Baker's Dish

I just got off the phone with former Mission High standout Jamaar Taylor. Taylor, who played two years with the New York Giants after his college career at Texas A&M, talked briefly about his coaching future and about the Giants’ Super Bowl victory.

The breaking news is that Taylor is nearing a deal to be the receivers coach at La Joya. That should be approved by the end of the week, he said. Dating back to college, Taylor always told me he wanted to be a coach one day. It appears this is the beginning of his career in that profession. And being the receivers coach at La Joya under Leonel Casas (known to favor the passing game), will be just the break Taylor has been looking for. Taylor also has a sports training service, which he’s had for the past year or so helping area athletes improve their conditioning.

As for the Giants: Taylor said he was happy they won the Super Bowl. He sounded sincere about it. He also said something that I thought was funny. Giants coach Tom Coughlin has been known to be a stickler for discipline. When I first asked Taylor about the Super Bowl, his response was “Maybe coach Coughlin will loosen up now.” I thought that was interesting. Anyhow, hope you enjoyed the Jamaar Taylor update.

Well, realignment is in the books for another two years. It’s my second one of these, and it seems like I’ve learned to appreciate the day more this year. Even though it was around 8 a.m. when I arrived, as the room began to fill up with coaches from across the Rio Grande Valley — and a few from outside — the electricity began to build.

I mean, how often can you find Tom Chavez, Dave Evans, Joe Solis, Tony Harris, Fred Sanchez (at your far left), Mario Pena, Jim Helms, Mel Rios and Tony Villarreal in the same room at the same time? And this place was crazy. It’s like the stockmarket for football coaches. It’s a guys place. It’s a gym, minus the sweat, weights and eye candy, as I mentioned in today’s column.

And, as for the actual realignment, it did nothing to make it interesting this year. But the key here, is that even though it lacked the fireworks when the magic box, as they called it, was opened at 9 a.m., you still have the feeling that this was the place to be on Friday.

Here’s some of the keys from Friday:
>> Mission High remains a 4A school, and is proud of it.
>> There’s one 3A Valley district. I’d like to personally thank the UIL. You guys in Austin have no clue how much easier you made my job of budgeting coverage next season.
>> Weslaco and Donna will not play. What? That’s right, Tony V. and Manny Moreno can’t lose their jobs because of losing to their archrival during the next two years.
>> Laredo, our South Texas neighbor, experienced a bit of shock. The UIL split their schools up, creating a 5A and 4A district and a lot more travel. The keyword out of Laredo was “shock.” Read this story by the Laredo Morning Times’ Dennis Silva, which says that the Laredo schools plan to appeal the realignment to the UIL.

Normally it’s our policy not to report on the various camps, mainly because there are just so many around here. So we try and limit stories to the camps when certain celebs come out — when there’s a story a little deeper than the fundamentals. Everything else we’ll just run in announcements on our Sunday recreation page.

One camp caught my attention this week. It’s the Elite Baseball Camp which will be held Saturday, Feb. 2, at the CWV Park in Mission behind Spikes Ford. It’s going to have the who’s who of the Valley’s recent baseball past as instructors. Former Sharyland pitcher Jaime Garcia, pictured at left, former McAllen Rowe star Jose Pablo Oyervidez, former Sharyland player Osiel Flores, former La Joya player Alex Guajardo and former Sharyland player Marco Garza will be the instructors at the camp, which will be held for $30 from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m.

For those that haven’t kept up with these guys, here’s a little refresher: Garcia is considered the top pitching prospect for the St. Louis Cardinals. He competed in Triple-A last season, but injured his elbow. Garcia is scheduled to report to the Cardinals’ big league camp next week. Oyervidez, pictured to your right, is one of the best kept secrets in the Valley, having graduated from McAllen Rowe, played one year of junior college ball in Laredo and then signed a free agent deal with the San Diego Padres in 2002. Oyervidez is set to return to Double-A with the San Antonio Missions and has been labeled by scouts as a player to watch in 2008. Flores and Garza each attended UTPA and were picked up by MLB teams. Flores is in the lower levels of the minors with the Cleveland Indians, with Garza now playing in the Mexican League with the Union Luguna organization. Guajardo is in the Mexican League, playing with the Tigres organization.

Now, to me, this sounds like a good deal. Because with this batch of instructors, you’re not getting some old guy telling you how to get to the top. You’re getting the Valley’s young talent — guys who lived right here on a few years ago — telling the up-and-coming talent how they can make it to the next level. And considering that’s something that we don’t have much of here in the Valley, this camp will be unique for baseball players.

For those of you that are interested, you can contact these numbers for more information: (956) 463-7114; (956) 890-6925; (956) 225-9514. And if you will notice by the area code on these numbers, these players haven’t forgotten where they came from.

If you have been following The Monitor this weekend, you saw this story where McAllen High girls soccer coach Pat Arney yanked his team off the field and into the school bus minutes into Saturday’s championship match of the Dog Pound Invitational. It is one of the more odd coaching stories I have come across since I’ve been here in the Valley (well, not counting the Dave Evans and Tom Chavez sagas with Donna ISD).

If you haven’t seen it, check out this video below of Arney’s incident.

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Now, Arney did profusely apologize for his actions in the article on Saturday. He was then suspended for Monday’s match, but the school district confirmed Tuesday in this article that Arney would return to the field in time for the Lady Bulldogs’ match Friday.

Now, as always, I’m going to offer my two cents, or three — or maybe even a dollar’s worth. I’ve met Arney face-to-face several times. I’ve done a story or two on his soccer teams at McHi. I have even fielded a 20-minute phone conversation one night on deadline where he verbally trashed our entire sports staff for not covering high school soccer more. And, believe me, he ripped our staff pretty good. But, with all that said, I think Arney is a good guy. I mean, he’s calling us for a reason. He wants his team covered. But this time he may have bitten off more coverage than he can chew.

What he did Saturday, it just wasn’t right. Because calls weren’t going his way, he pulled his team off the field. In this case, he was 100 percent wrong. What these kids should have been taught was despite the odds, despite how bad it gets, you never quit. That, my friends, is how you deal with everyday life. And everyone will find out one day that life has the tendency to throw you some wicked curveballs. What these kids need to know is that no matter how ugly it gets, you should never throw in the towell.

A fellow colleague asked me earlier in the office if I thought the one-game suspension is enough. To be honest, I don’t think it is — mainly for the reason mentioned above.

In my phone conversation that night with Arney, he asked me why we covered high school football so much more than high school soccer. He asked what the difference was. Well, I give you this. If a football coach had done what Arney did — had his team quit after a few too many yellow flags — I don’t think that football coach would have his job come Monday morning. That’s the difference between football and soccer in this state.

But, regardless, when you have a coach that takes his team of 15 or so 14- to 18-year-old athletes and tells them to quit, that’s wrong. I’m not saying Arney should be fired — because I really don’t think it’s necessary with his spotless track record — but something more should be done than just giving him a harmless one-game suspension.

As I predicted, the RGVsports.com redesign hit a snag. It was supposed to be unveiled Jan. 30, but Wednesday we received an e-mail that suggested otherwise. As mentioned before, the redesign of RGVsports.com is a massive undertaking. Apparently our internet department at Freedom Communications learned just how enormous it was when they began rebuilding the site late last week and early into this week.

The main issue is converting the new site with the backend of RGVsports.com, which is where we keep all the stats at. In the end, your front page of RGVsports.com will look like the front page of themonitor.com. Our sister papers, the Valley Morning Star and The Brownsville Herald, just made the transformation to the new look this week. When Freedom is done coverting all of its newspapers, it then will begin to tackle the varsity Web sites, which is the category that RGVsports.com is labeled. Early word has that transformation being completed by late spring or early summer.

I’ll keep you updated here. But like you guys, I can’t wait for the redesign. I think all our Valley Freedom sports staffs do a great job with RGVsports.com like it is, but I also realize that the new redesign promises to be a lot more user friendly to our visitors.

The breaking sports news of today can be found here and here. After about a year of speculating and planning, the UIL will begin drug testing in a matter of days. The final hang-up in the ongoing process was finding a vendor (a rich one now thanks to the two-year, $6 million program), which the UIL did with an announcement Tuesday. Now all Valley schools can expect to begin this testing within a matter of days. Of course, we’ll never know for sure. The UIL is keeping the start date top secret for obvious reasons.

Many Valley athletic directors are against the policy, saying participants in extracurricular activities should have to take part in the testing as well, not just athletes. Also, the cost of the program is a major concern, the Valley ADs say, and it doesn’t test for other recreational drugs such as marijuana, which ADs say has more widespread use in their high schools than steroids. Either way, drug testing in Texas high schools is now a reality, and it’s going to be interesting to see how it effects the Valley.

For those wanting the full background on the testing policy, check out this link. Also, be sure to check out rgvsports.com (later tonight) and the hard copy of The Monitor on Wednesday for local reaction to the new testing policy.

For fans of RGVsports.com, we soon should be getting a facelift. For those that don’t know, the Valley Freedom high school sports Web site is one of the highest traffic web pages for high school sports in Freedom Communications. In all honesty, it’s put up some rather staggering web views, especially during football season.

With that said, our internet department is hoping to give RGVsports.com more of a look like themonitor.com. We’re told this move will take effect around Jan. 30, although I’m a bit skeptical due to the enormity of the project. I’d say the end of January is more accurate, at this point, although I’ll make sure to keep you updated. It’s a pretty massive undertaking considering this transformation is the first of its kind for the Freedom Varsity sites (the high school web pages, which all have a uniform look throughout Freedom).

Later down the road, hopefully before next football season, we expect to have a new varsity platform as well, which will allow us to deliver online stats for our readers in a much more effective and time-friendly way (I’m sure our staff will love that). I’ll be sitting in on this redsign process to make sure your needs are met with this Web site. Which is where you come in at. If there’s anything you’d like to see (new or different) on the RGVsports.com Web site, let me know. Now’s your chance to speak out before we get knee deep in this redesign process.

As always, thanks for checking us out. As successful as RGVsports.com has been so far, I really think we’ve just seen a glimpse of how powerful this Web site can be. And that, without question, is 100 percent because of the loyal Valley high school sports fans.

For those who don’t know, the biennial UIL realignment will be taking place Friday, Feb. 1 and for the Valley folks, that means an early morning at the Region One offices in Edinburg. That’s where every football coach from Roma to Port Isabel will be hanging out, along with a large contingent of Valley media members. We here at The Monitor expect to have at least three sports reporters on the scene, including live updates on themonitor.com and RGVsports.com.

The biennial realignment orginally was scheduled to be Wednesday, Feb. 6, but the UIL elected to move it to the Friday before because of national signing day on Feb. 6. This, in my opinion, is a smart move by the UIL considering high school coaches can’t be in two places at once.

For those who missed our November article on the subject, here’s a quick link to a story by Todd Mavreles which gives our readers a look at the unofficial numbers.