South Carolina baseball coach Ray Tanner, who has compiled a 413-175 record since coming to USC in 1997, has been awarded an honorary life membership to the Carolina Alumni Association.

Tanner will be recognized at the alumni association’s reunion and awards gala on Oct. 21 at the Columbia Convention Center as part of that week’s Homecoming celebration. He also will also be acknowledged at halftime of the South Carolina-Vanderbilt football game the following day.

Ray Tanner survivied another first day of classes on Thursday. The 47-year-old baseball coach gets the same sinking feeling in his stomach every August when South Carolina professors open their classroom doors for a new academic year.

There have been times when Tanner went home feeling sick after the first day of class. This time, Tanner won out in his annual campaign to get high school kids to attend college. Justin Smoak and Reese Havens, two talented players from the Charleston area, turned their backs on professional baseball and the millions of dollars that was waved under their noses by attending their first classes at USC on Thursday.

Ray Tanner said that as late as Thursday morning he was concerned star recruits Justin Smoak and Reese Havens would not be members of USC’s team for the 2006 season.

But Smoak and Havens attended their 8 a.m. classes, making them ineligible to sign with the pro teams that drafted them in June.

The Oakland Athletics’ farm system is full of “live arms,” the slang term for hard-throwing pitchers, but it also has at least one dead leg.

That would be Landon Powell’s surgically reconstructed left leg, the knee of which now is supported by a ligament extracted from a donor.

He's been up for about an hour, but shortstop Steven Tolleson is already killing time.

It's 10:30 a.m., and Tolleson has just returned from the local hospital -- where, through his minor league team, he lifts weights four times a week in keeping with the routine developed while at South Carolina.

The 2002 Dorman graduate sits in the upstairs den with his laptop, surfing the Web while his host family packs boxes for its upcoming move down the road.

Kip Bouknight knew his road to the major leagues would not be paved with gold, but he didn’t brace for some of the potholes.

Still, the former USC ace said he believes the worst is behind him, and he is excited about playing in the Washington Nationals organization