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USC receiver/trackster Marqise Lee qualified for next month's NCAA championships in the long jump with a personal-record jump of 25 feet, 5 1/2 inches in Thursday's NCAA Regionals held in Austin, Texas.

His mark was second in his flight and seventh among all jumpers. He entered into the competition ranked 20th in the region, meaning he placed well above his ranking.

Lee's career best entering into the 2012 track season was 24 feet, eight inches, so the month of track-specific training he's done since football ended last month has helped him improve significantly.

In other football/track news, running back/hurdler D.J. Morgan will run the 110-meter hurdles on Friday in Austin in an attempt to qualify for the NCAA championships, and linebacker/jumper Tony Burnett will do the triple jump. Notable sprinter Bryshon Nellum easily won his heat in the 400-meter and will compete in the quarterfinals Friday.

The NCAA championships are held in Des Moines, Iowa, from June 6-9.

USC center Khaled Holmes was named to the 2012 Rimington Award watch list on Thursday, putting him in contention for a trophy given annually to the nation's top center.

The award is named after former Nebraska center Dave Rimington and is presented by the Boomer Esiason Foundation, fundraising for a cure for cystic fibrosis.

Holmes, a senior, has started for two seasons for the Trojans, in 2010 at right guard and in 2011 at center. He has already graduated from USC and is pursuing a master's degree in communication management from the school.

He is USC's second watch-list nominee so far this offseason, with senior safety T.J. McDonald being named to the Lott Impact Trophy list earlier this month. That award goes to the best defensive player in the country each year who best exemplifies six categories: integrity, maturity, performance, academics, community and tenacity.

The Trojans should have several more players named to watch lists when the others roll out in the next month.

Here are some of the more interesting stories that the 16 USC Trojans who trekked to Haiti last week to build houses have brought home to the U.S.:

Barkley speaks Spanish

Quarterback Matt Barkley recalled one of the more unusual experiences from the five-day trip with a big smile.

On one of the days, he spotted a local teenager with an old chalkboard in front of him and a textbook in his hand sitting down under a tree. At first, Barkley thought the kid was practicing Algebra, based on what he saw on the board. But as he walked closer he realized the 18-year-old Haitian was practicing Calculus -- "doing functions and all that kind of stuff."

Most of the Haitians didn't speak English, but there were interpreters translators available when the athletes wanted to talk to the kids. Barkley couldn't find an interpreter in sight, so he tried to strike up a conversation with him in English.

His English was spotty, so Barkley asked what else he knew. The teen said he knew Creole, as all Haitians do, as well as French, Spanish and a bit of English. Cue the conversation.

"We ended up talking for like two hours," Barkley said, "in Spanish."

"It was pretty tight."

How good is Barkley's Spanish?

"We both knew enough to understand each other," he said. "But the grammar was probably pretty messed up.

"If a Spanish speaker heard me talking, it probably wouldn't have pretty."

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The USC men's tennis team won its record-tying fourth consecutive NCAA national title on Tuesday with a late-night 4-3 victory over Virginia in Athens, Ga.

The championship matchup had to be moved indoors after afternoon rain first delayed the action on the outdoor courts at the University of Georgia.

USC freshman Yannick Hanfmann, playing the final of six singles matches, battled back from down a break in the third set to win it all for his team in a dramatic tiebreaker. Steve Johnson, Raymond Sarmiento and Roberto Quiroz also won singles matches for the Trojans after they lost the crucial doubles point on the outdoor courts to start off the action.

USC, the first college tennis team since Stanford's 1995-98 teams to win four consecutive national championships, finishes 2012 with a 33-1 overall record. Interestingly, the Trojans' men's water polo team is also on a run of four straight titles.

Johnson, the reigning NCAA singles champion, and fellow senior Daniel Nguyen both won the national title all four years they were in college.

USC's Sept. 8 game against Syracuse at MetLife Stadium, the Trojans' first trip to the New York City area in 12 years, has officially been set for a 12:30 p.m. PT kickoff on ABC.

MetLife Stadium is the home of the NFL's New York Jets and New York Giants and is located in East Rutherford, N.J.

The game is the first of the Trojans' 12 scheduled 2012 contests to have a game time announced. Some of the others should begin trickling in over the next few weeks as television networks divvy up games and arrange their weekly schedules.

All games will be on some form of national television thanks to the Pac-12’s new media rights agreement with ESPN and FOX and the launch of the Pac-12 Network.

As soon as the rain started pouring and the winds started spiraling a few hours after he and 16 members of the USC football team arrived in Haiti last Saturday, Les Barkley knew his guests were in for the experience of their lives.

Barkley, the father of USC quarterback Matt Barkley, had spent many months planning the house-building trip with Hope Force International and even pushing it forward and condensing it when the NCAA ruled it couldn't conflict with summer school at the university. He got so many requests from football players to come along, he had to turn many of them down for logistical reasons.

The group -- roughly two dozen strong, family members and staffers included -- ended up leaving Los Angeles late last Friday with 2,600 pounds of food and supplies in tow and getting to the two-terminal airport in Port-au-Prince on Saturday afternoon. Then they bussed the 20 miles to the beachside town of Leogane where they were staying, on the way seeing how much damage the January 2010 earthquake had inflicted on the capital.

They stopped and took pictures of the ruined presidential palace and took note of the makeshift homes many Haitians lived in, often just some sticks covering sheets or other type of bedding. Then, within a few minutes after arriving in Leogane, a standard summer thunderstorm hit Haiti. It rained a few inches in a matter of minutes and winds gusted by at 40, 50 miles an hour.

Les Barkley noticed the players looking around, looking at each other and putting two and two together. They had available shelter away from the rain -- but most of the hundreds of thousands of people they had just driven by didn't.

"In that moment, they realized that this is what these people put up with every day," Barkley said in a phone interview Thursday. "I think that was a striking moment for them."

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Illinois running back Ty Isaac, one of the top backfield prospects in the country, committed to USC on Tuesday, giving the Trojans their sixth commitment of the 2013 recruiting season and arguably their most important.

Here's why: Isaac, ranked sixth at his position by ESPNU and 68th overall, is the first top-flight running back prospect to commit to the Trojans since D.J. Morgan in the class of 2010. Well, there was Amir Carlisle in 2011, but that ship has sailed.

Simply enough, USC direly needed a back in this class to provide some actual depth at the position once Curtis McNeal leaves. Actually, the Trojans needed two -- and they might get another later this week, when Northern California prospect Justin Davis makes his college announcement.

But Isaac's even better than the typical four-star prospect -- at least for USC -- because he's a legitimate big back, one who would ideally work in tandem with Morgan upon his arrival in Los Angeles. The Trojans tried to get one of those under the radar in Buck Allen in 2011 but realized this spring he's more of a standard-sized runner than anything else.

At 6-3 and 215 pounds in his junior year of high school in Joliet, Ill., Isaac is definitely a big back.

He becomes the third skill-position player to commit to the Trojans in the last six weeks. Highly-touted quarterback Max Browne (Sammamish, Wa./Skyline) committed last month as an early enrollee and receiver Eldridge Massington (Mesquite, Tex./West Mesquite) committed earlier this month.

Defensive end Kylie Fitts (Redlands, Calif./Redlands East Valley) and cornerback Chris Hawkins (Rancho Cucamonga, Calif./Rancho Cucamonga) also committed in April. Defensive tackle Kenny Bigelow (Elkton, Md./Eastern Christian) became the first member of the 2013 class when he committed last November.

Three USC football players participated in the Pac-12 track and field championships over the weekend in Eugene, Ore. -- and another high-profile Trojan trackster surprised in the Pacific Northwest with a comeback win.

Receiver Marqise Lee, running back D.J. Morgan and linebacker Tony Burnett collectively competed in the relay, hurdle and jump events for the Trojans, giving USC three of its 11 points-scoring participants.

Bryshon Nellum, the former Long Beach Poly sprinter who was shot in the leg near the USC campus in October 2008, came from behind to win the 400-meter sprint with a personal-best time of 45.20 seconds. To do it, he motored past reigning conference champion Mike Berry in the final stretch and improved on his previous best by nearly two tenths of a second.

Lee ran the first leg for USC's 4x100m relay team which finished in sixth. Oregon's De'Anthony Thomas and Oregon State's Malcolm Marable, both football players, also ran the race for their respective schools. Thomas ran anchor and led the Ducks to a second-place finish; Marable ran first like Lee and finished in eighth.

Lee also finished fourth in the long jump with a mark of just over 25 feet and one inch -- eight inches behind the winner. Lee's mark was better than the 24-8 best he posted in high school, which was the second-best mark among all high schoolers in 2011.

Morgan was the top USC hurdler, finishing fifth with a time of 14.21 in the 110-meter hurdle in his second competitive hurdle race since his junior season of high school at Woodland Hils Taft. He ran a 14.48 in the preliminary heat.

Burnett, who came to USC for track and then walked on to the football team and later earned a scholarship, finished 15th in the triple jump -- second among USC jumpers.

Overall, the USC men finished seventh and the women finished fourth.

We wrote in April about Matt Barkley and his family's plans to bring several USC Trojans with them to Haiti this summer for a house-building trip in the earthquake-torn Caribbean country.

Those plans are ongoing, and the trip is nearing. Here's the updated list of players going and a brief itinerary of what the group will do in Haiti this month with Hope Force International.

The full list of participants includes Barkley, T.J. McDonald, Devon Kennard, Dion Bailey, Robert Woods, Khaled Holmes, Nickell Robey, Hayes Pullard, Kyle Negrete, Scott Starr, Josh Shaw, Cyrus Hobbi, Kevin Greene, Max Wittek, Cody Kessler and Luke Freeman.

The 14 players who originally planned to go are all still going, and McDonald and Bailey joined the group later. Barkley's parents and siblings are also attending.

They will leave at midnight on May 12th, so late this Friday night, meaning a few of the players walking in Friday's commencement ceremony will essentially be going straight from school to the foreign country. They return a week from today, on the 16th.

They're staying in the beachside town of Leogane, 20 miles west of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. Leogane was at the epicenter of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and had 80 to 90 percent of its buildings damaged.

The plan is to build four houses for four family in the small village of Sous Savanne and to visit an orphanage and school there and help out too.

Dick Beam, an assistant coach on a pair of USC’s national championship football teams and later an NFL front-office executive, died of cancer on Thursday in Corona, USC announced Friday. He was 75.

Beam spent four seasons under head coach John McKay at USC, the first two as a part-time assistant and scout and then the final two seasons as a full-time assistant. The Trojans won the national championship in 1972 and 1974 and played in three Rose Bowls during his tenure.

He then went with McKay to NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers, where he worked for five years as an assistant coach and the director of administration. Bean was then the director of operations for the Rams for 10 seasons from 1981-1990. He later helped organize three NFL American Bowls in London, Tokyo and Berlin and served as a consultant to the NFL for 29 Super Bowls, including Super Bowl XLV in 2011.

He began his coaching career at Whittier College, his alma mater, in 1958, later coaching there under Don Coryell. He spent more than a decade coaching local high-school football at Santa Fe, Montebello, Brea and Alhambra before joining the Trojans.

Beam is survived by his wife, Dorothy, son, Donn, daughter Cathy Crofts, and three grandchildren.

After USC's 2012 spring game had concluded, at the end of his post-scrimmage meeting with reporters, coach Lane Kiffin was asked about his star receiver Robert Woods, who sat out the entire spring while recovering from an ankle injury originally suffered a year ago.

Would Woods, Kiffin was asked, be ready to go by fall? After all, he was supposed to be fully healed in February after undergoing arthroscopic surgery on the ankle in December. Missing the entire spring wasn't even an option until midway through it.

"That's what we believe," Kiffin said.

USC is hoping -- or believing -- a lot of its other players will be ready for the 2012 season, too. Truthfully, the Trojans need most of them back for depth reasons.

"We couldn't have something like what has happened this offseason to us in the fall," Kiffin said after the spring game. "We wouldn't be very good. So we need to make sure we keep our guys healthy."

Here's an overview of who's been out and when they are expected back, going position-by-position:

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Former USC and NFL linebacker Junior Seau died Wednesday at his Oceanside home from a gunshot wound in his chest, authorities said.

He was 43. He is remembered primarily for his professional successes in his 20-year NFL career, most of which was spent with his hometown San Diego Chargers. But he also left quite a legacy up the road at USC, where he spent three years in the 1980's and starred for two seasons, leading the Trojans to a Rose Bowl win.

Wednesday's news shook up the USC community quite a bit, with tons of current and former players tweeting their surprise and sadness upon hearing the news. It also brought back memories of Seau's time with the Trojans, spanning from 1987-1989.

Seau sat out of his freshman season in 1987 because of academic restrictions. He reportedly scored a 690 on the SAT, 10 points lower than the 700-minimum needed to secure eligibility. Then he struggled with injuries his sophomore season before exploding onto the scene as a junior in 1989.

Totaling 19 sacks, he was named an unanimous All-American and Pac-10 Defensive Player of the Year, then declared early for the NFL draft and was selected fifth overall by the San Diego Chargers the following April.

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The last time USC had as few as three players selected in an NFL draft, as did they did last weekend, the Trojans were coming off a 6-6 season in Pete Carroll's first year on the job.

That was April 2002.

Cornerbacks Kris Richard and Chris Cash went in the third and sixth rounds, respectively. Thus, the common reaction would be to dismiss that year as having nothing to do with this one, when Matt Kalil and Nick Perry each went in the first round and then only tight end/fullback Rhett Ellison was taken among the remaining 231 selections.

But that would be incorrect.

The two years actually share a lot of similarities -- starting with the fact that the talent on both the 2001 and 2011 squads was overwhelmingly backloaded with underclassmen. The lack of draftable talent in 2002 -- along with the success the 2002 team would go on to have -- foreshadowed the five players who would be taken in 2003, including two in the first round.

And the lack of draftable talent in 2012 should foreshadow the many players likely to be selected in 2013, including three potential first-rounders.

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Six 2011 USC Trojans have latched on to NFL teams via the undrafted free-agent wire as of Sunday morning.

Those include defensive tackle DaJohn Harris, who signed with the Tennessee Titans, and linebacker Chris Galippo, who agreed to terms with the Indianapolis Colts. Harris had been projected as a potential mid-round pick in the 2012 NFL draft but slipped because of health concerns, and Galippo had an outside shot of being selected entering the weekend.

The four others: receiver Brandon Carswell, who signed with the Oakland Raiders, long snapper Chris Pousson (Tampa Bay), defensive tackle Christian Tupou (San Diego) and running back Marc Tyler (Green Bay).

Nine players from the 2011 USC squad will have the opportunity to play in the NFL next season, with the six undrafted signees plus first-round draft selections Matt Kalil and Nick Perry and fourth-round pick Nick Perry.

The Trojans could have close to that many drafted next season, led by potential first-round selections Matt Barkley, T.J. McDonald and Robert Woods.

Former USC tight end/fullback Rhett Ellison is going to join his college teammate Matt Kalil at the next level.

Both ex-Trojans were picked by the Minnesota Vikings in this weekend's 2012 NFL draft, Kalil on Thursday as the fourth overall selection and Ellison on Saturday as the 128th overall selection, late in the fourth round.

It was right around where he was projected to go, but Ellison told Minnesota-area reporters in a conference call after his selection that it was a surprise to him.

"I wasn’t really expecting to get drafted," Ellison said. "I was pretty shocked and I’m still trying to calm everything down."

Ellison becomes USC's third selection of the 2012 draft after Kalil and defensive end Nick Perry, who went 28th overall to Green Bay. Defensive tackle DaJohn Harris is expected to be taken sometime Saturday.