it. That’s not the case in rugby. Why not? Some of that reason is surely due to cultural differences, both within the sports themselves and society as a whole.

At the same time, rugby does do things to discourage dangerous play that football could take a lesson from. As noted by one Prep Rally reader, a dangerous play doesn't just get a 15-yard penalty; it lands 10 minutes in the sin bin at the least, and often elicits an immediate removal from the game and two-match suspension. Because all tackles must be made by wrapping one's arms around the opponent, there's none of the flying spearing that goes on in football, and that's a very good thing.

There’s good news and bad news if you’re a University of South Carolina football fan. The good news: The Gamecocks just landed a key commitment to its Class of 2015, with Georgia defensive end Arden Key pledging his future to Steve Spurrier’s squad. The bad news? He belittled South Carolina’s academics in an underhanded way while committing, and said that was a key reason he wanted to be a Gamecock.

Georgia defensive end Arden Key committed to South Carolina in part because of easy academics — Rivals

As first reported by Palmetto Sports and brought to Prep Rally’s attention by The Big Lead, Key, a rising junior defensive end Lithonia (Ga.) High, cited USC’s coaching staff as a key reason why he committed to the Gamecocks rather than in-state power Georgia. Yet, he also said that the school’s ability to create an easy road for its athletes as a key reason why he wanted to head to Columbia.

"The academic part, it's like you have to try to fail," Key told Palmetto Sports.

That probably isn’t the best way for a young prospect to endear himself to a large body of alumni who will, in turn, spend their hard earned money to watch him play. It stands to reason that most of those fans probably spent more time ensuring that they would graduate than Key plans on doing himself.

Then again, maybe Key was just misunderstood. Perhaps he meant to cite South Carolina’s tutor program as the key to lifting up players’ academic performance. According to unverified reports, he took a tour of the Dodie Anderson Academic Enrichment Center while visiting the campus shortly before committing, so that actually is a distinct possibility. Yet, if that was Key's intent, it raises secondary questions over whether athletes are students on an equal footing with their classmates if they know they're getting so much help they can't fail.

It’s not often that families attend a high school graduation and are immediately presented with a perplexing riddle like the following: How can the nation’s best collegiate golfer be walking across the stage at a high school commencement?

Annie Park won the individual and team national titles as a freshman — AP

That was the bizarre scene in Long Island on Saturday, where Levittown (N.Y.) MacArthur High graduate and current NCAA women’s golf individual and team national champion Annie Park officially graduated with her former classmates. As one might expect, the attendance of a high profile USC golf star at a high school commencement inspired eligibility questions.

Luckily for Park and Trojans fans everywhere, the teenager didn’t violate any rules to compete for USC before she was eligible to do so. Instead, she finished her high school coursework and graduated from MacArthur early, in December, but couldn’t walk in a traditional commencement ceremony because the school didn’t host one then.

Instead, Park agreed to wait until the school-wide commencement in June and rejoin her classmates. Little did she know that she would do so as a dual national champion.

“The result was very unexpected for myself,” Park told USC sports information website USCTrojans.com immediately after her individual title. “I was just trying to play my best each round and each shot. It turned out to be good and feels great.”

That all became a reality in May, when Park and her teammates rolled to USC’s third consecutive national title, setting a team score record in the process; USC’s final combined score of 1,133 was 15 shots better than the standing record set by UCLA in 2004.

As for Park, her high school commencement was just the latest chapter in a whirlwind semester which could give way to an even more high profile professional future sooner rather than later.

9-year-old Zach Adams shot a 58 over 18 holes — Mt. Pleasant Junior Golf Association

Justin Rose’s victory in the U.S. Open was the talk of the golf world on Sunday, as it should have been. After all, its not every day a man breaks through by edging Phil Mickelson in the final round of the U.S. Open (even if it has happened six times now). Still, what Rose achieved may be no more buzzworthy than what a golfer named Zach Adams pulled off last week in South Carolina.

While Rose deserves all the plaudits he receives, he can’t overshadow what Adams accomplished, shooting a remarkable 58 across 18 holes. That’s a remarkable achievement, yet it’s the age of the two golfers that makes it all the more unbelievable: Rose is a relatively spry yet traditional (by pro golfing standards) 32 and Adams is 9.

Yes you read that correctly: A 9-year-old carded a 58 on 18 holes in a recognized competition. As reported by the Charleston Post and Courier, that competition was a junior golf event -- the Mount Pleasant Junior Golf Open in South Carolina, to be specific -- but Adams’ 58 is a score that still puts him in rarified air. By comparison, David Duval is one of the few who have ever recorded a 59 in a competition before, let alone a 58. The lowest round Tiger Woods has ever recorded is a 61.

“It was pretty fun because I just kept on making putts and chipping it real good,” Adams told the Post and Courier. “The course was playing short and my putting was real good.”

Make no mistake: The yardage in the Junior Open is far shorter than that used in a professional event. The yardage Adams golfed across was 2,680 yards while the yardage at the Patriot Point Links course used for the event can reach upwards of 6,000 yards for a professional event. That shorter yardage means that par-5 holes on the junior course are approximately 215 yards long.

Adams was also helped by the pacing of his 18 holes. For the junior event, the 9-year-olds play a single full round across two days, as opposed to pros who play 18 in a single day.

Yet, even with the shorter distances and additional day, it can’t be underestimated how unprecedented the future fourth grader’s 58 was, even for Adams himself. The youngster had never scored below a 73 before, and used three eagles and eight birdies to reach the score at Patriot Point.