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Spring break and the choices that teens make Kevin Blaum In the arena

Sunday April 11, 2010 | 01:00 AM

TRADEGY STRUCK a week ago Friday in Panama City Beach, Fla. It was 6:25 p.m. when Matt James of Ohio fell to his death from a fifth-floor balcony of the Days Inn hotel on Front Beach Road.

Matt James was an accomplished high school athlete. He was the heralded 6-foot-7, 291-pound offensive tackle for the St. Xavier Bombers of Cincinnati. More than that, he was a USA Today first-team All-American and among the most highly recruited linemen in the country.

Head coach Brian Kelly, formerly of the University of Cincinnati, had him sold on the Bearcats. But when Kelly replaced Charlie Weis at Notre Dame, James chose to follow Kelly and signed with the Irish on Feb. 3.

Eight weeks later, he left for Florida and spring break. He was 17 years old.

The Associated Press reported, “Police say the offensive lineman was drunk and acting belligerent when he fell Friday night as he leaned over a fifth-floor railing to shake his finger at people in an adjoining room. He was in Panama City Beach with 40 fellow students from St. Xavier.” It was Good Friday.

James wasn’t the first American teenager to meet a tragic end during spring break and he won’t be the last. Nor was he the first this season to fall from a fifth-story hotel balcony in the panhandle region of Florida. Sadly, teenagers and alcohol often lead to innumerable life-altering decisions. These are choices with terrible consequences from which, so often, there is no return.

With proms, graduation and the end of another school year somewhat visible in the dim light at the end of the tunnel, the combination of booze, teens and parties will become more prevalent.

Mixing these volatile elements can create a typhoon so horrible in the lives of young adults that the cyclonic storms of the southern ocean would pale in comparison. Choices.

Six thousand miles south of the Panama City Beach Days Inn, at exactly 6:25 p.m. on Good Friday, Abigail Sunderland was rounding Cape Horn between Antarctica and the tip of South America. She was aboard her 40-foot sailboat, “Wild Eyes,” in the middle of the Southern Ocean, living her dream of circumnavigating the globe, alone.

The Southern Ocean encircles the Earth at 60 degrees south latitude and is a most unforgiving phenomenon. There, the strongest winds on Earth whip around the planet with no continents to get in the way or slow them. The waves generated are literally mountainous.

Abigail Sunderland, from Thousand Oaks, Calif. began her voyage from Cabo San Lucas, Mexico on Feb. 6.

She has rounded Cape Horn on her way east to Africa and the Cape of Good Hope, then past Australia, across the equator at least once and back to where she began.

Nonstop and unassisted, it will take more than five months to complete her grueling journey in accordance with the International Sailing Federation World Sailing Speed Record Council.

Sunderland is a world-class sailor and “Wild Eyes” is an electronic, state-of-the-art, fully equipped sailing machine.

You can follow her remarkable adventure at www.abbysunderland.com.

An accomplished athlete, Sunderland chose to spend early April in the middle of the Southern Ocean.

Avoiding ice and whales, negotiating monstrous waves and marveling at the sights and sounds of this most remote and treacherous location, she naps alone beneath a glorious array of stars few human beings will ever see.

She is 16 years old.

Godspeed, Abigail.