Sorrow, regret, and the need to learn from losses large and small

YOU FRIENDS WHO call and e-mail your disgust with athletes gone wild, especially local ones, might want to give your blood pressure a break today. Maybe skip right over to "Opus" or to the grocery ads to check out the week's 2-for-1s.

Reason is, I need to discuss for a bit what a bad few weeks it's been for players from what the kids call "the 757," and what it means. At best, you could call what's come along somewhat less inspiring than a "One Shining Moment" montage. At worst, you can pretty much call it disastrous.

We've seen Indian River High's Branden Ore, a two-year starter at running back at Virginia Tech, become an ex-Hokie after a lengthy string of poor judgments and behaviors. (For his cynical part, coach Frank Beamer just happened to put up with Ore until Tech appeared to have the parts to replace him, but that's another rant.)

We've seen Granby's Chris Bell, a Penn State receiver, arrested for allegedly threatening a teammate with a knife. Bell was temporarily jailed, has been banned from campus and was thrown off the team, from which he'd already been suspended for academic issues.

Oddly enough, also at Penn State is basketball player Stanley Pringle, who attended Landstown High. Pringle is facing charges from campus police of "open lewdness and disorderly conduct." Evidently, Pringle was discovered in the campus library last week allegedly doing something he ought not to have been doing.

That's a strange and suspicious proximity of dubious episodes, but hardly as sobering as this pair of incidents:

Salem High running back Kevin Whaley, a University of Minnesota recruit, was wounded in the leg by 2 a.m. gunfire outside a nightclub in Virginia Beach.

And former Lake Taylor football player Derrius Walton was shot and killed outside a nightclub in Arizona, where he attended junior college and played football.

The goal here isn't to swirl these all together as symptomatic of a certain vulnerability. It's not to apply a broad brush to this area or its rising athletes and to declare everyone and everything broken. That would be foolish and wrong, of course.

However, the goal should be to hold each case up - whether it affects bystanders, active participants in their own downfall, or something in-between - as a caution light and a serious message about opportunity, ego and entitlement.

Our parents, teachers, coaches and mentors can't have too many teaching tools. Situations evolve and names change but trouble is a constant threat that requires constant vigilance.

Success also needs to be protected. Or else we leave open the window for what we've seen lately, a sad rash of compromised or wasted opportunities - some taken for granted, some just taken away.

Listen to part of what Tim Brewster, Minnesota's football coach, said recently about Whaley:

"You think about that situation, how you could have lost a kid. The high school coach told me that there's a situation in Tidewater and Virginia Beach where there is a lot of jealousy towards kids who are doing well and doing something good with their lives.... There's a lot of jealousy towards (Whaley). It was a directed act of violence."

The "situation" has just been difficult all around lately. With effort, there will be a way to grow some good out of the bad.

Tom Robinson, (757) 446-2518, tom.robinson@pilotonline.com