Libertyville's Schurr joins ethical athletic discussion

It may be nerve-wrecking, but AJ Schurr is in for some good practice.

He'll be around all kinds of bigwigs when he goes off to West Point in the fall to play football and baseball. To prepare, he'll soon be rubbing shoulders and debating sports with some of the biggest names in the business.

Next week, Schurr, Libertyville's veteran middle infielder, will be a panelist for a panel discussion entitled “Athletics and Ethics: Can They Coexist?” His fellow panelists include Northwestern football coach Pat Fitzgerald and Northwestern baseball coach Paul Stevens, former Chicago Bull Dickey Simpkins, former Chicago Bear Jim Schwantz and Olympians Bob Berland (Judo) and Brian Hansen (speed skating).

Organized by Character Counts, a Glenview-based non-profit group that promotes positive character traits in youth, the panel will discuss how adults can help young athletes demonstrate good, ethical behavior during sports participation.

Schurr is the only high school athlete on the panel, which will assemble at Attea Middle School in Glenview from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. on April 28. The event is free and open to the public.

“This is a big honor for AJ,” said Libertyville baseball coach Jim Schurr, who also happens to be AJ's father. “It's funny because I just happened to meet the guy who organized this. We work out at the same gym and we just became friends.

“One day, I had AJ with me and he got to talking with AJ about sports and the fact that AJ was going to West Point and he asked if AJ would be on the panel. It's a great opportunity to discuss an important topic with some really big names in sports.”

Character Counts is hoping to draw a lot of young people to the event.

“They'd really like to reach out to kids, especially kids in junior high in high school,” Schurr said. “I think it should be really interesting for them.”

For more information about the panel discussion, call (847) 904-4477.

Woeful weather: Mother Nature is once again taking her frustrations out on baseball coaches, baseball players and every single outdoor spring athlete out there.

A plethora of extremely cold, rainy days has wreaked havoc with sports schedules in the north suburbs. Some local baseball teams, for example, have already missed seven to eight games because of rainouts … or freeze outs.

“This hasn't been fun … not at all,” Grayslake North coach Andy Strahan said. “We've been inside since last Friday. We're going stir crazy. And our field has so much standing water on it.

“You pretty much need a kayak to play in the outfield. It looks like the Chain-of-Lakes out there.”

Strahan isn't kidding.

Earlier in the week, he and his players were out working on the field but were fighting a losing battle. They filled bucket after bucket with water with no end in sight.

“I bet we filled 75 to 80 five-to-seven gallon buckets and it was still pretty wet out there,” Strahan said. “We normally have pretty good drainage, but we also normally don't have this much rain in April. Our field isn't getting a chance to dry up, so we're having real problems out there.”

Spaced out: Bad weather doesn't just wash out games, it also brings in practices. And when every outdoor team, as well as indoor teams such as volleyball, are fighting for limited gym space, no one ever goes home happy.

“Gym space is so tough at our school,” Antioch coach Paul Petty said. “We really get so little time.”

But what little time the Sequoits get, they make the most of it.

Petty has his team playing games inside. Simulated games, that is.

“We do our best to keep the guys in a competitive frame of mind, even though we're inside,” Petty said. “We'll go to our cage and whatever pitcher was supposed to pitch that day, we'll have him throw 50 or 60 pitches and we'll have him act like he's throwing a real game. We'll have our guys keep the book. We'll even act as if there are guys on base, so our pitcher has to work with that.

“We'll play a whole game in our minds.”

Pace race: Talk about bad timing.

This week is Antioch's bye week in the North Suburban Conference Prairie Division. So the Sequoits had only two nonconference games on their schedule for the entire week.

Both games got canceled because of weather.

That means no games for a seven-day stretch for a team that wanted anything but a layoff right now. The Sequoits are currently 8-3 and fresh off a split with Prairie Division heavyweight Vernon Hills.

“We've been playing pretty well so far,” Antioch coach Paul Petty said. “I've been talking to the kids a lot about pace, how we're on a really good pace compared with last year.”

In 2010, the Sequoits finished with a bang and wound up with 18 wins and a trip to the regional final. It was quite a feat, considering their start.

“We started off 4-10 last year, and it took us until May 5th to get 8 wins,” Petty said. “We had 8 wins almost two weeks ago.”

The biggest difference for the Sequoits this year is offense. Antioch has upped its numbers significantly in team batting average and team on-base percentage.

Brett Prather is hitting .424 right now and at one point earlier in the season went an impressive 8-for-10 at the plate. Joe Gregory, Alex Grimm and Paul DeJong have also been consistent at the plate.

“We've played some close games this year, but the difference is we're winning those games,” Petty said. “We've beaten some teams that we didn't beat last year because we're pulling games out at the end.”

Take notice: Somehow, Carmel pitcher Colin Quinn has found a way to stand out in the crowd.

The lefty is one of a whopping 14 pitchers Carmel coach Joe May kept on his roster. His rationale was that the pitchers who wouldn't get varsity innings this year could still practice with the team in preparation for next season.

He called those players “projected developmental players.”

Quinn was one of those players until he began developing into a player the Corsairs needed on the field.

“Colin isn't overpowering, but he gets his pitches over the plate and gets people out each time we let him pitch,” May said. “He also doesn't walk many guys either. He's given us everything we could have expected out of him and more.”

May is hoping Quinn isn't the only developmental pitcher who leapfrogs into the regular rotation. In fact, the Corsairs will probably need that to happen.

“I told our developmental pitchers at the beginning of the year that there may not be innings for them,” May said. “But with the weather and the way games could be stacking up for the rest of the season, where you could have games almost every night, we're probably going to need a deeper bullpen.”

Abandonment issues: Hitting in general hasn't been an issue for Grayslake North, where guys like Brandon Fern and Adam Gomski have been hitting the cover off the ball.

Fern, for example, boasts a .440 batting average.

But that number goes down, as it does for the rest of the Knights, when hitting is narrowed down to one specific situation: when runners are on base.

“We're still looking for guys to come up and get hits in big situations,” Grayslake North coach Andy Strahan said. “We've really struggled with that.”

In a doubleheader against Prairie Ridge last week, the Knights stranded 12 runners in the first game. In the second game, they left the bases loaded twice and left two runners on two other times.

“We have kids who are just struggling with their hitting altogether, and for them, it's a matter of working on everything,” Strahan said. “But we have other kids who are hitting well but just struggling in those spots.

“It's working on mindsets with them. I think we're just tightening up and putting too much pressure on ourselves. We've got to keep a sharp mental focus, but we've also got to play a lot more relaxed.”

Pitchers, not throwers: Although they differ in style, Libertyville pitchers Joey Eichmann and Dar Townsend are the same kind of pitcher in one very important way.

And it's not just the way either one of them can dominate a game for the Wildcats.

“They both have a lot of poise, it's really impressive,” Libertyville coach Jim Schurr said of Eichmann and Townsend, both of whom he considers to be ace material, and both of whom have 2 wins apiece so far this season. “You've got a lot of pitchers out there who are hard throwers but that's all they are. They just throw the ball. But Both Dar and Joey pitch the ball. They know the craft of pitching and how to set hitters up.

“I really like the way they are both such heady pitchers out on the mound.”

Stat of the week: Libertyville outfielder Nick Coutre had some interesting at-bats against Lake Zurich last week.

The junior No. 2 hitter had a home run in his first at-bat in the Wildcats' first game of a two-games series against Lake Zurich.

The next day, Coutre again smacked a dinger in his first at-bat against the Bears.