R-C Sports Notebook: Back when I was playing ...

I remember turning around to see my buddy Waldo laying along the baseline of the tennis courts at Hug High School.

Waldo, a tall, scrawny kid with glasses who drew his nickname from the same Waldo of the famous books (And no, I'm not Waldo), hadn't ended up in this position by diving to make a shot or by twisting awkwardly on his ankle.

No, the kid was just rolling around on the court shouting, "I'm tired, can we go home?"

And that, in a nut shell, typifies exactly how far the Douglas High tennis program has come in the last 15 years or so.

Waldo came to mind last week as the Douglas High girls' squad came within just a handful of points (and I mean points, not games or even sets) of winning its first-ever regional title.

For a period of time there, Tiger tennis was a bit of a joke. And I don't say that bitterly, because it was the teams from my era -- teams that I played on -- I speak of.

I mean, how could we be taken seriously?

Three of our alumni from that basic period (Myself, R-C education reporter Scott Nueffer and RGJ Wolf Pack hoops reporter Chris Murray) willingly chose journalism as a profession -- so that tells you a little about our overall intelligence.

Our max conditioning was a daily jog from the tennis courts at Lampe to the Willow Creek duck pond (a total distance of like five feet), which actually caused one of our coaches to walk out on practice because he caught us climbing trees instead.

I read an encyclopedia entry the night before I tried out for the team to learn the basic rules of the game.

Our best players, boys or girls, three years running were foreign exchange students from Germany.

A teammate once caused an extended delay in a set because he'd thrown his racquet so high in the air out of frustration that it got stuck in a tree branch high above the courts. Come to think of it, that racquet was still there when we graduated.

While other teams would diligently pace through warm-ups, we'd set up a makeshift firing squad in front of the brick wall at Lampe and see who could fend off the most tennis balls at point-blank range.

Before facing off against Carson, a buddy of mine pulled me aside and said that if any Senators tied to start anything (you know, because tennis is such a confrontational sport) that he was prepared -- as he withdrew a razor blade from his pocket, which he later accidentally cut himself with.

The school yearbook praised other teams for their successes on the field. Our team was praised for ... well, joking around.

If you would have told any one of us then that Douglas High School would one day produce the top boys' and girls' seeds in the same season, much less that the girls' team would be among the elite overall programs in the region, we might have thought you'd been napping along the baseline too.

What I'm saying is that this resurgence of tennis in the area didn't happen overnight. And it certainly was no small or effortless task. It's been gradual, even methodic.

Right around the same time I was playing, there was a little kid named Gabe Grobben working with local coach Bill Welch before and after our "practices" who easily could have beaten any one of us.

Gabe, who I later covered during my first two years at The R-C, was one of several strong individuals (Josh Sorich, the Oglesby sisters, Keegan Chipp and Robert Shawhan come to mind, although there were several others) who helped raise the regional profile of the program.

Thanks to the private coaching efforts of people like Welch and JoJo Townsell, Douglas started getting more polished players coming through the program (Amelia Ritger, the TenBroeck siblings and Cesarina Ceglia are excellent present-day examples).

In recent years, Mike McLaughlin on the boys' side and Roger Rusmisel on the girls' side started establishing some continuity in coaching for a program that traditionally saw a near annual turnover (While McLaughlin had to step back from his duties due to his job, Rod Smith stepped in as a capable and willing coach; Also the girls' team started seeing some early success as a team after several conseutive years under the direction of Dee Gosselin).

Then, this year came along. A pair of Rusmisel's seniors -- Ceglia and Jamie Lundergreen -- approached him last winter about establishing an offseason program.

They said outright that they wanted to legitimize the sport at the school as a real team sport that you couldn't, for example (I don't know, just pulling one off the top of my head here) just read an encyclopedia the night before tryouts and attempt to play the next day.

They wanted commitment. They wanted more work. They wanted to be better. They didn't want other schools to look at Douglas on the schedule and see an easy win anymore.

And that's exactly what they got.

While it may be too soon for this year's girls' team to truly realize what they accomplished, one needs only to look at the past to see how far they've come.

This was Reno they played on Friday -- A team that has all but walked straight to the podium to claim its annual team championship through most of the sport's history in the area. A team that for the most part has grown up together at the tennis club. A team that up until Oct. 1 had never lost to Douglas.

And, last week, Reno was a team that had its hands absolutely full in the regional title match, right down to the last three sets of the day.

Suffice it to say, no one wearing orange and black was ready to go home then.

I'm planning to be at these games this week, so check online for updates (Cover It Live is the tool we use to post automatic updates during games and also allows for comments and questions from fans during the game, so be sure to check out our Web site if you can't make it to the games I will be posting from.):

Friday: Douglas vs. Manogue football, 7 p.m. (Cover It Live)

Saturday: Northern 4A Regional tennis championships, afternoon (Cover It Live)

- Last week, I noted the Douglas' football team's propensity for slow starts this season (at that point, they'd been outscored 50-17 in the first quarter). While last week's effort against Wooster certainly helped, I noticed that I'd failed to take something else into consideration -- all of the Tigers' struggles early on in games have come on the road. In three home games this year, Douglas has outscored its opponents 29-0 in the first quarter.

- Ryen Ake's 53-yard touchdown run in the second quarter Friday night was Douglas' longest scoring play this season. It was also Ake's first varsity touchdown.

- With her nine wins in three team playoff matches last week, junior Amelia Ritger eclipsed the 100-win mark for her career at Douglas (She is 105-3 in three seasons). The two-time regional champion will never have a shot at the school's career mark, though, as it has been mathematically out of reach since before Ritger even set foot on the Douglas High tennis courts for the first time. Lisa Chacon posted 184 career wins in the mid '80s, when 4A schools played a round-robin format against every other school in region, as opposed to the current, shorter, High Desert and Sierra League seasons.

- Am I the only one who every week when ABC announces which game our region will be seeing, gets totally bummed out when it's the West Coast game?

Seriously, there are some really, really lame match-ups in the Pac-10. Come to think of it, outside of USC (and whoever I'm cheering for to beat them), Oregon some years, the top three in the Mountain West and Boise State, there aren't many Western teams that are even worth watching.

But I guess that's why this is the "Naps on the couch" section.

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Overall, not a great week for me, but not a bad week either. Let's just leave it at that.

Congratulations to Joe Burke, who picked a perfect 12 out of 14 games.

Here are my picks for week 6:

Bengals over Texans

Packers over Lions

Jaguards over Rams

Ravens over Vikings

Saints over Giants

Steelers over Browns

Panthers over Tampa Bay

Chiefs over Redskins

Eagles over Raiders

Seahawks over Cardinals

Patriots over Titans

Jets over Bills

Broncos over Chargers

Tiebreaker: Falcons 21, Bears 14

Regular Season Survivor: Green Bay

Last week: 9-5. Season: 52-24. Season Survivor: Still alive.

Celebrating Edd Roush, the only player ever ejected from a Major League Baseball game for sleeping in the outfield.

- The Boston Globe reported that a 7-year-old boy playing a game of backyard football was tackled by a deer in Ohio last week.

The boy said he encountered a buck after his football rolled into the woods while playing a game with friends. The buck ran at him and flipped him with its antlers.

While the boys suffered bruises and a gash, one of his buddies beat the deer with a stick to make it go away.

- I love the Red Sox, a lot, but I had to laugh when Boston second baseman Dustin Pedroia took a couple jabs at the Fenway Park field crew following the team's Game 3 loss to the Angels on Sunday.

Pedroia, according to the Portland Press Herald, was upset that a sure inning-ending double-play ball in the eighth inning took a bad hop, leaving him only with a throw to first to record a fielder's choice. The two runners left on base later came around to score

Boston, of course, ended up losing the game by one run.

Pedroia blamed the bad hop on the infield crew, saying Fenway's infield "stinks" and is "the worst in the game."

He also said, "My job is to take 1,000 groundballs a day. Other guys' job is to get the field perfect so we can play baseball."

Of course, taking those 1,000 ground balls a day on the worst infield in baseball, you'd think he might be used to the quirks of said infield, right?

So what was the problem again?

- Lost in the whole hubbub over wide receiver Michael Crabtree finally signing with the 49ers after a prolonged holdout to start his professional career was the fact that M.C. Hammer was sitting in on some of the final negotiations.

Seriously, I'm not kidding. He was reportedly there as a guest of Crabtree's agent Eugene Parker. Personally, I think Parker asked Hammer to bring that awesome gold sledge hammer from the Super Bowl Cash 4 Gold commercial along as a show of muscle during the meetings.