UCLA spring football energy is proving contagious

• May 1, 2023

LOS ANGELES — Throughout spring football practices, UCLA’s defensive players have boasted about their ability to play with energy. They’ve had catchphrases like, “The more tired we get, the more ‘lit’ we get,” and they practice with bravado during team periods.

The mood is infectious among the defense, but it benefits the offense, too.

“They’re gonna challenge you every day, but also it’s going to be competitive and we came here to strive to get better,” receiver Kam Brown said. “You really can’t take a break for the defense we already know they’re going to come with that energy every day, so we’ve got to come right back with it.”

Monday marked the start of the final week of spring practices. Players came out in helmets and shoulder pads and practice ended a half hour earlier than usual as recovery becomes the focus for the final days of spring.

Practice was just long enough to show the offense’s compete level against the defense. Quarterback Dante Moore, who is a contender for a starting job, hit Braden Pegan with roughly a 40-yard pass during a 7-on-7 drill.

“We were a big running team last year,” Pegan said. “We did throw the ball a lot, but I think this year we’re going to be a big-throwing, deep-threat kind of team. So I think I’m really excited about that.”

Receiver Logan Loya also made a diving catch on a pass from Ethan Garbers in an 11-on-11 live period during Monday morning’s practice and Jeremiah McClure hauled in a 20-yard pass from Collin Schlee.

The Bruins lost their two top receivers of last season to graduation — Jake Bobo led with 817 yards and seven touchdowns and Kazmeir Allen was next with 403 yards and two touchdowns.

Their departure leaves room for experienced players like Brown, who ranked third on the team last season with 362 receiving yards in his redshirt-junior campaign. Transfers J.Michael Sturdivant (Cal) and Kyle Ford (USC) will battle for playing time as well as developing talent like Pegan, who is entering his sophomore season after getting into four games as a freshman.

The depth that’s building in the receiver room gives players almost as much energy as going against the Bruins defense does.

“I’m excited for it,” Brown said. “The more playmakers you can have on the field, that makes everybody’s job easier. It’ll make my job easier, their job easier, everybody and to work collectively as a unit and get everybody on the same page is something that every football player loves.”

Receivers value their position coach

Jerry Neuheisel is in his third season as the wide receivers coach, and players are reaping benefits from working with him.

Neuheisel is one of the youngest people on the coaching staff as a 2016 graduate of UCLA, where he was a backup quarterback and even earned the Charles Pike Memorial Award for Outstanding Scout Team Player his freshman year.

“He tells us what the quarterback sees,” Brown said, “because a lot of times, we may see it from our point of view, but coming from the guy who throws the ball out there and what he’s looking for, he gives us great pointers all the time.”

Last season, UCLA’s offense threw for a total of 3,463 yards and 29 touchdowns and averaged over 500 yards of total offense for the first time.

Back on the field with the receivers this spring, Neuheisel looks and sounds like a quarterback when he coaches, throwing tight spirals and speaking with a firm and quick cadence.

“He’ll throw deep balls and he’ll drop it in,” Pegan said with a laugh.

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​ Orange County Register 

Kings’ playoff exit hurt more because team was so close

• May 1, 2023

EL SEGUNDO — As the NHL’s first round crashed to a close with a Game 7 in New Jersey on Monday, the Kings were left to lick their wounds from a fierce battle with the Edmonton Oilers, who eliminated the black and silver in six games on Saturday.

While it’s a familiar feeling – they were eliminated by Edmonton in seven games during last year’s opening round – the Kings spoke of novel coalescence and a bright future at Sunday’s exit interviews, while still healing from a series that featured a pair of overtime games and two one-goal games.

“In the group, this year, the camaraderie in the room was amazing. Every guy would do anything for each other, and you’d feel that every day in practice and every day in games,” center Blake Lizotte said. “When you have a team that’s like that, that has a special bond away from the rink, these losses sting quite a bit more when you’d give the shirt off your back for everyone in the room.”

Lizottte has been a career King, but even newly acquired winger and top point-per-game scorer Kevin Fiala felt the love, despite being disappointed with the Kings’ finish.

“It felt like home, quickly. I’d been in Nashville and Minnesota longer than here, and I feel like I’ve been here the longest,” Fiala said.

Here is a quick glance at the pluses and minuses of what was, by points total, the second-best regular-season in the 55-year history of the franchise.

Special Teams

Plus: The power-play

Minus: The penalty kill

Not only did the Kings make a historic about-face on the power play, which General Manager Rob Blake attributed to a combination of improved personnel and competition between units, they carried their success into the postseason, connecting on one third of their opportunities.

Over a full season, that would have been the best mark in NHL history, edging out this year’s Oilers. Edmonton set the record during the campaign and then exploded for a 57.1% mark in the postseason, which once again exposed a Kings penalty kill that struggled through the bulk of the season.

“Power play was a difference, a huge turning point for us this year, we gained a lot of momentum and we won a lot of games like that, too,” center Phillip Danault said. “We needed to be better on the kill, that was obvious.”

Offense

Plus: Production

Minus: Timely scoring

Where two years ago the Kings could barely muster one scoring line, flanking Kopitar with an aging Dustin Brown and utility man Alex Iafallo, last year they cobbled together a pace-generating second line and this year they often featured their leading scorer and a 20-plus-goal-scorer, Gabe Vilardi, on their third line. The results were tangible as the Kings finally reified the vision of Coach Todd McLellan for a high-tempo, high-chance, high-possession and, now, high-scoring system, all while playing a stingy 1-3-1 trap that flummoxed many attacks.

Yet in the playoffs, the Kings scored their two overtime winners following Edmonton penalties and, in one case, because of an alleged missed high stick as well. After four hermetically sealed affairs to begin the series, Edmonton came up with a decisive win in Game 5 and a late tiebreaker in Game 6 that sealed the Kings’ fate. While the Kings had dominated five-on-five play and mostly been burned by two of the three Edmonton 100-point scorers this season as well as its power play, Game 6 saw Edmonton accumulate four even-strength goals, two of which came from their fourth line.

“We were flat-out a better team this year than last year. We were because of personnel, the players that we had available to us and we improved in a lot of areas. But, to my point, so was Edmonton,” said McLellan, who coached Edmonton for more than three seasons.

Defense

Plus: Depth

Minus: Decisions

The Kings’ went from lacking a serviceable NHL defense corps to burgeoning with options in short order, but they’ve still got pieces of their blue-line puzzle strewn about the dinner table. Sean Durzi played a significant and clear-cut role quarterbacking the second power-play unit and also showed growth as a penalty killer. But his five-on-five role saw him shift sides, change partners and ultimately drop to the third pairing once Vladislav Gavrikov was acquired from Columbus. Durzi appreciated the experience but seemed to hint at a desire for more consistency, much as Fiala did when asked about his linemates.

Though veteran Alex Edler seems like a long shot to return to the Kings and Sean Walker expressed doubts about his being a King next year, despite being under contract, that’s not the extent of their moving pieces on defense. They would like to re-sign Gavrikov, an unrestricted free agent to be, give Durzi a solid evaluation in his upcoming contract year and also integrate some prospects. Jordan Spence mostly bided his time in Ontario this year and prospect Brandt Clarke returned to the OHL to put up nearly two points a game against his peers. Blake said, in so many words, that he’d penciled Clarke into the Kings’ lineup. McLellan added that, much as they’d done with changing some of captain Anze Kopitar’s responsibilities to reduce fatigue, he was ruminating on how to ease some pressure off top defenseman Drew Doughty.

“We’ll have to look at managing him a little bit,” McLellan said. “That’s probably a fight we’ll have because he wants to play 26 minutes a night and he’s very capable of it, but we need to get (80-plus) games out of him.”

Goaltending

Plus: It made it through the season

Minus: Who knows what’s next?

In a puzzling move, former GM Dean Lombardi invested the first pick the Kings had in the 2011 draft into Christopher Gibson, when the organization had a budding Jonathan Quick and the tantalizing prospect Jonathan Bernier. Since that point, the Kings haven’t invested anything higher than a third-round pick into a goalie and their limited commitments have been even more fruitless than they have been sparing.

This season, they cycled through Cal Petersen, who was sent to the minors and fared worse than expected there; Quick, whose potential hall-of-fame tenure came to an abrupt and unceremonious end at the trade deadline; Pheonix Copley, who’d last seen regular NHL duty in 2019; and Joonas Korpisalo, the impending UFA who started all six playoff games.

Copley is signed for next season at a modest cap hit, while Petersen’s carries a whopping $5 million annual average value. On a day where both goalies drew a little attention and praise, there was also talk of re-signing Korpisalo, meaning any quotes might only add to the confusion in net.

Coaching, health and intangibles

Though leading postseason scorer and top goal-scorer Adrian Kempe said the series might have been different if the Kings were fully healthy (three important forwards missed at least one game), they lost significantly fewer man games to injury this season and had their full array of players available for Game 6.

McLellan will return for the fifth season of his five-year contract, and one could expect assistants Jim Hiller and Trent Yawney back. McLellan and Edmonton coach Jay Woodcroft, who remained the closest of friends, paused their relationship again during the series but resumed it immediately at the series’ conclusion. Woodcroft’s theatrics, including requesting a podium rather than a table for the postgame news conference and some braggadocious moments behind said podium, receded as he became highly complimentary of McLellan and his staff following Game 6. McLellan returned the favor Sunday but, in the NHL as in all sports, the players win championships. With Quick gone, Doughty and Kopitar are the last vestiges of the only two Stanley Cups in Kings lore, from 2012 and 2014, as other big-game performers like Kempe and Danault hope to add to the organization’s legacy.

“I’ve seen this group mature now,” Kopitar said. “I think this window, if we’re not quite in there yet, is approaching. We’re taking strides in the right direction, the group is getting tight and I’ve seen that before.”

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​ Orange County Register 

Swanson: Lakers’ Rob Pelinka defied critics and built a contender

• May 1, 2023

Rob Pelinka might make a pretty successful Realtor if he weren’t already a good basketball general manager.

Yes, you read that right.

What did Willy Shakespeare write? Worms turn, man.

O we of little faith: The seventh-seeded Lakers have just easily disposed of the second-seeded Memphis Grizzlies in their first-round Western Conference playoff series.

The Lakers became the second team since the play-in tournament was instituted in 2020 to advance in the playoffs, along with the eighth-seeded Miami Heat, who also just did it. And the second team in the NBA’s broader history to start 2-10 or worse and recover to win a postseason series, according to ESPN.

They’ve set up a monumental second-round showdown with the Golden State Warriors, seeded sixth and defending their fourth championship in eight years.

These Lakers, down-on-their-luck protagonists since winning title No. 17 in 2020, are looking again like viable contenders for the crown – a plot twist so contrived it would be panned mercilessly if this wasn’t sports, if it wasn’t the best reality show on TV.

To get here, Pelinka, the Lakers’ director of casting, spent months defying skeptics and eschewing experts. Just continually making assurances, and assuaging no one.

He didn’t ever blink, even with an avalanche of criticism – from you, from me, coming even from inside the house – gaining perilously on where he stood.

There was Pelinka’s proclamation at media day, when the Lakers introduced a head-scratcher of a roster that wasn’t fit to fix last season’s regular-season failure: “We will do everything we can, picks included, to make deals that give us a chance to help LeBron (James) get to the end.”

And then months later, picks still untouched, his rather bold assertion – “the calculus for the Lakers is to win a championship or not” – as he discussed potential moves while introducing Rui Hachimura.

That was on Jan. 24, when the Lakers were in 13th place and 22-26.

But Hachimura, you remember, was the first domino in a succession of deadline-period deals that would scuttle an unhappy Russell Westbrook and his $47 million salary, as well as a few other expendable guys.

That brought back guard D’Angelo Russell and brought aboard defensive wing Jarred Vanderbilt and shooting guard Malik Beasley, quality role players who immediately infused the Lakers’ roster with length and youth and some shooting – the necessary ingredients to pair with James, as everyone knows.

So the Lakers’ future, at least, looked not as bleak – especially because Pelinka pulled it all off without trading the Two Picks the public had been offering up on his behalf since the offseason.

He held onto the 2029 first-round pick, and not only that, arranged for the 2027 first-round pick he relinquished to be top-four protected. That is to say: It stays with the Lakers if they’re drafting in the top four – and, moreover, conveys to a second-round pick if the Lakers are, in fact, in the top four.

Good deals.

“Doing trades is a little bit like the L.A. house market in that you can’t buy houses that aren’t listed,” said Pelinka, a man of many metaphors. “Ultimately sellers will determine if they want to sell a house or not, and which buyers get them. But the last thing you want to do in the housing market is overpay, or spend all your effort and energy trying to buy a house that someone doesn’t want to sell.”

Location, location, location, but what about timing, the everything of it?

James is 38, and playing in his 20th NBA season. Anthony Davis is 30 and oft-injured.

And as of the Feb. 9 trade deadline, the Lakers were three games behind Portland for the 10th and final play-in spot. They’d essentially have just 26 games and scant practice time to incorporate five new players, also including center Mo Bamba.

So better next year. But still. A shame, no? To have squandered this season of the Lakers’ star pairing?

Not to Pelinka. The Lakers’ to-win-a-championship-or-not architect insisted the deals “set us up for hopefully a productive run now.”

Now?

Now.

Remember, in 2019, the summer when Kawhi Leonard spurned the Lakers in free agency, choosing the Clippers instead? How, instead of being able to put a three-star super-squad on the court, Pelinka cobbled together a team of role players long on length or shot-making or defensive skill to complement James and Davis?

Remember what we eventually watched go down on TV that season, in a bubble, far, far away?

Remember that championship, a pro’s title if ever there was, and how the Lakers lived happily, well, not quite ever after … because they hadn’t found their way past the first round again until now.

I don’t know basketball. pic.twitter.com/8YEACyyIgl

— Harrison Faigen (@hmfaigen) February 9, 2023

Don’t know that the Cleanup in Aisle 5 this season warrants a writeup in apology form, necessarily, not when the mess is the result of a shoddily constructed display.

But you do have to hand it to Pelinka – and to team owner Jeanie Buss, who kept the faith in him and even quietly extended his contract – for being a smart shopper, for resisting the pressure to pay more for players he believed would be available for a better price later.

For successfully evaluating the landscape, and then checking all the boxes, getting the Lakers into the playoffs, where now it’ll be up to James and Davis and an improved cast to bring it home.

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​ Orange County Register 

New pediatric guidelines aim to treat obesity without stigma. Critics say they’ll make bias worse

• May 1, 2023

Maya Lora, Angela Roberts | Baltimore Sun

From the time Alexandra Slick was little, she knew that when she went to the doctor’s office, at least one person was probably going to tell her that she needed to lose weight.

She remembers sitting in an examination room as a middle schooler, watching her mother cry as a nurse practitioner asked her if she wanted her daughter to die. At that point, while Slick’s weight was considered obese by the body mass index, she already had been dieting for about four years and practiced karate every week.

“It used to be that if I had a doctor’s appointment in the day, I wouldn’t eat or drink anything until I had gone to the doctor — whether or not that appointment was at 10 a.m. or if that appointment was at 3 p.m.,” she said. “I just wanted to be as small as I could going into the doctor’s office.”

When Slick, a 31-year-old Baltimore resident, heard about the American Academy of Pediatrics’ new guidelines for treating childhood and adolescent obesity, she shuddered.

The guidelines, released in January by the country’s leading pediatricians group, advise primary care doctors to offer families a variety of treatments early for childhood obesity. “Watchful waiting” to see if children with obesity developed into average weight adults — the group’s previous recommendation — would no longer cut it.

The guidelines became an immediate subject of controversy, triggering backlash from nutritionists, eating disorder clinicians and people like Slick, who know what it’s like to live in a larger body.

They worry a focus on weight loss will trigger or worsen disordered eating in children with larger bodies, exacerbate weight stigma in doctor’s offices and lead physicians to overlook the diets and exercise routines of children whose weights are — according to the body mass index — average or low.

Especially controversial was a guideline that doctors consider prescribing weight loss drugs to children as young as 12 and referring 13-year-olds to be evaluated for weight loss surgery.

The guidelines use the body mass index, or BMI, a measure calculated from a patient’s weight and height. While controversial, BMI remains widely used by physicians to determine whether a patients’ weight is healthy.

Supporters of the guidelines say surgical treatment options wouldn’t be offered in isolation. The recommendations also emphasize the need for ongoing lifestyle and behavioral treatments, such as proper nutrition and physical activity.

“This is nothing that pediatricians can or should force on families,” said Dr. Sarah Hampl, a lead author of the guidelines and a pediatrician in Kansas City, Missouri.

Research dating back decades has documented weight stigma among medical professionals. Primary care physicians may be less likely to show empathy, concern and understanding to patients whose bodies the doctors consider overweight or obese, while such patients have reported being mis-diagnosed and may even avoid going to a doctor.

The American Academy of Pediatrics’ guidelines explicitly recognize the role weight stigma historically has played in medical care.

At Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Weight Management Program, patients work with their doctors to create unique treatment plans, said Dr. Anton Dietzen, a pediatric physiatrist with the institute’s Fit and Healthy Clinic.

“Every one of these cases is so different,” Dietzen said. “There are so many complex biopsychosocial issues going on — a lot of multigenerational households, and parents working two jobs, and issues of food insecurity, and patients who are eating two of their three meals a day at school.”

But no matter the circumstance, Dietzen said, it’s important to offer early and intensive treatment for childhood obesity.

The condition is a chronic disease, and its effects pile up over time, he said. The longer a child’s weight is elevated, the more likely it is they’ll develop serious diseases like cardiovascular health problems and Type 2 diabetes, he said.

Colleen Schreyer, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who serves as the director of clinical research for the Johns Hopkins Eating Disorders program, has complicated feelings about the guidelines.

“I see the need for treatment of obesity,” Schreyer said. “I also think we need to be thoughtful about how we implement those treatment interventions to prevent the onset of disordered eating.”

Some researchers say people whose weights are considered obese by the BMI can still be healthy. But Schreyer said patients with a BMI above 30 are more likely to have conditions such as high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol levels, chronic pain and limited mobility.

Schreyer said bariatric surgery can alleviate some of those conditions. She said before adolescents undergo surgery at Johns Hopkins, they receive six months of a behavioral weight loss intervention and meet for six months with a psychologist to identify and treat mental health concerns such as eating disorders, depression and anxiety. Hopkins offers the surgery to adolescents as young as 16.

The guidelines recommend that doctors consider referring children to be evaluated for the surgery if their weight is 120% above the 95th percentile, according to the BMI. Schreyer said her typical adolescent patient weighs well above the 99th percentile for BMI — some around 400 pounds — and typically have other medical issues like high blood pressure and limited mobility.

Deborah Kauffmann is a nutrition counselor who practices a non-dieting approach to weight management and is the former director of nutrition services at The Center for Eating Disorders in Towson. She said the BMI is an inaccurate measure of health.

“Many people are born with a high number of fat cells and that doesn’t determine health,” Kauffmann said. “Even if the BMI did account for body composition, it would still be pretty meaningless and not be an indicator for your health in any way.”

Dietzen said BMI is a useful tool when it comes to screening patients for potential weight management intervention, but doesn’t capture the complete picture.

“Just like anything in medicine, you have to look at the individual and not the numbers,” he said.

Kauffmann strongly objected to the guidelines’ suggestion of considering weight loss surgery consultation for teenagers as young as 13. She said bariatric surgery comes with short and long-term complications, which she’s seen in patients she’s worked with after surgery who have digestive and nutritional issues.

Schreyer defended weight loss surgery as a long-term solution. One option involves removing up to 80% of a patient’s stomach, allowing them to feel full after eating significantly less food.

“We know that 95% of people who start a behavioral weight loss intervention will regain the majority of their weight,” Schreyer said. “Around 60-65% of patients who undergo bariatric surgery keep their weight off five to 10 years later.”

A bigger issue with the guidelines, Kauffman said, is that they treat obesity alone as an elevated health risk. Instead, Kauffman said, physicians need to pay attention to sudden, drastic weight loss or gain, which could be indicative of issues such as eating disorders or insulin resistance.

“To assume that a child isn’t healthy because of a higher weight is just wrong,” Kauffmann said. “There’s no way around it — scientifically and morally, it’s wrong.”

Jane Zeltser, who works at the Eating Recovery Center, has struggled with eating disorders herself. (Karl Merton Ferron/TNS/Baltimore Sun)

Jane Zeltser, the practice manager for the Eating Recovery Center’s east region, said weight loss surgery is like “butchering” children “just so they can fit a mold of looking a certain way.”

Still, Zeltser, 38, said that when she was a teenager struggling with an eating disorder, she would have jumped at the suggestion.

“I would have done anything and everything to make myself smaller,” Zeltser said.

At 4 years old, Zeltser immigrated with her family from what is now Kyiv, Ukraine. She said that while she couldn’t control her secondhand clothing or her accent, she could reject her hometown foods that set her apart from other students.

By the time she got to high school, that restriction morphed with a desire to occupy a smaller body, leading Zeltser to take weight loss pills. She experienced worrying symptoms: an elevated heart rate, insomnia, headaches and even hallucinations.

But because Zeltser never fell into the “underweight” category, help was hard to come by, especially from Zeltser’s pediatrician.

“He would say, ‘Well, you’re in the 75th percentile. So actually maybe you could stand to lose some weight,’” Zeltser said. “I was hospitalized because of the effects of these diet pills on my body.”

According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, fewer than 6% of people with eating disorders are medically diagnosed as underweight.

Hampl said the American Academy of Pediatrics is working with eating disorder organizations to develop better tools to help doctors check their patients for the warnings signs of disordered eating, regardless of their weight.

Research shows that kids who try to lose weight through fad diets are more likely to have an eating disorder, Hampl said. But kids who have a caring medical provider trying to help them “achieve a healthier weight” through a structured program are less likely to develop such disorders, she added.

“There’s really no benefit in trying to pit the eating disorders community against the weight management community. That’s really counterproductive,” Hampl said. “Both of these issues are highly stigmatized. They’re often interrelated.”

Schreyer said that, in her experience, obesity specialists are not primarily interested in making their patients skinnier.

But Zeltser said her pediatrician constantly told her to eat less.

“He fueled my eating disorder,” Zeltser said.

Zeltser said she was sick to her stomach when she read the pediatricians’ new guidelines.

“Children should be able to be children. And I feel like these guidelines are taking away from their childhood,” Zeltser said. “I didn’t even have a childhood because of my eating disorder.”

©2023 Baltimore Sun. Visit baltimoresun.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

​ Orange County Register 

CIF-SS baseball polls: Final 2023

• May 1, 2023

The final CIF-SS baseball polls of 2023, released Monday, May 1

CIF-SS BASEBALL POLLS

(Selected by the CIF-SS Baseball Committee)

DIVISION 1

1. Notre Dame/Sherman Oaks

2. Santa Margarita

3. Huntington Beach

4. JSerra

5. Cypress

6. Harvard-Westlake

7. La Mirada

8. Corona

9. San Dimas

10. Pacifica/Garden Grove

DIVISION 2

1. Aquinas

2. South Hills

3. Gahr

4. Mater Dei

5. Crespi

6. Vista Murrieta

7. West Ranch

8. Quartz Hill

9. Crescenta Valley

10. Tesoro

DIVISION 3

1. La Serna

2. Valencia

3. San Marcos

4. Long Beach Poly

5. Centennial/Corona

6. Summit

7. Riverside Poly

8. Aliso Niguel

9. Newbury Park

10 Highland

DIVISION 4

1. Crean Lutheran

2. Linfield Christian

3. Northwood

4. La Habra

5. Arrowhead Christian

6. Glendora

7. Santa Barbara

8. Elsinore

9. El Rancho

10. Brea Olinda

DIVISION 5

1. Bishop Montgomery

2. Shadow Hills

3. Peninsula

4. Apple Valley

5. Windward

6. Estancia

7. Savanna

8. Marshall

9. Montebello

10. St. Anthony

DIVISION 6

1. Bloomington

2. Campbell Hall

3. Norwalk

4. Mayfair

5. Castaic

6. Hesperia Christian

7. Xavier Prep

8. Costa Mesa

9. Riverside Prep

10. Lakeside

DIVISION 7

1. Ganesha

2. St. Genevieve

3. Banning

4. Brentwood

5. Leuzinger

6. Calvary Chapel/Downey

7. Coast Union

8. Fontana

9. Newbury Park Adventist

10. Artesia

​ Orange County Register 

Stagecoach 2023: Our 50 best photos from the country music festival

• May 1, 2023

The 15th annual Stagecoach Country Music Festival in Indio was certainly a memorable one.

It was the hottest installment of the festival weather wise that our crew can recall, with temperatures staying about about 103-105 throughout the three-day weekend on April 28-30. The sun showed no mercy and absolutely cooked the fans that came out for early sets by acts like Priscilla Block, Corey Kent, Lily Rose, Flamin’ Groovies, Nikki Lane, Drake Milligan, Luke Grimes, Sierra Ferrell and more.

It cooled off in time for the top-tier acts on the Mane Stage, Palomino and the Honky Tonk each evening including Luke Bryan, Jon Pardi, ZZ Top, Melissa Etheridge and Girl Talk on Friday night; Kane Brown, Old Dominion, Bryan Adams, Marty Stuart and his Fabulous Superlatives and Dillon Francis on Saturday; and Chris Stapleton, Brooks & Dunn, Tyler Childers, Turnpike Troubadours and Los Frequencies on Sunday.

There were also after-parties each evening following the Mane Stage headliners over at Late Night in Palomino.

On Friday, drag queen, TV personality and singer-songwriter Trixie Mattel entertained the masses. Saturday, rapper Nelly drew an enormous crowd over to his turn, which featured songs like “E.I,” “Shake Ya Tail Feather,” “Air Force Ones” and he brought out Friday performer Breland to sing on “Country Grammar.” Honky Tonk curator and original Stagecoach after-party artist Diplo officially closed out the show on Sunday with a classic rock, country and EDM-filled set that fans went wild for as they danced, sang and enjoyed every last moment of Stagecoach.

 More Stagecoach Country Music Festival news

Stagecoach 2023: How the TV series ‘Yellowstone’ took over the festival

Stagecoach 2023: See photos of performers and fans from Day 3

Stagecoach 2023: Chris Stapleton, Brooks & Dunn and Diplo wrap up the fest

Stagecoach 2023: 5 fun non-music activities to do at the festival 

Stagecoach 2023: Ready to party, yet stay sober? There’s a tent for that

Stagecoach 2023: See photos of performers and fans from Day 2

Stagecoach 2023: Kane Brown, Bryan Adams and Nelly close out Day 2

Stagecoach 2023: Guy Fieri, Jon Pardi toss barbecued turkey legs to hungry fans 

Stagecoach 2023: Trixie Mattel slays Late Night in Palomino performance 

Stagecoach 2023: See photos of performers and fans from Day 1

Stagecoach 2023: Luke Bryan keeps fans singing, Jon Pardi gets a surprise on stage during Day 1

Stagecoach 2023: Country music fans, performers brave the heat and cut loose during Day 1

​ Orange County Register 

The Vietnam War 50 years on: Two authors explore the conflict’s lasting effects

• May 1, 2023

Fifty years ago, the last American combat troops left Vietnam, although there’d be an American presence there until the fall of Saigon two years later. A half-century on, the war there may no longer be the defining catastrophe of American foreign policy in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the saga still intrigues and infuriates.

Two very different new books – “The Long Reckoning: A Story of War, Peace and Redemption in Vietnam” and “Getting Out of Saigon: How a 27-Year-Old American Banker Saved 113 Vietnamese Civilians” – look back to that era, offering insights into the mistakes that were made and the lessons that could be learned if we, as a nation, were inclined to study the past.

Related: Sign up for our free newsletter about books, authors, reading and more

“I’m not terribly optimistic,” says George Black, author of “The Long Reckoning.” “It’s hard to get Americans interested in history and in foreign countries in the best of times.”

Still, his book digs deep into the way the war was conducted, not just by the Americans but also by the North Vietnamese, as well as the efforts over the last 30 years to deal with the lingering aftereffects of America’s unexploded ordnances and Agent Orange. 

While Black’s book is heavily researched with a broad scope covering decades, “Getting Out of Saigon,” is a more intimate tale that reads like a thriller set in the fateful and chaotic two weeks in April 1975 when the last Americans finally fled. Ralph White was sent to Saigon by Chase to keep their branch open till the last possible moment. He focused instead on how to get the bank’s Vietnamese employees out of the country and to safety despite an utter lack of official help from the U.S. government – armed with a gun, bribe money and a pilot’s license, White recounts what it took to make his own airlift a success. 

Black and White had never met, but during a recent video interview, they discovered common ground: White’s brother-in-law, Ted Osius, was the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam during the Obama years and Black became friends with him during his research and writing. (“He was very important and pushed difficult issues,” Black says, persuading John McCain to get the Pentagon to help pay some of the costs dealing with the aftermath of Agent Orange.)

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. George’s book notes that there have been about 30,000 books on the French and American misadventures in Vietnam. What can your books add to the conversation?

White: When I started writing, a young woman asked me what I was writing about and I said the fall of Saigon and she said, “Oh, what’s that?” I decided I wanted to write a book that explained, “What’s that.”

We wouldn’t have the phrase “the fall of Saigon” in our vocabulary if it wasn’t for the insanity of the U.S. ambassador Graham Martin. He refused to admit that the war had been irretrievably lost well before 1975. Afterward, I would try to explain about the ambassador and people would roll their eyes and I thought I would set it out in print that he was detached from reality. 

Black: My book is rooted in a new approach to the war that challenges people to rethink what they know about it. 

For instance, I wrote about why so many of the worst impacts of the war are concentrated in a very, very small area about the size of Connecticut. There’s recent scholarship by academics who have gotten into the Vietnamese archives that recast the idea that most Americans have that this war was run by the great military genius, General [Võ Nguyên] Giáp and commanded by Ho Chi Minh.

That’s not true. The destruction of this area has to do with the two men who supplanted their influence, Le Duan, who was a Stalinist, and Nguyen Chi Thanh. They were very hard-line; Giáp and Ho Chi Minh thought their ideas about massive attacks were crazy and wouldn’t work and they didn’t. It caused incredible destruction. 

But the United States didn’t necessarily know that Le Duan was in charge or who we were fighting; General [William] Westmoreland’s memoir does not have one reference to him.

Q. How important was it for you to include the names of the people who were doing good, often by using unconventional means, into the history books? 

Black: That ability to think outside the box was important with everyone I wrote about. My main cluster of characters are not known to readers, and it was especially important to get in not just the Americans but the Vietnamese people – not just as names, but as people. The doctors and scientists, like Dr. [Ton‐That] Tung and those who took his work through the next generation of research about Agent Orange, were major, serious scientists who are brilliant and had first-hand experience in the valley where the spraying happened. Their work was written off as propaganda for 25 years and I think their reputation is important. 

White: It was one of the compelling reasons for writing the book. My primary success factor was luck, but second, were the foreign officers who were like saints and were running clandestine operations, especially Ken Moorefield and Shep Lowman, as well as others like Bob Lanigan, who commandeered barges and took thousands of Vietnamese down the Saigon River.

Q. Ralph, you were willing to break rules yourself to save your employees – you even considered stealing a plane to fly them out.

White: The more that the ambassador told me over and over that I couldn’t get them out and the deputy chief of mission told me they would prevent me from doing it, the more I just became absolutely resolved to get around them. It was not necessarily just about doing the right thing, it was about not being stopped by them. 

I had a pilot’s license. I could helm a vessel. I carried a gun. I had bribe money. But those out-of-the-box ideas did not come to fruition. What worked was sleuthing and stealth and willfulness. 

Q. What similarities and differences do you see between the Vietnam War and the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan?

White: We didn’t do a very good job in either case. But there are a lot of differences. Congress issued 130,000 visas for people to enter our country during the fall of Saigon but nothing like that happened during the fall of Kabul. We had large processing centers and massive city-sized refugee camps – I was in a few myself as a refugee – and they were well-organized. We did nothing like that for Afghanistan. 

Q. What do you think we owe the people and government of Vietnam at this point?

White: The war has been over for 50 years. We should treat them, individually and as a country, with respect and dignity. Our state department should treat them the way we treat every other country so they can succeed or fail on their own, not because of what we did to harm them. 

Black: That happened very much under Ted Osius’ ambassadorship. There was a blip in the Trump years but Biden’s attitude is very much what you’re talking about too and I’ve been told, he is planning to go to Vietnam in May, which I think is great.

The most important sentence in my book is when these American veterans show up in a village in Vietnam in the 1990s and say, “What do you need and how can we help?” Every person in my book took their lead from the Vietnamese, instead of saying, “Here’s the solution to your problem.” 

These days, the answer may not be what you’d expect. They want more trade and economic development and a close partnership because we have a common interest in keeping China out of the South China Sea and they worry about China dominating their culture. 

But they’d also love to get more help with more provinces affected by Agent Orange. The money involved in helping families who need it is a pittance. It’s what they call “decimal dust’ in Washington. A lot of families have aging parents with kids who were affected by Agent Orange from birth and have horrific 24-hour-a-day needs. The Vietnamese point out that this should not be a partisan issue anymore, and they’re right.

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Man who killed father on Laguna Niguel trail committed to mental-health hospital

• May 1, 2023

A 22-year-old man was committed indefinitely on Monday, May 1, to a state mental-health facility after he was found to have been insane when he killed his father on a Laguna Niguel trail the day after Thanksgiving in 2018.

Maximilian Gregory Ludwig was convicted March 21 of murder with a special-circumstances allegation of lying in wait before Orange County Superior Court Judge Patrick Donahue, who also found the defendant was insane when he killed Christopher Ludwig, 59.

Ludwig could have faced life in prison without the possibility of parole, but because he was found to have been insane he will be committed indefinitely and can petition for release when his sanity has been restored.

As has been the case throughout the legal proceedings, many relatives and friends attended the hearing to support Ludwig.

Four out of five psychiatric experts who analyzed the defendant found that he was insane at the time. Some of the experts said Ludwig was a paranoid schizophrenic who believed he had to kill his father because the victim was killing others, including relatives.

Ludwig’s delusions led him to believe his father was “evil” and that when he called authorities they would understand what he did was OK, some of the experts said.

After Ludwig had some treatment for schizophrenia, he was “quite disturbed” about what he did, psychologist Richard Lettieri said.

Another expert, psychologist Roberto Flores Deapodaca, was the lone dissenter who said Ludwig was sane at the time.

Ludwig killed his father on a trail near Highlands Avenue.

Senior Deputy District Attorney Jennifer Walker said Ludwig took his father out for a hike on the same trail the day before. Donahue noted that the defendant knocked the victim down and then attacked him with rocks until he was dead.

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