Sport's Drinks or H20?

This is an excerpt from a article on dehydration.  the article is fairly long so I took the part that I thought was most pertinent to what we do.  The link to the full article is below if you are interested in reading it, just a warning it has a lot of scientific terms! 

Preventing Dehydration: Sports Drinks or Water
Bob Murray, PhD, FACSM

Excerpt:
Promote rapid rehydration. The key to rapid and complete rehydration is to provide enough electrolytes in the rehydration beverage to serve as an osmotic impetus to restore and maintain extra-cellular fluid volume, including blood volume. And this depends upon ingesting both the fluid as well as the electrolytes that are lost in sweat. A study conducted in New Zealand helps to prove this point. During the experiment, subjects were asked to cycle in a warm room for three hours, ingesting on one occasion water and the other, a properly formulated sports drink. Results showed that plasma sodium levels were better maintained and less urine was produced when the sports drink was consumed.6 Why? The electrolytes in the sports drink maintained plasma sodium and served as an osmotic impetus to retain the ingested fluid by reducing urine production by the kidneys.
The NATA position stand also addresses this issue, stating that “consuming water alone decreases osmolality, which limits the drive to drink and slightly increases urine output. Including sodium in the rehydration beverage or in the diet allows fluid volume to be better conserved and increases the drive to drink.”1
Improve athletic performance. Decades of research confirm that sports drinks are superior to water at improving performance during both intense and prolonged exercise.7-9 The primary reason is that the carbohydrates in a sports drink provide fuel to both muscles and brain.
Ingesting a sports drink during exercise maintains blood glucose levels and promotes the uptake of carbohydrate into muscle cells. This in turn increases the use of carbohydrates as fuel by muscle and brain. Sustaining carbohydrate oxidation benefits performance in a wide variety of tasks, including maintaining motor skills in the latter portions of practice and games.
The NATA position stand is very clear in this regard, stating that “including carbohydrates and electrolytes in the rehydration drink can maintain blood glucose, carbohydrate oxidation and electrolyte balance and can maintain performance when the exercise session exceeds 50 minutes in duration or is extremely intense.”1
Full article:  http://www.gssiweb.com/Article_Detail.aspx?articleid=701&level=2&topic=5