NBA all-time great David Robinson, sports broadcasting legend Pat Summerall, former college baseball coach Jerry Kindall & FCA President Les Steckel.

Are you tired of making excuses for why things are’nt the way you want?

Retracing the steps of Tre’ Kelley’s childhood is a sobering, sometimes harrowing, task.

To start, you must visit the areas of Washington, D.C., that aren’t in any travel brochures. You must go into the neighborhoods of the Northeast where vice is readily available — where the sounds of “Pop! Pop! Pop!” and the ensuing drone of police sirens, like banshees wailing in the night, are a familiar dirge. Only a short drive from the city’s majestic monuments and stately halls of legislature, it is worlds apart. No one goes sightseeing in this part of town.

In America, we believe that we can make everything better. In fact, we relentlessly pursue improvement. And this can often be a good thing! It can make us examine our hearts and actions and get right with God and others. It can bring new advances in medicine, travel, industry and the environment. It can even help us discover and understand God in new and deeper ways.

But many times our efforts to improve on God’s design give us a far inferior result.

Last December, STV asked Leah Rush, starting power forward of the nationally ranked University of Oklahoma women’s basketball team, to give readers a peek into her daily routine by logging a game-day journal.

Rush agreed and kept a dairy on Dec. 20, the day of the Sooners’ homecourt showdown with Ohio State, which was then a match-up between the third- and eighth-ranked teams in the country. To that point, the Sooners were undefeated on the season, but the Buckeyes stunned OU that night with a 74-67 upset. Certainly this journal looks different than Rush expected, but that’s life — a day in the life of a college athlete.

Long after the last confetti streamer had fallen to the floor and the echoes of the crowd’s deafening roar had stopped ringing in his ears, Lee Humphrey felt an odd sense of emptiness.

It didn’t happen right away, mind you. After all, April 3, 2006, was the greatest night of his basketball existence. That night, at the RCA Dome in Indianapolis, Humphrey and his University of Florida teammates polished off UCLA with ease in the NCAA championship, 73-57. Humphrey himself had enjoyed a great game and a monster tournament, setting records and winning awards along the way.

With more than 500 new energy drinks launched worldwide this year, every parent and student in America needs to do their homework and be aware of what they are drinking. For instance, did you know that an 8-ounce Red Bull contains the caffeine equivalent of a cup of coffee (almost 2.5 times the amount in Coke)? Many of these drinks also pack in a ton of sugar and other “natural” ingredients, many of which are additional stimulants. As the popularity of energy drinks grows, it is important to have the information you need to make the best-possible decisions concerning your body.

The faint of heart need not apply.

It takes grit to play at Rice University’s Reckling Park on game day in front of 3,000 fans. It takes nerve to battle under the shadow of a preseason No. 1 ranking. Expectations overwhelm, and stomach knots tangle themselves inside even the most tested of athletes. Why? Because players know that a single performance can make or break an entire season.

But really, that’s all hogwash ... and Rice juniors Bobby Bramhall, Joe Savery and Brian Friday know it.

In 2004, Hoosiers was voted the greatest sports movie of all time. Somewhere, Luke Ridnour was cheering.

Maybe it was because he had grown up longing for the chance to be like Jimmy Chitwood. Maybe it was because he’d lived a Hickory-like experience growing up in smalltown Blaine, Wash. Either way, Ridnour agreed with the critics.

Solomon knew the importance of taking care of the heart. It is not only the most important muscle in the body for physical life, but also for spiritual life. Have you ever considered that your behavior is really a reflection of your heart? We are encouraged to guard our hearts because our attitudes, our thoughts, our emotions, our words and our actions all flow from the condition of the heart. Anger, jealousy, pride, conflict — all of these reveal the state of your heart.

When STV caught up with Craig Kanada, he was shopping for shampoo at Target near his home in The Woodlands, Texas, accompanied by his wife, Brooke, and their three sons.

Nobody asked for his autograph. It is likely that nobody recognized him, even though at that time — five weeks into the PGA Tour season — he was outplaying Phil Mickelson, Geoff Ogilvy, Stuart Appleby, John Daly, Stewart Cink and many of the big names who had been padding their multi million-dollar portfolios while Kanada was piling up over 100,000 miles on a Chrysler minivan with malfunctioning locks.

He can still feel it when it storms. The occasional tingling in the right side of his face whenever the thunder rolls through Atlanta. That’s where the 95 mph fastball smashed into his cheekbone as he was squaring around to bunt in what should have been his final at-bat for the Class-A Myrtle Beach Pelicans.

Jeff Francoeur won’t forget that day.