Metro Sports Report

Heitland emerges as a two-sport standout

Trevor Heitland has been known around Kennedy High School the last two years as a tough, hard-nosed football player who gets the most out of his ability.

Now his fame is growing as a tough, hard-nosed basketball player as well.

Heitland, a 5-foot-11 senior, is leading the Kennedy basketball team in scoring, assists and steals, but that only hints at the contributions he's made as the emergency point guard for a winning club.

Role reversal for coaching O'Donnells

Around the girls, he calls him “Coach.”

As in, “Check with Coach about practice.”

“This is very definitely his program,” says Pat O’Donnell, the first-year assistant coach for his son Brian’s Marion girls basketball team.  “I’m just glad to help out in any way I can. Hopefully, some of my knowledge and experience can take a little of the load off of Brian.

“But he makes the decisions.”

For his part, the son is happy to have his dad beside him on the bench.

Utley switching to DMACC for baseball

D.J. Utley had his head in the classroom at Iowa State University this fall as a regular student, but his heart was on an imaginary baseball field somewhere.

He missed the game so much that he's decided to do something about it.

Utley has left Iowa State after one semester and has enrolled at Des Moines Area Community College in Boone for the winter semester so he can play baseball.

Utley, a slugging first baseman, hit a school-record 14 home runs, drove in 50 runs and hit .441 last season at Cedar Rapids Prairie before putting his bat away and moving to Ames.

He enjoyed Iowa State, where he planned to focus on becoming an engineer, but he couldn't get baseball out of his system.

"I guess I was thinking about it the whole time," he said Friday. "I knew I didn't want to regret it for the rest of my life, you know what I mean?"

Sweeney excited about bigger stage in Boston

The Boston Red Sox think Ryan Sweeney is a perfect fit for Fenway Park and tried several times in recent years to grab him.

They finally got their man Wednesday night.

"They said they'd been wanting to get me and excited to have me. So that's good," Sweeney said Thursday after a workout in Cedar Rapids.