After months of rumors that Texas was on the verge of eliminating all steroid testing for high school sports, the state's prep testing program has been spared, even if its new incarnation will bear only slight resemblance to the systemic tests which have recently been used on athletes in scholastic sports in the Lone Star State.

Anabolic steroids

According to the Associated Press, Texas lawmakers will pledge some $1.5 million to fund a steroid testing initiative over the next two years, with the tests on athletes to be carried out only for those in sports where steroid use is deemed a more significant risk, with football, baseball, track and field and girls soccer most likely to receive the brunt of testers' attention.

While the application of the Texas steroids testing program has been criticized by some, it's breadth remains unparalleled in scholastic sports. The state's governing body for public school athletics -- the University Interscholastic League -- made all 700,000 of its affiliated athletes eligible to be randomly administered urine tests to check for steroids or other banned substances. Such widespread tests carried with them a genuine sense of deterrent for high school athletes, but also an extreme price tag: The existing steroid testing initiative has cost Texas approximately $6 million per year.

That universal approach meant that freshman field hockey players were just as likely to be pulled out of class to provide a urine sample as senior tight ends on a school's football team.

The lack of correlation in the number of athletes in an individual sport administered tests to the likelihood that those in that particular sport might take illicit drugs has been a cause of some consternation in Texas, and lawmakers now appear set to adjust testing standards to make the new, streamlined program address those issues.

In early May, James Tate earned national attention for one of the most public prom invitations in recent memory, when he used giant cut out letters to ask friend Sonali Rodrigues to the senior prom on the side of the Shelton (Conn.) High School building.

The resulting saga -- in which Rodrigues accepted his invitation but the school administration banned Tate from the event -- was covered across the nation, with Tate and Rodrigues both appearing on late night shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live, above, and spread globally on Facebook.

While Tate has since had his prom privileges reinstated, thanks to a worldwide campaign that included a Connecticut legislator, on Tuesday he got back to receiving attention for the skill that he's better known for: being an outstanding golfer.

Tate led the Shelton boys golf team to the Southern Connecticut Conference title, earning medalist honors with the event's low round of 76. According to the Connecticut Post, the event was held at Race Brook Country Club in Orange, Conn.

Tate, who is a co-captain of the Shelton team, earned all SCC honors for his performance, which helped pace Shelton to a whopping 15 shot victory over rival Amity (Conn.) High for the title. The conference crown was the first ever for Shelton's boys golf program.

Top sprinters usually come in fairly uniform packages. Most of them are relatively short and remarkably muscular, with each muscle fiber trained to get them to the finishing line as fast as possible.

Once you see Shorecrest (Wash.) High hurdler Dillon Baker, as you can in the clip above, it's clear that he doesn't fit that mold. Unlike any of the other racers he competes against, Baker is most often confused for a starting center on his school's boys basketball team. In case you're still wondering who he is in the video, just look for the guy who is much, much taller -- and faster -- than everyone else.

In fact, at 6-foot-6 and a lanky 200 pounds, Baker is almost certainly the tallest 110-meter high hurdles state champion in the country. Making his rise to state track prominence more impressive is the way in which Baker improved his technique after less than a full season competing in the hurdles as a junior. According to the Seattle Times, the senior watched tons of sprint video clips of high hurdlers on YouTube.

"I did a lot of work in the offseason working on my form just by myself and watching YouTube videos," Baker told the Times. "So that helped me. That came back to this season."

As a result, he cruised to the Washington 110-meter high hurdles title at the Class 3A state championship meet, crossing the finish line in an impressive 15.14 seconds. The time was only an eyelash slower than the 15.10 mark he recorded at the Northwest District 1 Class 3A Finals, which is shown in the video above.

Regardless of time, Baker is still getting used to the concept that he's a champion hurdler.

On May 22, one of the best boys soccer teams in the nation was upset in its state title game. Irmo (S.C.) High entered the South Carolina High School League 4A championship game against Wando (S.C.) High with a perfect, 24-0 record. At least one national poll had ranked Irmo as high as No. 1 during the season, putting even more emphasis on the team's drive to try and finish off a perfect season and state title with a single flourish.

Wando had other ideas, and thanks to the spectacular goal you see above courtesy of SCHSL.tv, it got off to a running start en route to a stunning 3-1 victory that denied Irmo a state title and cemented one player's name in local soccer lore in the process.

As you can see, Wando got the game started with a spectacular goal which might be the best result off a throw-in, well, ever. The player launching the ball inbounds was Wando star Brandon Buckholder, who used the uncommon high school maneuver of a flip throw to add more velocity and distance to his inbounds pass.

Buckholder's pass flew perfectly into the box, where it was seamlessly met by the head of Wando striker Hamilton Carlin, who nodded it into the goal, sending Irmo into new catatonic shock.

In fact, Irmo was so stunned by the sudden goal that it quickly conceded another, again to Carlin, when Irmo failed to clear Wando's subsequent drive into the penalty box.

Last year, Armando Galarraga was cheated out of a perfect game at Detroit's Comerica Park by a blown call at first base. As a result, no pitcher had ever thrown a perfect game at the Tigers' new home park entering the 2011 season.

Detroit Western ace Todd Phelps

That statistic still holds for Major League Baseball, but it's no longer true for the stadium itself, thanks to a seven-inning gem turned in last week by Detroit (Mich.) Western High ace Todd Phelps against Detroit (Mich.) Renaissance High in the Public School League championship game.

According to the Detroit News, the 8-0 Western victory on the Tigers' home diamond Thursday handed the senior and his teammates a Public League title and may have etched Phelps' name in more than one record book in the process. In addition to being the first perfect game pitched at Comerica Park, the no-no is also believed to be the first ever pitched in a Detroit Public School League title game.

"I never ... thought I'd do it," Phelps told the News. "I tried not to think about it. I tried to stay humble. I started to think about it in the fourth or fifth inning. Nobody talked about it (in the dugout). They didn't want to say anything."

The statistics from the best outing of Phelps' high school career are truly startling for a pitcher who entered with a middling 4-3 record. The ace threw just 77 pitches to retire the 21 batters he faced, with just three balls reaching the outfield, all of which were caught by Western left fielder Chris Torres. Only three batters reached a favorable 3-1 count in the game, and all three times those batters struck out.

Memphis basketball coach Josh Pastner has been called a number of things in his career, "visionary" and "basketball coaching prodigy" among them. What he hasn't been accused of in the past is running a dirty program.

CP3 AAU star Rodney Purvis

No one is accusing the Memphis wunderkind coach of sullying the team he has led for two seasons, but a year after Pastner committed the only recruiting violation in his coaching career -- a secondary infraction that came innocuously after Memphis' own compliance office cleared his attendance at a player's summer league game -- his closest relative may have committed a more direct violation that could affect the Tigers going forward.

On May 28, superstar recruit Rodney Purvis, the top shooting guard in the class of 2012 and the No. 7 overall recruit among rising seniors, announced he was adding Memphis to the list of schools he is considering for his college career.

The decision moved the Tigers into rarified air with the likes of Kentucky, North Carolina State, Duke and Louisville, and was made via Purvis' personal Twitter account. Naturally, there's nothing wrong with that, with Twitter use among top recruits rising on a daily basis.

A screenshot of Purvis' tweet about considering the Tigers can be seen directly below.

Rodney Purvis tweet

What may be more problematic is a tweet that followed just a day later, sent out by Courtney Pastner, the sister and confidant of Josh Pastner. On May 29, Courtney Pastner sent out the following tweet, in response to a tweet Purvis made about a particularly disappointing loss he suffered with his AAU team at the Nike Elite Youth Basketball League in Los Angeles:

Courtney Pastner tweet

As the tweet makes abundantly clear, there is no doubt that the younger Pastner is making public, direct contact with a recruit via social media, something which would be a clear violation if Pastner was doing so himself. The question is whether Courtney Pastner is "someone affiliated with the Memphis institution." Considering her relationship with her brother and her understandably open pro-Memphis bent (see her Twitter background above, for instance), Prep Rally is inclined to say that she should be tabbed as someone connected with the Tigers.

Here is the particular NCAA rule regarding social media that Courtney Pastner appears to be in violation of:

"NCAA rules do not allow comments about possible recruits on an institution's social media page or a page belonging to someone affiliated with the institution. In addition, these pages cannot feature photos of prospects and messages cannot be sent to recruits using these social media technologies other than through their e-mail function."

According to Rivals.com recruiting analyst Mike Farrell, coaches themselves can send direct messages to players' Twitter feeds, just as they can "inbox" a player on Facebook without penalty. In fact, they can do both of those things without limit. What they can't do is precisely what Courtney Pastner did: Make a public Twitter response to a player, which is viewable by everyone else on Twitter at large.

All this means is that the essence of whether Courtney Pastner's tweet can be considered a violation or not almost surely boils down to whether she can be considered affiliated with the University of Memphis. Professionally, the younger Pastner serves as the director of marketing for Vision Sports, a Houston-area company that runs an in-season basketball league and summer basketball camps. The organization holds an affiliation with the Houston Hoops, a program which Josh Pastner coached at age 16.

Signing a National Letter of Intent to play college football on the highest level is a big deal. From the hours spent practicing in the summer heat during two-a-days to the hours logged in the film room, being recruited and offered a chance to play for a D-I school is a big deal.

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Clearly, Mesquite Horn (Texas) High School's Kyle Boyd didn't take the decision lightly. After verbally committing to Iowa State, Boyd turned around in January and gave a verbal to Baylor, which is where he signed in February, all but sealing his decision to be in Waco, Texas, next fall for the start of his freshman year.

But along the way, Boyd had a change of heart that resulted in informing Baylor that he wouldn't be honoring his National Letter of Intent at this time, because he had instead decided to join a team that was closer to his heart: the Marines. As the Dallas Morning News reported, Boyd's decision to leave Baylor for the military was a difficult one; the Mesquite Horn linebacker has a history of family members serving our country.

"It is totally Kyle's decision, something that he's been thinking about for a long time," Horn coach Rodney Webb told the Dallas Morning News.

As Rivals' Baylor site, SicEmSports.com said, head coach Art Briles wished Boyd nothing but the best in his decision. "America is in good hands,'' Briles told SicEmSports. "It's hard to fight the USA. We can fight other universities for other players. He's a great young man.''

There are plenty of top notch high school baseball playoff series remaining across the country, yet none can match the glitzy name recognition of a game which will take place in Southern California on Tuesday evening. That's where Westlake Village (Calif.) Oaks Christian High will face off against Palm Desert (Calif.) High in the California Southern Section playoffs. Perhaps more notably, the game will feature the sons of two former MVPs, albeit of different sports: Trevor Gretzky, the sire of hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, and USC-signee Ryan Garvey, the offspring of "Mr. Clean" Steve Garvey, himself.

Ryan Garvey and Trevor Gretzky

While the celebrity fans in attendance may end up drawing more attention than the teams themselves, that's hardly fair to the younger Gretzky and Garvey, let alone the schools they represent. As noted by the Los Angeles Times, Palm Desert is the top seed in Southern California's Division 4, one of the most competitive regional classifications in the state, if not the nation.

Meanwhile, Oaks Christian starter Travis Radke will enter the playoff showdown with an 11-1 record and plenty of confidence that he can take care of a powerful Palm Desert lineup keyed on the slugging prowess of Ryan Garvey, who hit .381 with nine homers in the regular season alone, in the middle of the lineup.

That's not to mention Gretzky, whose bat has exploded in the latter stages of the 2011 season, a factor which was made incredibly apparent by his school-record 9 RBI game in late April. He hit for the cycle in that performance as well, just for good measure.

Naturally, both players are keen on leading their programs to the Div. 4 Southern Sectional title game, a landmark achievement for any squad which reached that point. Yet one of the two players with a famous surname might be able to take just a bit more from the experience of playing at Dodger Stadium than the other, considering the fact that Ryan Garvey's father spent his most notable years manning first base for 14 seasons.

"It would mean a lot for me and my Dad," Ryan Garvey told the Times.