Each year, a different team is crowned champion of the AAU 19U Nationals boys basketball tournament. Traditionally, that team is made up of top basketball prospects who are either 18 or 19 years of age. Occasionally a 17-year-old slips in for consideration. Anyone younger than that practically need not apply.

Incredibly, that wasn't the case for the 2011 champions, Maine's 19U MB Nation squad, which featured a 5-year-old on its official roster.

Yes, you read that last line correctly: One of the official players on the MB Nation national champion squad is a 5-year-old from Maine. That elementary school pipsqueak happens to be named Reese Woodbury. Despite having never stepped foot in an elementary school, Woodbury was one of the MB Nation members cutting down the nets in Orlando when the AAU Nationals wrapped up.

As you might expect, Woodbury has a familial connection to the MB Nation program: His father, Mike "Woody" Woodbury is the MB Nation head coach. Yet, while the younger Woodbury never officially entered the AAU championship game, he did play in the squad's previous games, including a 77-38 blowout victory it authored in the tournament quarterfinals. You can see video of his appearance in that game directly below, a cameo which included a jump shot in the lane that nearly earned him a spot on the final box score.

While college-bound 19-year-olds might be a step too far, the younger Woodbury is emerging as a bit of a phenom nonetheless. The 5-year-old already starts on the MB Nation program's third- and fourth-grade team, which is the youngest classification at the basketball facility. Woodbury doesn't just play against third- and fourth-graders, either; he helps run his team's offense.

As you can see in the ScoutsFocus video above, Woodbury has the raw skills to back up his significantly elevated level of competition.

"This is the first national championship I've won with my Dad's group, but I've won championships with my third- and fourth-grade team, too," Reese Woodbury told ScoutsFocus. "It feels really cool."

The younger Woodberry told ScoutsFocus that he got the idea to cut down the nets from watching "SportsCenter" with his father, but he hopes to eventually land on that program himself one day. Reese Woodbury claims that he dreams of one day being a point guard for Duke, and possibly even the Boston Celtics.

There won't be high school football games broadcast on the ESPN co-owned Longhorn Network … yet. According to the Associated Press, Austin American-Statesman and other sources, the Big 12 Conference passed a one-year moratorium that will keep the University of Texas sports-themed cable channel from airing any live prep sporting events until the conference can complete more due diligence to determine how such a decision would affect recruiting.

Stephen F Austin football team plays Belton

Whether the Longhorn Network is allowed to broadcast high school games after the forthcoming year-long moratorium is completed remains to be seen.

"[Big 12 athletic directors] recognize that this issue is complex and involves a detailed analysis of the recruiting model in many areas, including existing NCAA legislation related to the publicity of prospective student-athletes and the rapidly evolving world of technology," the Big 12 said in a statement to the media. "This process will take an extended period of analysis."

The most interesting part of that previous statement, of course, is "extended period of analysis." If that extended period lasts for more than one year, it could have knock on affects for the overall high school coverage market in both the state of Texas, where the Longhorn Network had expressed interest in televising games involving teams like the Austin (Texas) Stephen F. Austin High squad pictured above, and on the West coast. With the recent contract between New York City's Public School Athletic League and the Cablevision-owned MSG Varsity network setting a benchmark for prospective future deals for some large markets, interest in landing a significant portfolio of high school events on a cable television platform has never been higher.

Longhorn Network logo

That's precisely where the likes of the newly created Longhorn Network and Pac 12 Network come in, as Prep Rally outlined in late July. Just as televising Texas games on the Longhorn Network could still be determined to be a recruiting advantage for Texas (that's the logic currently keeping games off the network in 2011-12), the same could be said for the Pac 12 Network's 7 individual regional sub-brands, all of which will focus on groups of schools within the reorganized conference.

While it remains a legitimate question for debate whether airing games on these newly created school-branded networks is actually a boon for a school's recruiting, at least one Austin-area coach whose school had been approached by the Longhorn Network said he felt that the broadcasting high school games on the Texas-based channel could present a viable conflict of interest to the other schools in the Big 12.

It took two days for football practices in South Carolina's stifling heat to claim a victim. It took practices in Texas only one, with a more shocking victim: A coach.

According to TheOldCoach.com and a variety of Dallas-area media outlets, Plano (Texas) Prestonwood Christian School assistant football coach Wade McLain collapsed and died after his school's first football practice on Monday afternoon. While the cause of death remains unknown, it is believed that severe temperatures in the area played some role in McLain's passing; Monday was the 31st consecutive day where temperatures in the Dallas area soared past the 100-degree mark.

Prestonwood Christian Academy released a statement on the school's Facebook page expressing sadness at McLain's passing while trying to support the rest of the PCA community.

We are deeply saddened by the loss of Coach McLain yet are thankful in knowing he is in the presence of Jesus. We will keep you notified of all arrangements and how to reach out to the family during this time.

The program's other coaches and players met hundreds of other supporters at the school on Monday evening to remember the 55-year-old assistant coach, who left behind a wife and five children.

UPDATE: As is all too typical in sports reporting, Jordan officially named assistant coach Will Burnett the program's new head coach on Tuesday, on the second day of practice for the team. The move was first reported by the Los Angeles Times. He'll take over the program after serving as an assistant under former coach Sheron Butler.

Teams are kicking summer training camps into full swing this week across the country, and Southern California is no exception. After the annual City Section football coach's meeting on Saturday, the teams across the Los Angeles area that hadn't already started practicing get going this week.

Ingleside Morningside football coach Sheron Butler

That's the case at Los Angeles (Calif.) Jordan High, too, yet those practices are a bit more exceptional for the Bulldogs, for one simple reason: They don't have a head coach.

After months of the program operating without a program, Jordan took the rather remarkable step of kicking off the preseason without a coach, too. It's not as if Jordan is coachless at the moment because of a last second defection by its former head coach, either. Instead, Sheron Butler (pictured at right) who served as the team's head coach for the 2010 season, was fired in March after a disagreement with school administrator.

Butler landed a new head coaching job at nearby Ingleside (Calif.) Morningside High just more than a month later. He'll lead the Monarchs for the first time in 2011.

That abrupt departure left Jordan administrators and athletic department officials within the Los Angeles Unified School District a whopping four months to pick a new head coach. That's a third of a year, more lead-in than many programs across the country get when installing a new coach, whether he be a head coach or assistant.

While state high school athletic associations across the country continue to struggle to regulate the legality of different metal bats -- just check out the headaches that Virginia lived through this spring -- America's oldest nationwide youth baseball league is gradually making the switch from metal bats to old fashioned wood.

The Warwick American Legion post now uses only wooden bats, along with the rest of the state's Posts

As chronicled by the Associated Press, three American Legion state associations now require all their teams (which compete under the number of the nearest American Legion to a host town) to use wooden bats instead of the aluminum bats that have ruled baseball at the non-professional level for more than two decades.

In 2011, Rhode Island and Florida joined Connecticut, which began the switch to wooden bats in 2010, with all three states now preaching about the benefits of playing the old fashioned style with the thump of wood replacing the ping of composite metal.

"The game plays a lot better on wood," Rhode Island American Legion Baseball state chairman John Parente told the AP. "There's more emphasis on some of the finer aspects of the game."

Using wooden bats also forces prep prospects to swing bats that are much more similar to those used at the Major League level. That both makes American Legion contests in wood bat states a more attractive (and realistic) scouting option for pro scouts and, in doing so, helps the longstanding summer baseball organization keep the competitive advantage it has held over other summer leagues. In particular, more and more alternative leagues have begun using wood bats in recent years in an effort to market themselves as more accurate professional proving grounds.

Of course, all those benefits don't even account for the greater safety provided by wooden bats. There is a long history of catastrophic injuries tied to metal bats, with one tragic accident in a 2003 American Legion game taking the life of an 18-year-old Montana pitcher.

Such drastic consequences are not nearly as significant a concern with wooden bats, which tend to dampen the impact of contact. Those who are most familiar with both types of bats say that balls typically "explode" off of aluminum and composite bats in ways that they don't when making contact with wood.

With three states already pushing their counterparts across the nation to join them, the national program coordinator for the American Legion league said that a nationwide switch to wood would happen as soon as a majority of states choose to use wood bats over metal alternatives.

Current and former players of popular high school coaches try to take measures to save their mentors' jobs all the time. In that way, recent events at Medford (Mass.) High are no different than others from recent years.

Medford boys soccer coach Mike Petrides

Yet, in another sense, the Medford boys soccer team has taken the ultimate selfless step, and been rewarded for doing so. After being told that longtime coach Michael Petrides has been fired, the team stepped forward to say that it wouldn't play the 2011 season under any other coach.

As chronicled by the Boston Globe, Medford Transcript and other Massachusetts media outlets, the reinstatement of Petrides was made official on Saturday, when Medford headmaster Paul Krueger held a press conference to announce that Petrides would return for a fifth season this fall. The move came just weeks before students are to return to school, when the Medford team will reunite to try and launch another run to the Massachusetts Division I state playoffs.

"Sometimes there are things more important than being right," Krueger told those assembled at his Saturday press conference. "I have chosen to hold as priorities the cohesiveness and overall long-term interests of Medford High School and of the Medford community.

"[The decision to fire Petrides] pit student against student, teacher against teacher, team against team, and neighbor against neighbor."

The move to reinstate Petrides, who has been at Medford as an assistant or head coach for 12 years, was widely cheered by other current players and the town's mayor, who had been among the public figures to support the deposed soccer leader. In the aftermath of Krueger's decision, Medford Mayor Michael McGlynn praised the headmaster for being willing to sacrifice his own decision for the better future of the overall community.

Of course, the biggest winners of all were the student athletes, who learned that concerted player power could challenge a widely unpopular decision from an administration.

"Emotions got in the way," Medford junior captain Jonathan Pires told the media at the press conference. "We are Mustangs. We would have played. Coach [Petrides] wouldn't have wanted it any other way."

In the end, the steely old veteran coach, the man with more victories to his name than anyone else in prep baseball history, just couldn't keep up with the juggernaut program his team was facing. Not this time, at least.

Iowa Class A state champion Martensdale-St. Mary's

That was the abridged storyline at the Iowa Class A state baseball championship on Saturday. With a national record 86-game hitting streak on the line, Martensdale (Iowa) St. Mary High knocked off Lansing (Iowa) Kee High, 8-3. The victory ensured that the Blue Devils finished the season undefeated, with their record winning streak now at an astounding 87 games.

"This is what we set out to do and we did it," Blue Devils pitcher and outfielder Ethan Westphal told the Des Moines Register. "I guess it's a sigh of relief that we got it."

The victory wasn't as dramatic for Martensdale-St. Mary's as the dramatic nail biters that preceded it in the state quarterfinals and semifinals, both of which were one-run victories for the Blue Devils. Still, MSM fell behind in the second inning of the title game and looked to be facing a third consecutive surprising challenge.

Instead, the undefeated Devils tied the game in the fourth and then broke things open in the fifth, knocking in five runs against Kee Hawk reliever Jon Heiderscheit, the very pitcher who proved dominant in the state semifinals just days earlier.

"We had four pretty good innings," Kee coach Gene Schultz told the Register. "They're just a tough, tough, lineup. They hit the ball well."

Schultz's comments were a fitting epitaph for a team that became the first to enter the state playoffs with 40 or more victories since his own Kee team's of 1991 and 1992. To get those comments from the winningest prep baseball coach in history speaks volumes as well.

As the calendar flips to August, high school football teams around the country are finally getting back into the grind of official practices. In South Carolina, those summer workouts finally began on Friday, and, tragically, the stifling heat may have already claimed a victim.

Lamar freshman football player Tyquan Brantley

According to the Associated Press and a handful of other local media outlets, Lamar (S.C.) High freshman football player Tyquan Brantley died on Saturday evening. While the cause of the player's death has yet to officially be determined, the 101-degree heat that the team practiced in on Saturday may have played a factor.

"We are heartbroken at this terrible tragedy," Lamar school district superintendent Dr. Rainey Knight told South Carolina NBC affiliate WMBF. "Our deepest condolences and prayers go out to Tyquan's family, classmates, and coaches."

Another spokesperson for the Lamar school district told the AP that Brantley collapsed during a morning session on the team's second day of official practices. The entire football program was reportedly involved in the two-a-day workouts, which were held in helmets but without pads because of the heat involved in practicing in July and August.

While the extent of Lamar's attempts to avoid heat-related health issues remain unknown, the team was given water breaks every 20 minutes during practices on Friday and Saturday. The team will not return to practice until Monday evening, an apparent attempt to wait out the hottest period of the day.

Meanwhile, those who knew the 14-year-old Brantley have paid homage to the rising freshman. Funeral services are likely later this week. A Facebook page has been set up in his memory, and Brantley's coach offered words about his player just after he was pronounced dead on Saturday night.