SPECIAL SECTION  A giant billboard of a young, injured baseball player tells the story of youth sports in America today. “Sometimes,” the sign reads from above New York City’s Times Square, “the game they love doesn’t love them back.”

That message is the handiwork of the national STOP (Sports Trauma and Overuse Prevention) campaign, an unprecedented alliance of orthopedic surgeons, pediatric specialists, sports medicine experts, physical therapists, trainers and professional athletes. They’re issuing a wake-up call to America’s parents, coaches and medical professionals. Sports injuries, STOP says, are an epidemic — a national crisis.

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COOKING  Mid-afternoon tummies rumble. Three hours after lunch, it’s time to stoke the metabolic fire. But enter the snack zone with caution. For it is here that many of the most alluring but nutritionally empty food choices await. Candy bars, chips and sweet drinks can derail all the day’s previous conscientious efforts.

Knowing my weaknesses, I plan ahead. My favorites are a zipper bag with veggies, half a peanut butter sandwich on whole wheat or a crisp Fuji apple, complete with a paring knife and a napkin. Read More>>

PARENTING  Debbie Hieber doesn’t go far without her best friend, Mary Lou Bonanzino. The stylish, 50-something girlfriends serve on nonprofit boards and drink coffee and wine together, depending on the time of day. They have more than once been shushed as they gossiped and laughed loudly in an otherwise quiet café.

Hieber especially needs her friend when she talks about her oldest daughter’s death, as she is doing today in a rather loud coffee shop.

Alyson, she begins to explain, died in September 2009. After struggling with bulimia all through high school and the start of college, her depleted 22-year-old body gave out. Read More>>

GUEST COLUMN  Today, the day I’m writing this piece, the Centers for Disease Control has reported that one in 88 children are diagnosed on the autism spectrum; among boys, one in 54 are affected. When our son was diagnosed some 15 years ago, there was a one-in-10,000 chance to win the autism lottery. Now, one child is diagnosed on the spectrum every 20 seconds.

Is it just that more children are affected with the disorder? Or are more cases being detected? Good questions, but not ones I’m going to attempt to answer here. Read More>>

NEWS  There’s a stretch of road on Highway 200, as it nears the Idaho-Montana line in rural North Idaho, where the biggest traffic hazard is tourists parked on the side of the shoulder snapping pictures.

It’s there that the narrow ribbon of asphalt climbs from the muddy flats of the Pack River Delta and winds its way up onto the toes of the Cabinet Mountains. From that vantage point, the huge southern sweep of Lake Pend Oreille can be seen, and the view can be just as distracting as the idling roadside motorists. Read More>>

FROM THE EDITOR  As I've been learning about the problems with kids’ sports for this issue’s Healthy Kids section, the one thing I heard over and over from parents was the sense that it’s kind of a hopeless situation — they talk of remarkable displays of poor sportsmanship by kids and adults, of poor coaching that made a whole season a waste of time, of a lack of confi dence that rec leagues are “enough” for their kids. They complain that “moving up” to elite leagues brings crazy travel schedules and the trauma of try-outs and cuts. It’s hardly surprising that studies indicate that most kids opt out of sports altogether by the time they’re 13. Most parents don’t seem to have any idea where to start to make things better. Read More>>

NEWS  A health research pot porri.  A new diet to help those with problems swallowing from WSU, looking into an average 18-year life expectancy gap in just four miles and new light on just how the brain and sleep work together. Read More>>

NEWS  In her early 40s, Kerry Anne McGinn was no stranger to breast lumps, pain and even surgery. She’d been through a biopsy that found no cancer but stressed her out just the same. One doctor even called her a “cyst farm.”

Yet every time doctors told her the painful changes she was experiencing weren’t breast cancer, McGinn felt just as bewildered as relieved. Read More>>

SPECIAL SECTION  John Abraham Lodwick has been living and breathing basketball for nine years — five in Pullman (including one as a red-shirt) and four in high school in Bend, Ore., before that. He’s lived what every kid dribbling away the hours in the driveway dreams about — a chance to play under the bright lights of the NCAA.

Lodwick was kind of the consummate Coug — scrapping for playing time, earning 23 minutes a game in both his junior and senior years. He even landed on the PAC-12’s all-academic team this year. Read More>>

SPECIAL SECTION  On a crisp October day in bucolic Maple Valley, Wash., Zach Lystedt took the fi eld with his middle school teammates like they would for any other game. But this wasn’t just any other football game for Lystedt — or for the wider world of sports.

Lystedt, then 13 years old, suffered a concussion that went undetected; he returned to the action and played at full tilt for the entire second half. Just after the game, Lystedt lost consciousness and was rushed to the hospital. He ultimately needed two brain surgeries just to stay alive.

That was 2006, and as Lystedt’s story got out — all the way up to the Washington State Legislature and even the National Football League — it shook the way America thinks about concussions. Read More>>