Slippery Rock High School senior Jence Rhoads has gotten much attention this year as a result of her success on the basketball court.

But she's equally deserving of the attention she is getting on the basis of her selection by Gatorade and RISE magazine as Pennsylvania Girls Basketball Player of the Year.

Rhoads will join the other states' players of the year in being considered for Gatorade's National Player of the Year honor.

And, the honor, both on the state and national levels, is about more than athletic skill. The Gatorade/RISE magazine state winners are selected not only for their outstanding athletic performance, but also for meeting high academic achievement standards and demonstrating exemplary character on and off the court.

That makes her a multi-star in her school and in her community.

Rhoads is heading to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., on a full scholarship, and she has designs on a career in professional basketball.

However, in the meantime, all of Butler County can share in the pride surrounding her success and wish her well in the national competition of which she now is a part.

The Butler Fire Department and Butler County Community College's fire school availed themeselves of an excellent opportunity for honing firefighting and fire-investigation skills by organizing training exercises last month at the deteriorated Kaufman Drive Apartments.Don Crawford, the city firefighter who organized the training, was right that practice exercises using real fires are a better, more-effective training method than merely reading about them or looking at pictures.The Butler County Drug Task Force also deserves positive notice for having used the apartments in February for practice drug raids.Regarding the practice fires, eight city firefighters, including two who were in training, extinguished four blazes, setting the scene for the fire school students to begin their investigations.The fire scenes were littered with distractions to make it difficult for the students to determine the cause. But they were situations that the trainees might someday encounter investigating "real" blazes.The apartment buildings in question, which are along Zeigler Avenue, are to be razed to make way for single-family homes that the Butler County Housing Authority plans to build and sell. The authority plans to renovate most of the other buildings in the apartment complex, which the authority bought in 2005 from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for $10.Prior to the training exercises, the apartments stood vacant. To the credit of the training sessions' organizers, for at least awhile, those eyesores became a valuable commodity.These are the kinds of opportunities emergency responders and law enforcement officials always should be seeking.

The Blair County assistant public defender representing a man convicted of sexually and physically abusing four children said his client was disappointed with the length of his sentence — one of the longest penalties for child sexual assault in that county's history.Instead of being disappointed, Brian Lynn Corle, 41, of Altoona ought to be grateful that the judge in the case had the determination to keep him away from children for a long time. While behind bars, he won't have the opportunity to ruin or endanger other children's lives.Corle, who was sentenced to 46 years and 10 months to 177 years in state prison and was declared a sexually violent predator under the state's Megan's Law, will be almost 88 when his minimum sentence ends. He likely would be well into his 90s by the time he is eligible for parole.In July, Corle was convicted of 40 counts of sex-related offenses against children — offenses that occurred between 1991 and 2003."This sentence serves as some level of justice for the victims of these terrible crimes, and guarantees that this monster will serve the rest of his natural life in prison," said Assistant District Attorney Deanne Paul.Judges across the state should take note of this case and the message geared toward deterrence of future similar crimes that it conveys.