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.

After what can only be described as a "brutal beating" of their son during a Canadian youth hockey game and the perceived ensuing missteps by authorities, Wes and Julie Major have gone public to CBC News with video of what they consider an assault.

As first noted by Prep Rally's brotherly Canadian junior hockey blog Buzzing the Net, with a 7-2 lead at home in January over Ontario major midget 'A' hockey rival Brantford, Woodstock's Nick Major, 16, chased a puck into the offensive zone and stopped short as the Brantford net-minder covered it. Essentially, he "snowed the goalie," a hockey move where an offensive player rushes in on a goalie at full speed and sprays him snowy ice powder when the goalie leans over to cover the puck.

Even Woodstock manager Maria Velda admitted in a letter to Alliance Hockey, "I've observed many games where this very thing happens and the player receives an unsportsmanlike penalty or perhaps a shove by the goalie and it's left at that."

Only the teenaged Major didn't just get shoved. He got crosschecked, had his helmet removed and received a dozen blows to the head from a player with a history of fighting. Major did not fight back and somehow skated off the ice on his own volition.

Said Julie Major: "I felt, right from seeing it happen, my son has been assaulted."

Except, both Major and the unnamed Brantford player were suspended for fighting, according to the CBC report. The former received a two-game suspension while the latter earned a four-game hiatus as the result of a previous such incident on his record. Of course, Major also faced 2-3 weeks of recovery from concussion symptoms.

So, the Majors presented their video to both the league and police. While the league rescinded Nick's suspension, the instigator's penalty remained unchanged and police are yet to take action five months later, effectively condoning the fight as part of hockey.

"If this is part of hockey then we don’t want to be part of it," Wes Major told CBC. "I think that attitudes have to change."

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.

Addressing a room full of youth football players at Detroit's Sound Mind Sound Body Camp on Friday, NFL Hall of Famer Lem Barney described football as a "deadly" game in danger of becoming extinct over the next two decades, according to multiple reports.

"The game is becoming more deadly today," Barney told the youth football players while sitting on a panel with several Division I coaches, including Michigan's Brady Hoke. "It's a great game. I think it's the greatest game if you like gladiator-ism.

"It's the greatest game for yesteryear's gladiators, but I can see eventually, in the next 10-20 years, society will alleviate football altogether because of how strong it's becoming, how big it's becoming and the tenacity it already has. And it's going to only get worse."

Hoke, Michigan State coach Mark Dantonio, Western Michigan's P.J. Fleck, Eastern Michigan's Ron English and Wisconsin's Gary Andersen all sat beside Barney, and a few coaches countered that technological advances are being made to improve safety.

Still, Barney played 11 NFL seasons -- more than the rest of the panel combined -- earning Defensive Rookie of the Year honors in 1967, seven Pro Bowl selections and an induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1992.

That career came with a price. He suffered "seven or eight" undiagnosed concussions, he told the youth football players gathered at the camp. An ophthalmologist recently diagnosed the head injuries when Barney could no longer read his bible.

"There are a lot of people that don't want to let the game go," Barney added. "But the game is going to kill a lot of people if (something doesn't change) soon. Maybe take the helmet out of the game, which I don't think they'll do (in the NFL).

"Bubba Smith left us, Dave Duerson left us, Junior Seau of late -- guys are killing themselves because of the head injuries they had. You hear about guys who played in championship games, Pro Bowlers, Super Bowl participants ... but you don't hear about the average Joe who played and is killing himself. The game is that deadly today."

Describing the panel that featured so many college coaches at a youth football camp as the wrong place to make such remarks, Barney apologized for his comments in this statement to the Detroit Free Press:

The other day at the Sound Mind and Body Camp I was asked about my thoughts on football and safety. While I made comments I believe to be truthful it is apparent to me now that the camp was not