Will Graves: Singling out best of preps no easy chore

No matter what happens, no matter who is selected, somebody is going to be left off the list.

At the collegiate and professional levels, it doesn't hurt quite so much because the guys left off the all-star team can go home and cry in their million- dollar houses or whine while going to class for free thanks to their athletic scholarships.

But when it comes to high school, things gets more personal, and more difficult.

Next week, the sports staff at the Daily News will sit around a table and debate who the Collier County fall sports players of the year are in everything from football to golf to swimming.

It'll be a spirited debate. It's often hard to judge some sports that you only get to see a handful of times. So we make sure to ask around, getting various opinions to help in the decision-making process.

Yet our job is easy when you consider that we're only trying to pick out one athlete, and in the individual sports it can be relatively easy.

It's not hard to find the fastest runner, savviest golfer or strongest slugger.

With team sports, it's trickier.

There are 22 players on a football field at a given time, each one with a job to do on every single play. The same goes for volleyball, softball, soccer, etc.

We're so accustomed to watching the ball that we don't see the linemen with the pancake blocks or the shortstop expertly backing up the second baseman.

So we've always left the all- county team selections to the Collier County Coaches Association. It's their team.

They're the coaches, so they're the ones who know what's going on, having been in practice and on the field with their players for the better part of three months.

On Tuesday, we received the list of the Fall 2003 All-County teams as selected by the coaches.

The names are familiar, and in most case, the faces are too. The list will be published on Christmas Day.

Anybody who was anybody this fall was on the list in their respective sports.

Except St. John Neumann senior running back Eric Bratt.

Despite rushing for over 1,100 yards and helping the Class A Celtics to a solid 5-5 record, Bratt wasn't even an honorable mention on the All-County football team.

That's too bad. Sure, the 5-foot-7, 160-pound Bratt doesn't have the same talent, speed or skill of Naples' Jamelle Eugene or Barron Collier's Moises Plancher, both of whom were All-County selections at running back.

Yet that didn't make Bratt any less valuable to the Celtics, who would have been hard-pressed to go .500 without the tough kid with the spiky blonde hair and constantly churning legs.

First-teamer? Maybe not. But honorable mention? Absolutely.

"Honorable" comes from "honor" right? Bratt and the Celtics played with it all year.

And you didn't need to be a coach to see that.

(You can e-mail staff writer Will Graves at wrgraves@naplesnews.com )