First Place

WESTMINSTER -- St. John School recently presented the following students with awards and scholarships:* Brigid Boyce: The Father Duerr Scholarship to Mount de Sales High School for academic excellence.* Kerry O'Brien: Board of Trustees Scholarship to Maryvale Preparatory School for overall excellence; Academic Scholarship to the Seton-Keough High School; finalist for Marion Burk Knott four-year scholarship competition.* Matthew Smith: Loyola Scholar Athlete Scholarship.* Adam Coleman: Four-year Marion Burk Knott Academic Scholarship to St. John School.

It's semifinals week on “Dancing with the Stars,” and Jacoby Jones and Karina Smirnoff had two dances this week: Argentine Tango and Lindy Hop (chosen by Twitter users). First up was the Argentine Tango. Karina and Jacoby are losing their patience with each other in rehearsal this week. During rehearsal on the ballroom stage for camera blocking, Karina had a flip over Jacoby that ended with her landing on her jaw, and it sounds like she might have had a slight concussion. She goes to the hospital, but we don't follow her there.

Quote: "Everything about it is different. When you play for a team such as the one I'm with now, there's an added excitement coming to the park when you're a game out of first place. There's a jolt. I hadn't felt that in a while." - Curt Schillling, who returned to Philadelphia for the first time as a member of the Diamondbacks It's a fact: Owner Ted Turner and former star outfielder Dale Murphy were inducted into the Braves Hall of Fame. Who's hot: Mets closer Armando Benitez had not allowed an earned run in his past 20 appearances, spanning 21 innings.

When Goucher opened the season with a 13-9 victory over Birmingham-Southern, the initial thought was that the team that had captured two of the last three Landmark Conference tournaments might be able to extend that success under Kyle Hannan - who left for Division I Mercer - into 2013. The Gophers then dropped their next six contests before turning the tide with a 5-1 record over their last six games, and they are now tied with Scranton for first place in the conference with identical 4-0 marks.

"If you can't run with the big dogs, stay on the porch."That's the saying the Oakland Mills track and field team lives by. And when it comes to the Scorpions' boys team, few stay on that porch.Oakland Mills took the Class 2A boys title last year and yesterday, in the first day of competition in the state track and field championships at Western Maryland College, it jumped to a 20-point lead and appeared on the way to another state title.The competition in all four classes concludes today at Western Maryland.

If the President really wants to cut the budget, let him, starting with himself, his Cabinet, Congress and all their staff and advisors, and all the non-uniformed government employees. Cut their salaries and benefits by 10 percent. This would work for all the state governments as well. Dr. Arthur S. Jensen, Parkville

As a serious fan of the last place Red Sox, I have been appalled to see the size of the crowds at Orioles' games (16,000 or fewer during their recent series with the Sox). It's downright disrespectful to provide a good, young and first place team who are playing attractive baseball with so little local support. And so many of the sparse crowd are Red Sox fans that the Boston TV commentators actually referred to Camden Yards as "Fenway South. " It's not enough to make me root for the Orioles, but they really do deserve better.

BIRMINGHAM, England -- Todd Eldredge was a skating star at 18 and a has-been at 22.Now, he just might wind up a world champion at 23.Yesterday, Eldredge led a North American assault and grabbed hold of the World Championships with a 2-minute, 40-second technical program that was figure skating's version of a slam dunk.He jumped without fear. He swayed to the music from the film "Swing Kids." He claimed first place and took a giant leap toward tonight's free-skate final, worth two-thirds of the overall score.

The Westminster High School Owl Yearbook has received a first-place rating from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association for its 1992 yearbook.The 1991-1992 Owl Newspaper staff earned an international first-place award from Quill and Scroll, the international honor society for high-school journalists.

CLEVELAND - The Ravens are in first place in the AFC North. Go ahead, say it again. Let it roll off your lips like butter. The Ravens are in first place in the AFC North. Most of us thought we wouldn't hear that again for another two or three years, but that day is already here. It may only be four games into the 2002 season, but who cares? No one - absolutely no one - thought the Ravens would be in first place at this point in the season. Is the AFC North a sorry division? Absolutely.

Halfway through its Colonial Athletic Association schedule, Towson is 3-0 in the league and tied with No. 12 Penn State for first place in the conference. As euphoric as the team's rebound from an 0-3 start may seem, coach Shawn Nadelen said the players aren't giving into the temptation of assuming that they have locked up a berth in the four-team CAA tournament. “Being 3-0 definitely helps our chances, but I think the CAA is still wide open,” he said Monday evening. “There are a lot of games left and we're only halfway through our conference play.

The Blast completed its 2012-13 regular season with a fundamentally sound stamp of approval Saturday night against the two-time defending Major Indoor Soccer League champion Milwaukee Wave. In a showdown for first place, the Blast defended more closely, scored the bigger goals and blanked the Wave in the fourth quarter to come away with a 10-6 win in front of an announced 6,386 at 1st Mariner Arena . The Blast finishes with a 21-5 record and moves one game in front of the Wave, which falls to 18-4 with four games still to play before the regular season concludes next Sunday.

The Blast has the ideal primer for the upcoming Major Indoor Soccer League playoffs as the team closes out its regular season at 1st Mariner Arena on Saturday - a game against the two-time defending league champion Milwaukee Wave. The rivalry is far and away the best and most intense in the MISL, with all the other franchises too new to have developed any on the same level. And this game - set for 7:35 p.m. - has plenty on the line with the teams tied for first place in the league.

Rep. Donna Edwards, a Prince George's County Democrat, is again ranked among the most liberal members of the House of Representatives, according to an annual review of roll call votes by National Journal. Edwards tied for first place in the rankings with 13 other Democrats, including Bobby Rush of Illinois and Pete Stark of California. Baltimore Rep. Elijah E. Cummings was tied for 20th place in the liberal rankings with House Democratic Caucus chairman Xavier Becerra of California.

The Blast rallied from a 6-0 first-quarter deficit to earn a 14-12 overtime win against the host Syracuse Silver Knights on Friday night. Tony Donatelli scored the game-winner, his second goal of the night, 1:28 into the extra period to lift the Blast (13-4) into a first-place tie with the Milwaukee Wave. The Blast's Stephen DeRoux scored 2:17 into the final quarter, tying the game at 12. The teams will play again Sunday in Syracuse at 1:30 p.m. BLAST 14, SILVER KNIGHTS 12, OT Blast 2 6 2 2 2 - 14 Syracuse 6 2 4 0 0 - 12 FIRST QUARTER: 1. Syracuse, Neto (Slavisa Ubiparapovic)

Towson brought a four-game winning streak into its showdown for first place in the Colonial Athletic Association on Saturday against Northeastern. Then it sprinted to a 12-point lead. One important defensive change, though, put a stop to the Tigers' quick start in a hurry. Northeastern switched to a zone in the middle of the first half, a move that stumped Towson for the rest of a 70-59 loss before 1,814 at the Towson Center. "Sometimes when you get up, you have to make sure you handle prosperity the right way, and we probably didn't do it well enough today," Towson coach Pat Skerry said.

There are two major differences between the John Carroll boys lacrosse teams of several years ago, and the current one: the scoring margins are a lot different and the Patriots are in first place in the Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association B Conference.In earlier times, John Carroll was in the high-powered A Conference, and took its lumps by some lopsided margins."Actually, I'm disappointed in our scores," said coach Boo Smith of his 6-3 team. "I was looking for a greater gap instead of winning by one or two goals, but all the teams in the conference have great defenses."

NEW YORK -- It couldn't have happened at a better moment for the legend of the Mount.Jim Phelan of Mount St. Mary's became the eighth coach in collegiate basketball history to win 700 games last night, and his team simultaneously took over first place in the Northeast Conference with a 69-64 victory at Wagner.The milestone came before a mostly hostile crowd on the road in a first-place showdown. Phelan's kind of circumstances."I'm really happy it's over with," Phelan, 63, said after a post-game drenching from his players.

The last time Towson rode a four-game winning streak in men's basketball, this year's team was in grade school. Bill Clinton was president, Michael Phelps was a medal-less Olympian and iPods didn't exist. "Not since 2000? That's crazy," said Marcus Damas, Towson's 6-foot-7 forward and a reason the Tigers are on a four-game roll. "We didn't know that until our media people started throwing out statistics. " Towson (8-8) goes for its fifth straight against Northeastern (8-7) at noon Saturday in the Towson Center.

Mercifully, the recent vogue for making a statement with which the speaker does not really agree and canceling it by saying "Not" appears to have crested and subsided. Not particularly witty in the first place, it quickly became monotonous through parroting. Surely no one mourns its passing.* Today, by chance, I discovered that it was not all that original. From the opening of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe story "Immune to Murder," published in 1955: "'A fine way to serve your country,' I told him. 'Not.'" No doubt research would turn up even earlier examples of this feeble device.