Cool story at West Albany High School. Saturday night Mike and his father, Duane Barrett, will be inducted into that school’s Hall of Fame together.

For those of you who don’t know, Duane Barrett was a very successful high school basketball coach for many years. Mike went 11-2 as a pitcher his senior season and was a first-team all-state pick. He also played two seasons of basketball for his father.

Congrats to them both — a couple of class acts.

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The former local basketball guru was convicted of some very serious charges yesterday. He will likely be put away for a long time. I flinch every time I hear his name these days because he’s a guy with so much potential who came so far and who actually did help so many young basketball players in the Portland area.

But what he did to young girls in his care was reprehensible. And he did it over and over. It’s really impossible to understand or rationalize his particular degree of insanity.

I’ve been acquainted with him since he was a young prodigy playing basketball at Benson High School. He disappeared for a while before turning up as a senior at McLaren, leading that institution to a small-school state championship. So many times, I thought he had his path straightened out and was heading for a productive life.

He certainly always said he was.

I remember the first time I saw him as an adult, at the girls basketball state tournament in the Chiles Center. He was well dressed and excited. He handed me a business card with his company name, “Triple Threat,” on it and explained how he was making money helping kids out with private lessons. At the time, it was an interesting concept that hadn’t caught on to the extent it has nowdays.

But Avery was smart enough to be among the first to recognize how much money wealthy — or even not-so-wealthy — parents were willing to spend to help their children get better in sports. And over the years, Avery made an awful lot of money doing just that.

Lest anyone think that Avery worked only with girls, that’s incorrect. At one time, he had a thriving business with boys and girls that featured travel teams, individual instruction, clinics and his personal appearances at big-time college camps during the summer.

And I can tell you that there are few local players who made it into the NBA over the last several years who didn’t, at one time, work out with Avery and proclaim him a big help in their development. I remember once an NBA head coach telling me he thought Avery was one of the best developmental coaches anywhere.

But he eventually so totally self-destructed that he became a living symbol of why parents need to investigate the people working closely with their children. I hate that it’s come to that, by the way. There are so many great people out there working with kids, trying earnestly to help them with their sports and their lives — and we’ve reached the point where all of them now operate under a cloud of doubt and suspicion because of the actions of people such as Howard Avery.

But that’s the world we live in. And please, if you’ve learned anything at all from watching Howard Avery’s sad life play out on a public stage, make sure you understand the importance of knowing the adults who are mentoring your children. Take nothing for granted. Don’t totally trust your instincts — the charm of Avery hid a dark side that turned out to be cunning and successful.

In the end, I’m afraid Avery’s biggest contribution to our local basketball culture will be only as a chilling warning sign.

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You can do that at the Nike Global Challenge this weekend at Liberty High School. I was out there all day yesterday and probably will spend a lot of time there today and tomorrow.

It features three USA teams full of decorated high school stars (two of them lost yesterday, by the way) against teams from Serbia, Asia, Brazil, Canada and Senegal. It’s some of the best young players in the world and I have to tell you, at least yesterday, there weren’t a lot of fans there. You could pretty much sit anywhere you want.

It’s probably something, if you’re interested in basketball, you’re going to want to check out.

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The rule I’m talking about, that archaic old deal where you have to play four and a half or five innings, depending on who’s ahead, to make a baseball game official. And that if the game doesn’t go that long, everything is wiped away.

Wilson High was playing at Roseburg yesterday for a chance to play in the state championship game Saturday night. After batting in the fourth, the Trojans had a 5-1 lead with all-state (last season, as a junior) right-hander Stewart Fewel on the mound.

But a thunderstorm blew into Roseburg and caused postponement of the game. And so nothing counted. Wilson is left with its ace pitcher having already thrown 54 pitches Tuesday and probably unable to come back for Wednesday’s noon makeup game.

I understand postponing games, but in playoff situations, all postponements should be suspended games. The score stays the same and the game is resumed from its point of stoppage. But no, the old-fashioned rule — which nearly embarrassed major-league baseball by deciding the World Series last year — dictates a new start since the game didn’t make five innings.

That rule has always encouraged teams trailing in games early to stall, if a storm is on the way. And at the high school level it serves no real purpose. At the prep level, teams aren’t ready and able to wait all night to play after a rain storm, either. In pro ball, teams would have sat around for two or three hours, waited for the storm to end, then repaired the field and gone on with the game.

At the prep level, there is no will to do that. Umpires want to head home and there is often not much of a groundskeeping crew. Plus, if the trailing team in the game is the home team, you won’t usually find a lot of incentive to get that field playable in a hurry.

This isn’t the first time I’ve complained about this stupid rule. I believe the first time may have been decades ago after a similar prep playoff situation. But it’s time to change the rule.

Yes, I’m biased in this situation. My nephew is an all-league player at Wilson and that’s just one of several reasons I’m a Trojan baseball fan. But please, go ahead and try to make the argument that it’s a good idea to have teams play three or four innings of a playoff game and then arbitrarily wipe it all away for weather reasons.

In a lifetime of watching and writing about baseball, I’ve never heard a compelling argument for that side of the issue.

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John Hunt, the best baseball writer in the Northwest who doesn’t often write about baseball, has a nice story today in The Oregonian on the pending high school baseball playoffs and the stress that is often put on a kid’s arm trying to pitch his team to a state championship.

It’s good stuff. And it’s incredible to me that Little League beat the high schools to the idea of having rules of counting pitches, rather than innings, to save a kid’s arm. The good coaches count pitches at the high school level. Others don’t, but the relationship between injury and high pitch counts has been proven many times over.

I can remember watching a 17-year-old kid throw 170 pitches over a nine-inning American Legion game and then being called in by his coach in the ninth inning to pitch with the bases loaded THE NEXT NIGHT. Funny how the next spring he didn’t have the same fastball, isn’t it? Of course that coach wasn’t even bothering to count pitches.

Coaches who do that stuff ought to be locked up. That’s child abuse.

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Someone asked me if I’d ever seen a pitcher throw a perfect game and I said that I had. Couldn’t quite remember when or where, but somewhere along the line I did. (I know, you’d think a guy would remember something like that but I’ve seen about a million games in my life).

What I had never seen was the same guy throw two of them in the span of two weeks, until last night. In fact, Wilson High School right-hander Stuart Fewel pitched BACK-TO-BACK perfect outings in league games. He’s faced 42 batters in PIL contests this season and retired them all, in order, striking out a total of 19 of them and, obviously, walking or hitting none.

It’s very difficult to throw a perfect game anywhere — but in high school, where even an error can mar such an effort, they’re exceedingly rare.

The PIL is down again this season and the opposition wasn’t top flight. But come on, folks, TWO perfect games? Fewel, who was a first-team all-state choice last season, is a 6-4, 200-pound right-hander with outstanding control, a crackling fastball and a very good curveball.

One scout watching him last Saturday in a non-league, five-inning shutout stint against Tigard was aghast that he was not being heavily recruited by the northwest’s Pac-10 schools. Well, sometimes the PIL kids don’t get a lot of attention.

Speaking of that, has there ever been a local kid headed off to play basketball at UCLA who has gotten less media attention than Grant’s Mike Moser? Yes, there was a story in The Oregonian about him this morning, but I swear, when you look back to the Kevin Loves and Richard Washingtons of the world, Moser has flown under the radar.

Good luck in the Nike Hoop Summit, Mike.

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There’s a great piece on Yahoo sports by Josh Peter and Dan Wetzel about slimy agents trying to recruit basketball players and it concerns Kevin Love and his family. Really good, on-the-record stuff.

Everyone is at fault here, including the NBA for its self-serving and ought-to-be illegal rule that kids need a year of college before they can go into professional basketball. But I go all the way back to college basketball coaches, when they decided many years ago that it would be easier for them to recruit high school players if they could watch them play in the summer. That’s when this whole thing started.

Immediately, recruiting control slipped out of the hands of responsible high-school coaches — who are now often completely cut out of the picture — and into the hands of unscrupulous, irresponsible and just about completely unregulated AAU “coaches.” That one thing, more than any other, has facilitated cheating, the brokering of players, payoffs and under-the-table dealings more than any other single thing, while perpetuating a culture that fosters illegal and immoral activity rather than basketball development.

At the same time, a very high percentage of those AAU “coaches” aren’t anywhere close to the coaching level of average high-school coaches — further stunting the development of the players who spend all that time freelancing their way through summer tournaments that, first and foremost, exploit the high school players rather than accelerate improvement of their level of skill.

It’s a stinky mess that has soured me on college basketball for several years now.

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One of the first stories I wrote as the prep-sports editor for the late, lamented Oregon Journal was about Howard Avery. He’d been a sensation at Benson High School but then kind of just disappeared for a couple of years.

He surfaced as a senior at McLaren (a place where you don’t want to go, you HAVE to go), where he led the team to a small-school state championship almost single-handedly. What landed him in McLaren I never knew, but that season was my first real brush with him.

Howard would bounce in and out of my life over the years and I was happy for him when I first learned he was making it as a personal coach for young basketball players. And I mean turning it into a thriving business. There is a lot of money in personal coaching these days, as parents look for any edge in helping their little darlings become better athletes than the kid next door.

I understand Howard, at one time, was making a lot of money, not only from parents, but from shady college coaches who would pay him for directing prep players their way by giving him big bucks to appear at their summer camps. (And you wonder why I’m not a huge college basketball fan).

The rumor was, college coaches would recruit Avery’s players and not even bother talking to their high-school coaches. They’d go straight to Howard because of  the influence he had over his young athletes. And then later throw a few thousand bucks his way for showing up and doing a short clinic at their summer camp. Cozy arrangement, huh?

The thing about Avery, he knows his stuff. I’ve had an NBA coach tell me he’s terrific working with guards. From the lowest levels possible all the way to the NBA, players still sing his praises as a developer of skills. But over time, the rumors also surfaced about what he was doing behind the scenes. He would later admit to sexual relations with underage girls he coached.

At this point, Howard’s pattern of behavior is clear and predictable. It’s time to put him away for a long time. But I swear, the hardest part about understanding any of this is trying to figure out how, these days, a parent could ever, EVER allow his or her daughter to be anyplace alone with Howard Avery. EVER.

There is NO excuse. You’re saying you’ve never heard of him and didn’t know about his past? Sorry, just ask around. And if you can’t find out anything, don’t turn your daughter over to him. If you have heard about him and still allowed him to coach your underage daughter, well, that’s pretty sick.

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Deadspin has another one of those team-manager-finally-gets-in-a-game-and-makes-a-couple-of-three-pointers stories, with great video. It’s heart-warming stuff. And really, as someone who watched four players on a freshman basketball team I was on go an entire season without playing a minute, my hat’s off to the coaches and teammates who make these sorts of things happen.

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Big deal.

Man, spare me. I just can’t get into all the hoopla over a bunch of high school kids deciding where they’re going to school. Four-star recruits, five-star recruits. . . by now hasn’t everyone figured out how ridiculous that stuff is? Folks, just wait for them to play, OK? Talking about how good they’ll be means nothing. Less than nothing.

A lot of times, kids get all those stars because of the schools who are recruiting them — rather than the other way around. Meanwhile, Oregon State keeps steaming along with two- and three-star recruits, whatever that means, knocking off some of the best teams in the country. Are the OSU coaches that good? Maybe. Or perhaps it’s just that the evaluators figure that if some kid decides he may want to go to Oregon State, he just couldn’t be a five-star recruit.

I used to goof around with Colin Cowherd, a recruiting nutball, about this, when he was working in Portland. I told him his fascination with recruiting reminded me of one of those kids I grew up with who used to go to his bedroom and play with army men all the time. To me, it’s a “get-a-life” issue of the highest order.

Could all you recruiting mavens just let these kids at least show up on campus with a high school diploma before you get all juiced up about them, please? For a lot of these kids, this is the best time of their football careers — with all the big-time coaches telling them how good they are, how much they’re going to play, how many games they’re going to win, how great they will look in a uniform, how comfortable they’ll be in the fancy locker room and, perhaps – what kind of car can be arranged for them to drive. 

And while the coaches stand up today and tell the media about all the future stars they just signed, I’ll be the guy in the back laughing — and wondering what that poor coach had to promise the kid to get his name on the dotted line.

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