Portsmouth High School senior Ryan Westmoreland is one of the state’s best baseball players — as well as a scholar.

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The Providence Journal / Ruben W. Perez

They were All-Staters and All-Americans. They were valedictorians and class presidents. They scored goals, hit game-winning baskets and belted home runs, but they also tutored their fellow students, volunteered at Hasbro Children’s Hospital and helped raise money so some needy children would have Christmas presents.

They are the 100 student-athletes who were nominated for the 2008 Providence Journal Honor Roll girls and boys awards, and, once again, when I look at the nomination forms, I can’t help but be optimistic about America’s future.

The Journal Honor Roll is one of the oldest programs in the country honoring outstanding high school athletic and academic achievement. This year marks the 82nd anniversary of the Journal Honor Roll.

Each year the principal of every Rhode Island high school is asked to submit one male and one female student/athlete from the senior class as a nominee for the Honor Roll Boy and Girl Award. Through the years, some principals have told me that deciding which students would be their schools’ nominees is one of the toughest jobs they face because their schools have several excellent candidates.

The nominees are members of a generation that has grown up with sports being a 24-hour American fascination. But when you see the nomination forms, you realize that the honor nominees are teenagers who understand that as much as they love sports and know how to win, they realize life should dictate sports, not the other way around.

They are young people from various social and economic backgrounds who are talented, motivated and disciplined student-athletes who spent four years bettering themselves, their schools and their communities in a variety of ways.

It wasn’t easy, but they did it.

Maybe veteran East Providence football coach Sandy Gorham said it best.

“People don’t realize the work that these kids put into what they do,” Gorham said when talking about Nate Lovett, the 2008 Honor Roll Boy, and the other honor-roll nominees. “The fans see the final results and the big games, but they don’t know how many hours these students work to produce those results.”

There can be only one Honor Roll Boy and one Honor Roll Girl, but all of the 100 student-athletes who were nominated for the awards are special.

Some of the other nominees are familiar to Rhode Island sports fans, but the fans probably don’t realize how multitalented and socially conscious the nominees are.

Ryan Westmoreland became one of the best known athletes in the state last spring when he was named the Rhode Island Baseball Gatorade Player of the Year for the second straight year and was also drafted by the Red Sox in the fifth round of the Major League Baseball Draft.

But most fans didn’t realize that Westmoreland also was a member of the National Honor Society, and on springtime Sunday afternoons, rather than resting from his busy playing schedule, he worked with the young players in the Challenge Division of the Portsmouth Little League.

The fans watched last fall as La Salle Academy’s Neal Rooney became an All-State football lineman, then won both the javelin and shot-put titles at the state outdoor track championships. But his most impressive performances may have come in the classroom, where he compiled a 91.30 academic average over four years.

Rooney’s La Salle classmate Jeanne Mack earned 21 All-State selections in the sports of cross county and track during her career; compiled a 91.91 grade-point advantage yet still found time to help organize a Santa Claus Run for the Toys for Tots and play in the school concert band.

East Greenwich’s Alexa Monti was a first-team All-Stater in three sports — soccer, basketball and track, one of the top students in her class with a 4.26 GPA, served as a peer tutor and helped organize a community fundraiser.

Most of the nominees, however, never saw their names in headlines despite amazing accomplishments.

They were people such as Matt DaSilva, who was a three-sport standout as well as the valedictorian at North Providence High.

Alfred Rodriguez had the top academic rank in this year’s graduation class at Providence’s Academy of International Studies as well as one of the highest batting averages on the baseball team.

Erik Munsell was an all-division selection in both swimming and soccer, acted in two school plays, was a photographer for the school paper and ranked No. 1 academically among this year’s graduates at Shea High.

Justyna Szulc was the Central Falls valedictorian this year; a two-time all-division selection in volleyball and a volunteer at the George Wiley Center.

Smithfield’s Megan Skwirz was a three-sport athlete, her class valedictorian, a youth soccer coach; a religious-educator teacher as well as a writer of the official history of Smithfield High.

There’s never enough room to talk about all of the nominees, but the good news is that there were 100 of them in Rhode Island this year.