The Texas Rangers, in partnership with a steroid education foundation, yesterday launched a program aimed at discouraging Texas students from using performance-enhancing drugs, according to the Fort-Worth Star Telegram.
Over the coming months, former Rangers catcher Jim Sundberg and other members of the Major League Baseball organization will be making presentations about the pitfalls of steroid use at every junior high school and high school in the Arlington Independent School Distrct. According to the Rangers’ website, the first of these presentations took place at a local junior high school in January.
The program is a partnership between the Texas Rangers Baseball Foundation, a nonprofit launched in 1991 that has donated more than $11 million to the Dallas, Fort Worth, and Arlington areas, and the Taylor Hooton Foundation, which was created in 2004 in honor of Taylor Hooton, a student-athlete who took his own life while taking steroids.
“Youth today have a lot of peer pressure,” Rangers managing partner and CEO Chuck Greenberg said during a news conference to announce the partnership. “All three of my sons are involved in athletics. The kids have a good idea of who is doing what. When you see a peer using, it makes it important to counter with education so they don’t simply follow their lead.”
As I reported a few weeks ago, Texas is considering dropping its mandatory steroid-testing plan for student-athletes in public schools. Whatever happens with the steroid-testing program, it’s good to know that Texan students will still be receiving an anti-steroid message in schools.