ROSES to Sherry Norris, who recently won her 600th victory as coach of the Chapel Hill High School volleyball team.

Actually, as she would point out -- put down the phone, coach -- she didn't win the match. Her players did, and no doubt she gives them the credit.

Still, she has led the Tigers to 600 -- six hundred! -- victories in her years at CHHS, including two state championships, in 1994 and 2004. That's remarkable enough -- but consider that she also coaches the Tigers girls basketball teams, and she won a state championship with them, too, in 1982.

That's a rare record of accomplishment -- few coaches ever win a state title in anything, much less in two different sports -- and it says a lot about Norris. High school teams are a continual revolving door -- kids arrive, progress and graduate, to be followed by the next generation of students.

But year after year, decade after decade, Norris has taught her players how to excel.

Everybody knows what it takes to win: mastery of the fundamentals, teamwork, confidence in yourself and your teammates, determination.

Those qualities are easy to define. They are much, much harder to instill. Norris has done it, year after year. Congratulations, coach.


ROSES to Oliver Smithies, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at UNC.

When the phone rings at 5 a.m., it's rarely good news. But the one Smithies received Monday morning was an exceptional exception. It was Sweden, calling with the news that Smithies had been awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine.

Smithies shared the prize with Mario Capecchi of the University of Utah's Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Sir Martin Evans of Cardiff University in Wales. The three developed innovative methods for manipulating genes, accelerating the field of genetic medicine.

Smithies has been at UNC for 19 years. Monday he had a hard time getting much work done, what with fielding phone calls from around the world and being huzzahed by colleagues, doctors and students on campus.

Peter Agre, vice chancellor for science and technology at Duke and a Nobel winner himself, paid Smithies what is, in his field, the highest of compliments.

"That man," Agre said, "is a real scientist."


ROSES to Kendall Harkey, an 11-year-old Chapel Hill girl who was honored recently for doing something better than anyone else in the world under the age of 13.

What she does is play the gee haw whimmy diddle.

A whimmy diddle is an Appalachian folk toy that consists of two slender sticks. One of them has a little propeller stuck in one end and a series of notches carved along its length. The other one is, well, just a stick.

You rub the second stick back and forth across the notches in the first stick, and the vibration makes the little propeller spin. The trick is to learn how to make the propeller spin to the right ("gee") and to the left ("haw") on command (gee and haw, of course, are how you tell a donkey which way to turn).

At the world championship in Asheville, Kendall geed and hawed faster than any of her competitors, including a boy who played the whimmy diddle with his teeth.