Prep athletes get anti-steroid message

0 Comments | USA TODAY, August, 2008 | by A.J. Perez

Like hundreds of other high school coaches across the nation, William Hughes of Fairmont Heights High outside Washington, D.C., had his girls basketball players watch a short video on the ills of steroids, produced by a national prep organization. The message, he says, just wasn't absorbed.

"You need to be constantly drilling it into their heads," Hughes says. "It's not good enough to say something once.

"The most powerful tool we have is to be telling them steroids can mess up your career, your sex life and can make you depressed. You have to keep going at them."

That's exactly the tack of the NFL Atlas and Athena programs created by Linn Goldberg and Diane Elliot of the Oregon Health & Science University. Fairmont Heights High in Capitol Heights,...