Sports Medicine

Ebonye White collapsed to the all-weather surface and needed attendants to lift both arms to get back to her feet. She was wet, cold and exhausted, but more than that, she was frustrated. White is only a 15-year-old sophomore at Simon Gratz High, but already she knows everything must click in perfect fashion for any quartet that hopes to win a Penn Relays title. For Gratz early last night at rainswept Franklin Field in the 4 x 400-meter championship - an event pushed back 90-odd minutes by two different stoppages caused by lightning - it flat-out didn't.

Jamillah Wade took a seat, smiled nervously and glanced down at the two typewritten, paper-clipped pages on a library table. "Do I have to read this whole thing?" she said, softly. For four years, Wade had been making a statement - as one of the best in America - with her running and jumping for the track team at Simon Gratz High. And yesterday, with still cameras clicking and TV lights burning, and with friends, family and school personnel beaming, it was time for Wade to make a statement concerning her college decision.

The regimen never gets tedious for Blake Morgan. One hundred, two hundred, five hundred, or, sometimes, a thousand times a day, Morgan will practice his outside shot. Then again, when you are chasing a local basketball icon, no amount of workout time seems too much. The hours of practice over the last decade have paid off handsomely for Morgan, Holy Spirit's 6-foot senior shooting guard who has one of the sweetest shots in South Jersey. This season, Morgan is on the verge of surpassing one of the most storied basketball players in South Jersey history.

The Health Network of Chester County Hospital in West Chester has promoted Richard Donze to corporate vice president for medical affairs. Because many services have moved beyond the acute-care institution's campus, the hospital formed the network about two years ago, according to spokeswoman Colleen Leyden. Its subsidiaries include the Occupational Health Center, Neighborhood Health Agencies, the Center for Physical Therapy and Sports Medicine, and the Center for Health and Fitness.

OK, your 10- or 12-year-old son or daughter sees Michael Jordan or Sheryl Swoopes work all these wonderful, breathtaking moves on a basketball court. Wow! Now they want to be just like Mike and Sheryl. So they join a team, maybe two teams, perhaps three, to build their skills and become a star. And they play in three, four, maybe five leagues. Not good, according to Philip Alburger, a pediatric orthopedic specialist at Temple University's Center for Sports Medicine. "Too many kids are playing too many games in too many leagues," he says.

Darryl Williams knew all along he wanted some career connected with sports. Two years ago, he found out which one. Williams broke his left foot playing basketball with buddies in his Mount Airy neighborhood and was treated by Dr. Eric Mitchell, an orthopedist who played hoops for St. Joseph's University into the early 1970s. "He had a lot of trophies in his office," Williams said. Mitchell, a senior vice president for North Philadelphia Health Systems, also had a wall filled with degrees and a desire to light kids' fires.

Trecia Smith will long remember her first trip to the Penn Relays, and not because she was awed and overwhelmed by the huge Franklin Field crowds and the big city after flying here from her native Jamaica. She was, well, freezing. "All three days were horrible," she said of that first trip, in 1992. "It was really cold. I had been out of Jamaica before, but never out in the cold. I wasn't used to that kind of climate. " Strangely enough, Smith chose Pittsburgh to continue her career in college.

Patrick Aaron never looked. Not once. Not on the field. Not in the ambulance. Not in the emergency room. He found out everything he needed to know, and some things he didn't, merely by looking at faces and listening to voices. All around him was fear, concern and more than a little amazement. "I didn't want to look," Aaron said yesterday, resting not-so-comfortably on a sofa in his Southwest Philadelphia home, his left leg stretched across a coffee table. "I heard a crunch, a grinding noise.

Haddonfield senior Bill Candee has added a new weapon to his arsenal of wrestling skills. Candee thought he had the talent to compete against the best wrestlers in the state for the last two years. Still, he thought something was missing. That something was the ability to forget yesterday and concentrate on the task at hand. After winning the Region 7 title at 140 pounds his sophomore year, Candee dropped a 2-1 decision to Paul VI's Luigi Micela in the 152-pound regional final last year.

Call it a head start. When Megan Gibson arrives at the University of Rhode Island in the fall to begin her freshman pre-med curriculum, she figures to have an advantage over most of her classmates. That's what happens when you're allowed to watch your doctor perform arthroscopic surgery on other patients, and pick his brain afterward to feed a childhood fascination that never subsided. "Megan is very mentally gifted," said Gale House, her basketball coach at Girls High.