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Cooper Flagg wins Summer League debut despite uneven showing

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LAS VEGAS — Cooper Flagg made his professional debut Thursday night in the NBA Summer League and celebrated an 87-85 win over Bronny James and the Los Angeles Lakers.

Flagg finished with 10 points on 5-for-21 shooting, including 0 for 5 from 3-point range. He also had six rebounds, four assists, three steals and one block. Though Flagg struggled at times to find his rhythm, there were flashes as to why he was chosen No. 1 overall last month, doing plenty of little things that helped the Mavericks seal the win, including a key block near the end of the game.

Flagg swatted DJ Steward’s attempt with 1:10 left in the game, and Ryan Nembhard made a 3-pointer at the other end to give Dallas the 87-85 lead.

Flagg strolled into UNLV’s Thomas and Mack Center at 4:17 p.m. on Thursday, wearing Dallas Mavericks gear, bright white New Balance shoes, and an emotionless look on his face as he passed through security.

Roughly 45 minutes later, he wore the same stone-cold face as he came out for warmups shortly after 5 p.m.

His fans more than made up for it with plenty of energy, electrifying the jam-packed arena that cheered loudest when he was announced as a starter in his first Summer League game.

Flagg missed his first two attempts of the game, picked up his first foul just 46 seconds into the game, and gave the crowd what they’d been anticipating, going one-on-one with fellow fan favorite James.

James buried his first attempt over Flagg, and then hit a 3-pointer after the 6-foot-8 Duke product missed his second attempt to give the Lakers a 5-0 lead.

Flagg excited the crowd at the 4:30 mark of the first quarter, jamming home his first points.

Early in the second quarter, Flagg nearly sent every fan in the building into a frenzy when he made a spin move into the paint and attempted a one-handed slam dunk over 7-foot Christian Koloko. The ball caromed off the back of the rim and still drew plenty of oohs and ahhs.

Generally filled with Lakers fans when the team plays in the summer, the arena was full of emotion with a fair share of Mavericks fans in attendance to see the 2025 National college player of the year.

Like 15-year-old Baer Epple, 15, who was seated with his father Chad in the third row from the court, donning Dirk Nowitzki’s Mavericks jersey.

Epple said he’s been following Flagg since before his Duke days, beginning with his junior year at Nokomis Regional High School in Newport, Maine.

The 15-year-old who is in Las Vegas from Seattle for an AAU tournament said he’s been a Mavericks fan for roughly four years.

“Even more of a fan now that they got Cooper Flagg,” Epple said. “Hopefully he does good, that’d be pretty cool to see. I don’t want him to be like a bust or anything.”

Mavericks coach Jason Kidd told The Associated Press before the game he’s looking for nothing more than effort and grit in his team’s opening game, as he wants them all playing hard.

“This summer league is a little different when you have this type of turnout,” Kidd said. “But the guys have had a couple practices. There’s going to be some turnovers. I just want to see how they respond to a couple of mistakes being made, no one’s gonna play a perfect game and be unselfish.”

As for his prize draft pick: “We’re all excited,” Kidd said of Flagg. “Seen enough of him on tape, so now it’s good to see him on the floor.”



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NFL star, East Bay native Najee Harris injured in Fourth of July fireworks explosion, sources confirm – The Mercury News

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  1. NFL star, East Bay native Najee Harris injured in Fourth of July fireworks explosion, sources confirm  The Mercury News
  2. Agent: Bolts’ Harris hurt eye in fireworks incident  ESPN
  3. Chargers RB Najee Harris injured in fireworks accident but expected to be ready for season, agent says  CBS Sports
  4. Man loses fingers in Antioch firework blast that injured six others  San Francisco Chronicle
  5. Chargers RB Najee Harris sustains superficial eye injury during Fourth of July event  NFL.com



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Camp Mystic’s owner warned of floods for decades. Then the river killed him

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CNN
 — 

Dick Eastland warned for decades about the hidden dangers of the beautiful but volatile Guadalupe River, a peril he saw firsthand while running his family’s youth camp alongside its banks.

Eastland saw floods damage Camp Mystic again and again – and his pregnant wife was even airlifted to a hospital while the camp in central Texas was cut off by floodwaters.

He successfully pushed for a new flood warning system after 10 children at a nearby camp were swept to their deaths in 1987, and in recent years served on the board of the local river authority as it supported renewed efforts to improve warnings on the Guadalupe.

“The river is beautiful,” Eastland told the Austin American-Statesman in 1990. “But you have to respect it.”

But after 27 people were killed at Camp Mystic in last week’s cataclysmic flooding – along with Eastland himself, who died while trying to rescue his young campers – the scale of the tragedy highlights potential missed opportunities by Camp Mystic’s owners and government officials to better mitigate those risks.

About a decade after it was installed, the warning system Eastland had championed in the late ‘80s became antiquated and broken. The river authority ultimately shut it down in 1999, saying it was “unreliable with some of the system’s stations not reporting information,” according to an article in the Kerrville Daily Times.

Yet periodic attempts to adopt a more modern flood-monitoring system, including one with warning sirens that might have alerted campers last week, repeatedly failed to gain traction – stalled by low budgets, some local opposition and a lack of state support.

At Camp Mystic, meanwhile, several of the cabins that were hit hardest in the flooding were in an area identified by the federal government as the highest-risk location for inundations from the Guadalupe. Even as the camp built new cabins in a less-risky flood zone elsewhere on its property, nothing was done to relocate the buildings in the most danger.

“Camp officials might have not been aware of flood risk when they first built the cabins,” before the county even had flood maps, said Anna Serra-Llobet, a University of California-Berkeley researcher who studies flood risk. But after the recent construction, she said, officials should have realized they were in an area of “severe hazard.”

Eastland has been praised as a hero for his efforts to save campers on Friday and remembered as a beloved figure by generations who spent their summers in the idyllic riverside refuge. His legacy is less clear as a public steward of the sometimes deadly river that ultimately took his life.

“If he wasn’t going to die of natural causes, this was the only other way—saving the girls that he so loved and cared for,” his grandson George Eastland wrote in an Instagram tribute. “Although he no longer walks this earth, his impact will never fade in the lives he touched.”

Camp Mystic did not respond to a request for comment.

Camp Mystic has a long history with flooding, going back to just a few years after it was established 99 years ago.

In 1932, flood waters “swept away” several cabins at the camp and led campers to evacuate across the river by canoe, according to an article in the Abilene Daily Reporter. A counselor told the Austin American-Statesman at the time that campers might “have drowned if we had gone out the front door and walked face-into a sheet of water!”

In 1978, an article in the Kerrville Mountain Sun reported that Camp Mystic was “the most severely damaged” of local summer camps affected by a flood that year. A separate article reported that five Camp Mystic counselors “had their automobiles swept into the Guadalupe River” by flood waters that year.

And in 1985, Eastland’s wife Tweety, then pregnant with their fourth child, had to be airlifted from Camp Mystic to a hospital due to floodwaters, local news reported.

A volunteer holds a Camp Mystic t-shirt and pink backpack in Comfort, Texas, as search and rescue efforts continued on July 6.

One of the region’s most devastating floods – until last week’s Fourth of July disaster – came in 1987, when 10 children attending a different camp in the area were killed by floodwaters during a rushed evacuation.

Eastland, who at the time was serving on the board of the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, which manages the river, pushed for a new flood warning system. In newspaper articles, he described a computer-powered system that would lead to automatic alerts if water levels on the Guadalupe rose beyond a set limit.

The proposal was delayed, but officials eventually created a system of 21 gauges up and down the Guadalupe and its tributaries.

Even as Eastland voiced pride in the new system, he was quick to remind the public of the Guadalupe’s deadly power.

“I’m sure there will be other drownings,” Eastland said in a 1990 interview with the Austin American-Statesman. “People don’t heed the warnings.”

In the following years, the early flood warning system that Eastland advocated for – and was once considered state-of-the-art – started to suffer problems. In April 1998, the company that maintained the system “closed its doors without notice,” and the gauge system soon stopped functioning because of lack of maintenance, the Kerrville Daily Times reported.

In February 1999, the river authority shut the system down because it had become “unreliable with some of the system’s stations not reporting information,” and board members worried about “liability concerns that the system would send ‘false signals,’” according to an article in the Times.

A handful of river gauges remain in service on the Guadalupe today, but the county lacks a full-scale warning system to broadcast public alerts when floodwaters rise.

Kerr County officials, along with the river authority that Eastland periodically served on, worked to change that over the last decade, searching for funding for a flood warning system that included more river gauges and a network of sirens.

But they found themselves struggling to overcome funding deficits and opposition from some skeptical residents.

Grant applications for the system were denied by the state in 2016 and 2017, and the authority later decided not to pursue a separate grant after realizing that it would only cover five percent of the system’s cost.

Around the same time, Camp Mystic was embarking on an expansion project. As the number of girls attending the camp grew over the years – leading to waitlists to get in each summer – the camp built more than a dozen new cabins farther south of the Guadalupe River alongside the smaller Cypress Creek.

Some of those cabins were located in an area that the federal government has determined has a 1% chance of flooding each year, which would have required officials to get special approval from the county government to build there.

But the risk was even higher at some of Camp Mystic’s cabins closest to the Guadalupe, several of which are located inside the river’s “regulatory floodways” – the areas that flood first and are most dangerous – according to federal flood maps. Those cabins have been around for decades, historical aerial photos show, apparently before the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s first floodzone maps were developed.

Dealing with preexisting structures like these inside risky floodzones is especially challenging, said Serra-Llobet, the UC Berkeley flood expert.

“When they did the construction of the recent buildings, they should have seen the FEMA maps,” Serra-Llobet said. That, she said, was a “window of opportunity” where camp officials could have realized their decades-old dorms were in a high-hazard zone and acted to address it. Camp Mystic could have relocated the buildings to higher ground, or just turned them into structures for recreational activities and made sure that campers were sleeping in safer areas, she said.

Still, Serra-Llobet argued that Kerr County should move past the “blame game” that comes after any disaster and focus on the lessons that could be learned for protecting people from floods going forward.

It’s not clear whether Eastland personally grappled with the high-risk flood zone running through his own campground. But in recent years, he was part of continued efforts for an improved flood warning system for the region.

Eastland returned to the river authority’s board in 2022 after being appointed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. After the previous setbacks, the board this year moved forward with a proposal to create a new “centralized dashboard” of rainfall, river depth and other data sources “to support local flood monitoring and emergency response,” according to the county government.

In April, the river authority voted to hire a firm to develop the data system and had planned to begin work this month. That was postponed after last week’s disastrous flooding.

After Eastland was found dead, tributes have rolled in from his colleagues, community members and former campers whose lives he touched over the decades at Camp Mystic.

“Although I am devastated, I can’t say I’m surprised that you sacrificed your life with the hopes of someone else’s being saved,” Eastland’s grandson wrote in his Instagram post.

April Ancira spent summers from the age of 8 to 14 at Camp Mystic. In an interview, she remembered Eastland helping her catch a big fish – and being just as thrilled as she was when she successfully reeled it in.

“My memories of him wrapping his arms around so many campers and being so excited to see them excel is incredible,” she said.

Austin Dickson, who served on the river authority board along with Eastland and sat next to him at board meetings, remembered him as a “pillar in our county and our community” who had championed a recent effort to create a new park along the river.

“So many people say, ‘Mystic is my heaven,’ or ‘Mystic is a dreamland,’ and I think that’s true,” he said. “That’s Dick and Tweety’s life’s work to make that true.”

CNN’s Allison Gordon and Lauren Mascarenhas contributed reporting.





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Weekly News Quiz – AARP

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  1. Weekly News Quiz  AARP
  2. Measles Cases Hit Highest Total Since U.S. Eliminated the Disease  The New York Times
  3. U.S. measles cases hit 33-year high, CDC says  Axios
  4. US measles cases surpass 2019 count, while Missouri is latest state with an outbreak  AP News
  5. Opinion | Why it matters if the U.S. loses its measles elimination status  The Washington Post



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