Metro Sports Report

Furnish 11 strokes back at Junior Championship

OLYMPIA FIELDS, Ill. - Megan Furnish shot a 7-over par 79 Monday in the first round of the U.S. Girls Junior Championship golf tournament.

Furnish, a senior-to-be at Cedar Rapids Jefferson, is tied for 91st, but is one stroke out of 68th place. Her round included two birdies, nine pars, six bogeys and a triple-bogey.

Furnish tees off at 12:20 p.m. in Tuesday's second round.

The top 64 after the second round advance to match play.

The Cedar Rapids Gazette also reported Monday that Furnish has accepted a scholarship offer from Missouri State.

Beyond The Final Season

Jim Van Scoyoc coached the legendary Norway High School baseball team to 12 state titles from 1972 to 1990 and was a key player in the bitter, unsuccessful battle to prevent the school from closing after the 1991 academic year – a story chronicled in the 2007 movie The Final Season.

But in the town that baseball made famous, he keeps a low profile. “I’m just Jim,” he says. “I’m not a people person at all. I enjoy just being in my garden or alone with my wife.”

Still, his love of the game and the kids runs deep and, 20 years later, he’s back on the field, coaching a Norway Pony League team that includes three of his grandsons. “It’s a humbling experience,” says the always-intense coach. “I’m enjoying it, but it’s been a difficult transition back to the youth level, which is where I started a long time ago with Peewee teams.”

He’s coaching fifth through eighth graders, he explains, “because nobody signed up to coach Pony League or Little League, and it seemed kind of strange to me that a town with Norway’s baseball history had no one to coach.”

Van Scoyoc’s mild frustration hints at a broader dismay with the state of the sport he played and coached for more than 50 years.

“It’s not very good,” he says of the future of Iowa high school baseball. “You might consider me an old-timer now and we always tell you how great it used to be.”

Woods promoted to New York-Penn League

It took Nate Woods only 20 games to earn his first promotion in the minor leagues.

Woods, 22, has been promoted to the Jamestown (N.Y.) Jammers in the New York-Penn League after spending his first month in pro baseball in the Rookie Gulf Coast League in Florida.

The New York-Penn League is a Short Season Class A League with 14 teams in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Massachusetts, Maryland, Vermont and Connecticut.

Woods hit .347 with two homers, 10 doubles, one triple and 14 RBIs for the Florida Marlins' team in the Gulf Coast League. He was informed Sunday night that he'd been promoted and headed to New York on Monday.

Woods starred at Xavier High School in Cedar Rapids (Class of 2007) and enjoyed a productive career at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., where he set school slugging records and helped the Bruins reach the NCAA Division I tournament for the first time in school history this year.

Protect your rotator cuff

The rotator cuff is the most important part of functional anatomy for high school athletes throwing a softball or baseball.

The prevailing theory for softball pitchers is that the windmill pitching motion puts less stress on the shoulder than the overhead throwing motion of baseball pitchers.

Yet recent research tells us that shoulder injuries are not only the most common injury to a high school baseball or softball player, but that these injuries may be on the rise in both baseball and softball. What gives?

The rotator cuff is a functional set of four small muscles (see diagrams). These muscles surround the shoulder joint. They function as a finely tuned mechanism to control position of the ball (humeral head bone) on the socket (glenoid portion of the shoulder blade) during throwing.

The myth in sports, especially softball and baseball, is that the rotator cuff needs to be “strong.” Research has clearly debunked that myth.

In actuality, it’s the timing/coordination of the four muscles, along with their ability to resist fatigue, that are the keys to their function.

Any reader can see on the diagrams that the rotator cuff muscles are small and thin, thus they are unable to provide power to the throwing motion.