I listened to a good portion of the SEC men's basketball coaches summer teleconference today. Can't say there was a ton of weighty stuff on there, but I turned around a story about Jeff Lebo's thoughts on the National Association of Basketball Coaches' request that coaches stop offering scholarships and accepting commitments from players before they complete their sophomore year of high school. It will be in Thursday's Ledger-Enquirer.

Here are a couple of notes from Lebo's 10 minutes or so:
* He's not sure Josh Dollard will be ready for the start of the season. Dollard missed all of last season with an undisclosed medical condition and now he's dealing with a back injury he sustained early in the summer.
"We hope (he'll be ready at the start of the year)," Lebo said. "Each day that goes by, he’s a little bit closer, but nothing new on his status right now."
* He said they're "still working" on getting some of their '08 signees into school, but "we don’t anticipate having any problems of working on some guys getting in school."
* Lebo addressed the new distance in the men's game from the 3-point line, 20 feet, 9 inches -- a full foot back from where it was last year. He likes the change, but doesn't think it will have much effect on attempts or percentages.
"I don’t think the move back is gonna make a huge deal as to who shoots them for us," he said. "It may make a difference who shoots them for some other teams, but for our kids, I don’t think it’s gonna make a big difference."
* Coincidentally, Auburn's getting a transfer from Indiana named Brandon McGee. Auburnsports.com did a story on it here. Tom Crean kicked McGee off the Hoosiers' team in May for academic and team guideline reasons. Here's the wire story on that.

Also, I did a phone interview today with former Auburn swimmer Margaret Hoelzer, the new world record holder in the women's 200-meter backstroke. I wasn't aware of this, but she and 2004 200 back gold medalist Kirsty Coventry are former roommates at Auburn, who started there together as freshmen. Basically today they're the two best women's swimmers in the world in the event, as the world record Hoelzer broke earlier this month at the Olympic Trials belonged to Coventry. I'm no mathematician, but I'd have to think the odds of two college roommates going on to be the two top competitors in the world in something would be astronomical.

I'll be doing a story on the two of them later, but I asked Margaret about her former Auburn teammate Eric Shanteau as well. I'm sure most of you saw the story about how he was diagnosed with testicular cancer just before the Olympic Trials, but still qualified for the Olympics and will swim in Beijing before beginning treatment. It's pretty amazing. Anyway, here's what she had to say about him:

"We swam together for five years and he’s an amazing guy. He’s one of the hardest workers that I’ve ever known. I’ve always been inspired by watching him train and just watching what a tough guy he is. Obviously finding out that he had cancer was devastating. You don’t want that to happen to anybody, especially such a nice person. But that being said, he is one of the toughest people I know and I wouldn’t expect him to handle the situation any differently. If there is anybody that can compete with something like that, if there is anyone that can handle it, he’s such a tough guy to begin with that I’m completely in awe of him. He’s a great guy."