BIG BAND, BIG BANG
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Jazz and swing traditions come alive with 17-piece orchestra.
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The Gazette DAMASCUS | CLARKSBURG
DAILY UPDATES ONLINE www.gazette.net
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
25 cents
Planners want big cuts to Pulte housing plan n
Board to review Ten Mile Creek staff report on Thursday BY
STAFF WRITER
BRANDON ENG Walt Whitman
JOEY SHAVATT Bowie
LEXI D’ORSANEO Bowie
LINDSEY JANOSKIE Paint Branch
NICOLE WARREN James H. Blake
In the search for a college athletic scholarship, parents have endless opportunities to spend money, including youth teams, camps run by college coaches, buying top equipment, and online recruiting sites that market athletes. The trend has led to children specializing in sports at earlier ages, which has led to more serious injuries, youth giving up free time to chase their athletic dreams, and in some cases burnout. Another trend is that many top athletes now are being forced to choose between their club and high school teams.
Elite athletes sacrifice to play prep sports Most college recruiting now takes place outside of high school competition n
BY JENNIFER BEEKMAN STAFF WRITER
Thomas S. Wootton High School tennis star Titas Bera went undefeated this spring, winning his third consecutive county singles championship and the state boys doubles title. Bera, a rising senior, hasn’t lost a singles match in three years of
See ELITE, Page A-8
$5B
Nationwide spending on youth sports each year.
$2B
Amount of athletic scholarships awarded by Division I and II schools each year.
Only 2 percent of youth athletes earn scholarships that average about $11,000 n
BY
VIRGINIA TERHUNE
Early start can lead to burnout
Online services change recruiting A-10
TRAVIS MEWHIRTER
C
STAFF WRITER
andy Thurman had a rough idea how much she was spending on her daughters’ athletic pursuits — between $11,000 to $14,000. She knew that a field hockey stick went for $150 to $400 and that letting her children play on the Futures team — field hockey’s version of the Amateur Athletic Union — would cost nearly $3,000. While it was happening, though, “I didn’t realize I was spending all that money on it,” said Thurman, the Montgomery Blair High School field hockey coach. She chuckles now, thinking about the expenses of youth sports — the lucrative industry it has become. Baltimore author Mark Hyman wrote a book on the topic, titled “The Most Expensive
30M
Children nationwide (18 to 5) who participate in youth sports each year.
3.5M
Children nationwide under 14 who receive medical treatment for a sports injury in a year.
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Doctors see more injuries
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See SCHOLARSHIPS, Page A-9
Students who receive either partial or full athletic scholarships.
See HOUSING, Page A-7
Planning board OKs Clarksburg outlet center n
Members don’t want to kill demand for town center BY SONNY GOLDREICH SPECIAL TO THE GAZETTE
Game in Town.” In it, he estimated that parents spend $5 billion a year on youth sports. He says that’s a low guess; it doesn’t include gas and other expenses parents pay just getting their children to practice. Thurman’s daughter, Taylor, could run up a bill of $5,000 to $7,000 a year just on field hockey. Just one event on her Futures team cost about $2,800. Add in swimming and track, and that’s another $3,000 to $4,000. That’s just one child, who competes at Oberlin College in Ohio, but is not on scholarship. “Few athletes get full rides,” Thurman said.
145K
Pulte Homes is saying a recommendation by county planners to cut its housing project from 1,000 to 215 units in Boyds to preserve the Ten Mile Creek watershed is a gross violation of property rights. “I’ve never seen a down-zoning like this in my 39 years in the county,” Gus Bauman, an attorney and former county Planning Board chairman representing Pulte, said on Monday. Bauman said Pulte has hired an environmental consultant to testify about its project at a Sept. 10 public hearing about proposed development in the final Phase 4 build-out of the Clarksburg area. “We tend to testify at the Planning Board and County Council and see what the government does with it,” said Bauman, noting that he has taken property rights cases all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Pulte bought most of the 538-acre site west of Interstate 270 and also bought Transfer Development Rights that enable land to the west of the site to remain as farmland in the Agricultural Reserve. “They’ve spent tens of millions in good faith reliance on the master plan, on the zoning and on all the TDRs,” Bauman said. Others argue, however, that the 1994 Clarksburg Master Plan clearly states that before approving Phase 4 developments, the county can stop and review the situation,
70%
Children who drop out of youth sports by age 13. Reasons cited are adults, coaches and parents.
When you call something a “premium outlet mall,” some people are going to have trouble resolving the inherent contradiction of the term. So it’s not surprising that it took the Montgomery County Planning Board almost four hours Thursday to figure out a way to finesse approval of a development plan amendment that would allow the construction of the proposed 434,000-square-foot Clarksburg Premium Outlets at Cabin Branch, where the County Council approved only 120,000 square feet of retail as part of a mixed-use complex in 2003. The basic issue was simply a matter of shifting already-approved space for offices to retail on the west side of I-270. Both were lumped together as nonresidential space under the original approval. But the discussion was prolonged by the evolving vision of Clarksburg, which will be home to 40,000 residents if
See OUTLET, Page A-7
SOURCES: MARK HYMAN, BALTIMORE-BASED AUTHOR OF ‘THE MOST EXPENSIVE GAME IN TOWN’; NCAA; CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION; SAFE KIDS (CHILDREN’S NATIONAL MEDICAL CENTER)
NEWS
DOWN ON THE FARM Montgomery County continues tour tradition as farms welcome visitors, show off their products and offer special entertainment.
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STEPPING HIS WAY TO THE TOP Bethesda man rises to among the best in the world at competitive stair climbing.
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