A record crowd of 5,368 spectators filled Reckling Park on Saturday to witness a Super Regional rematch between Rice and Texas A&M University. The Aggies could not prevent history from repeating itself as senior designated hitter Jordan Dodson again played the hero in the Owls' 9-7 win. Mimicking last year's performance, Dodson had the crowd seeing déj? vu as he broke a tie to pull the Owls ahead in game one. On the day, he had four RBIs spread across three hits, an impressive feat considering he entered the game batting .167. He raised his batting average by nearly 30 points by the end of the game.
As a man of generally few outspoken opinions, trying to choose what to write for my first and last column as an undergraduate at Rice was rather difficult. Looking within the hedges there were many options: From lambasting the administration for the lack of both outdoor power outlets for laptops, among other issues, at the new Brochstein Pavilion, to recommending improvements in writing and communication for the undergraduate engineering education at Rice, no topic seemed broad enough. Looking beyond the hedges to November's election or global warming seemed too detached. In truth, as cliché a topic as it is, the only thing that seemed worth discussing was moving on to the next phase of life and the choices we have outside the hedges as Rice graduates.Looking back four years ago to graduation from high school, it seemed like there were so many choices. In retrospect though, there were few choices beyond picking which school to continue studying at for an undergraduate education. Going to college was not a choice, but rather, a mandate. While not true for every high school graduate, this is certainly true for most students at Rice.
This season, the women's track and field team set a bevy of personal and career individual bests. Together, however, they recorded an even more important team accomplishment: The largest number of post-season qualifiers in school history. After last weekend's action, the Owls now have 14 members with regional qualifying marks and one with a national meet invitation.The next competition for the Owls will be this weekend at the Conference USA Outdoor Championships in El Paso, Texas. Following that will be regional competition in Lincoln, Neb. May 30-31 and the NCAA National Championships in Des Moines, Iowa June 11-14. After winning the C-USA Indoor Championship in March, the Owls have a good chance to take both titles with a first-place finish in El Paso. With more regional qualifiers than any other school in C-USA this season, the Owls come in as the squad to beat.
Thursday, Aug. 14 - Hanszen College junior Matt Wilson, who had been missing since December, was found Wednesday night in a building on the University of California-Berkeley campus. A UC-Berkeley police officer was patrolling that part of the campus looking for a theft suspect when he came across Wilson alone in a classroom with a laptop hooked up to a projection system. At first, Wilson gave the officer a false name, but acknowledged that he was not a UC-Berkeley student. Later on, he provided police his real name.The laptop Wilson was using was confirmed to be stolen property, and police detained him overnight pending theft or trespassing charges.
The rising costs of fuel on the international market may seem more than a slight annoyance when shelling out $3.50 per gallon of gasoline, but a group of Rice students experienced the global effects firsthand when they had to cancel a trip to Central America. The team, comprised of seven students from Rice's chapter of Engineers Without Borders, had to cancel their Nicaragua trip which was scheduled to start last Monday, because of transportation strikes in the country that have recently escalated in violence.EWB Project Leaders Matt Wesley and Amy Liu directed the team, which had chosen Nicaragua for its service project last December. Wesley, a Baker College sophomore, said the team planned to construct a system to deliver fresh water to inhabitants of the area, which is two kilometers from the Costa Rican border. EWB projects involve several stages: Background research of the area; gathering data; implementation, when members construct and complete the project and a post assessment, when members will evaluate their project. Wesley said these projects take four different trips to the area to complete, and implementation alone often demands multiple trips.
JUNE 19 - One construction worker was killed and seven others were injured after a number of masonry walls collapsed Thursday afternoon at McMurtry College. The accident happened shortly around 4 p.m., and coincided with the arrival of heavy thunderstorms in the Houston area, Director of News and Media Relations B.J. Almond said. Executive Assistant Chief Rick Flannigan of the Houston Fire Department said four of the seven injured workers were transported to various hospitals in the medical center. The other three were treated on-site. Flannigan said the extent of the workers' injuries had yet to be determined, and their identities were still unknown. The workers were on the second floor of the building when the walls collapsed, and they were trapped in the rubble for a short time before fire and rescue crews arrived on the scene to secure the area. Rescue crews then checked the rest of the site to account for all the workers. Flannigan said an investigation has commenced to ascertain the cause of the collapse, but he maintained that HFD's first priority was ensuring the site's safety. "There's just a lot of work to be done," Flannigan said. "We want to make sure that it's safe, the walls are safe, and the investigative team can have access … to a large area." McMurtry and its counterpart, Duncan College, are scheduled for completion by Fall 2009.
Whenever a Rice baseball player crosses the plate to tally a run, his teammates immediately head out of the dugout to meet him - a celebration that is tradition in college baseball, and one that highlights the true sense of team camaraderie in college athletics. But fans following the Owls closely this year might have noticed that one of the first players out of the dugout is almost always senior pitcher Cole St.Clair. This Santa Ana, Calif. native has been a driving force for Rice's success whenever he set sfoot on the rubber, and he has been a consistent leader for the team in the locker room during his four-year tenure at Rice.It was then no surprise to Rice fans that St.Clair was drafted in the seventh round by the Cleveland Indians last summer. His accomplishments are numerous and include several school records: 27 career saves, 103 appearances and a top 10 all-time place in both the career and season-best ERA categories. These numbers also share a spot with St. Clair's multiple awards, which include the Dell Morgan Most Valuable Baseball Player for 2006 and the 2008 Bob Quin Award, given to Rice's most outstanding male athlete on and off the field. And that's on top of being named an All-American by Baseball America in 2006 and a freshman All-American by Collegiate Baseball in 2005, as well as earning a spot on Team USA in 2006. On the national team, he had a 4-0 record with three saves and an ERA of 0.69 against some of the best athletes in the world.
You made it through alive, though perhaps not unscathed. You have braved the late-night hours of Fondren, walked to lab in the darkness before dawn and left it in the darkness after dusk. And finally, after all of it, you walked across the stage and received the hollow tube with a picture of campus rolled up inside. But you will get your diploma in the mail sometime in the next few months.The Thresher wishes you all the best of luck in the future, in whatever endeavors you pursue, and we hope to be able to write about you (positively) in years to come.
With the school year more than over, we hope that all of you have by now found whatever beach, mountain or lab disctraction with which you will preoccupy yourselves over the next three months. We are taking a vacation as well, during which we will try our hardest not to think about fonts or pictures or photo captions or anything else of the kind, no matter how much we might regret leaving the office. We wish you an excellent break and we will be seeing you again in the fall.
The Marching Owl Band has experienced everything from rained-out shows to football fans who disagree with their sense of humor at halftime performances, and now they face an unexpected disturbance from construction crews.Director of Bands Chuck Throckmorton said the band hall has seen numerous pieces of debris fall through the ceiling this semester.
The University of Texas-El Paso Invitational is traditionally known to be a prime meet for setting personal bests and record-breaking times. Last weekend, senior Desarie Walwyn met the first and nearly the second of these goals in the 100-meter dash; her 11.45 second finish is the third-fastest time in Rice women's track and field history. The scorching time set the pace for the Owls, who grabbed first place finishes in four separate events.Walwyn's distance-running teammates, who did not attend last week's meet, will make attempts at personal-bests of their own this weekend. Seniors Marisa Daniels and Callie Wells, sophomore Nicole Mericle and freshmen Allison Pye and Becky Wade will travel to Walnut, Calif., to compete in the Mt. Sac Invitational today and tomorrow, where each will take the opportunity to try to post qualifying times for regionals and nationals. The rest of the squad will run in the Texas Invitational in Austin tomorrow against six other schools, including Texas State University, University of Texas-San Antonio and the University of Texas.
Two years ago, back when the common reading program was nothing more than a few articles posted on an obscure Orientation Week Web site, we wrote a staff-editorial praising it for its potential benefits for the incoming class ("Common reading: Good idea, needs improvement," Sept. 8, 2006). We wrote that the reading material should be well publicized and that it should be incorporated into pre-existing O-Week structures, such as the English Composition Exam and academic lunches. This year, the common reading selection committee has narrowed the field down to two choices: Allen Raymond's How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative is the apparent front runner, and Greg Mortenson's novel, Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . One School at a Time is the alternative choice (see story, page 1). With these two options in mind, and with another year of common reading program experience to draw from, we have some additions and revisions to make to our previous opinion.
There is something to be said about the terrifying and unrelenting march of time, reducing mountains to sand and flesh to dust in the unstoppable constancy of change - especially when it comes to contemporary fashion. No matter how cool something is, it will always eventually become tired, clichéd and lame. Aristotelian physics, mercantilism and even disco have suffered under the mighty progression of history, and now we find that one of our most beloved collegiate institutions is passing gently into that good night: sex.Sex? Yawn. How trite. How droll. What is so special about sex, anyways? Everybody does it. Boring.
After a stellar women's basketball career, during which she scored over 1,000 points and led the Owls in rebounding and scoring in the 2007-'08 season, senior Valeriya Berezhynska will have a chance to take her game to the professional level next year. Last Wednesday, Berezhynska was chosen in the third round by the Detroit Shock with the 42nd overall pick of the WNBA Draft.Despite being slowed down by an ankle injury, Berezhynska had a productive senior year. In only 23 games, she had 20 double-doubles and averaged 17 points and 10 rebounds per game. She ended her career with 1,076 points, placing her 10th on Rice's all-time scoring list.
A magic date is set in the minds of many students on campus, particularly underclassmen: Fall 2009. This is when major construction for current projects will conclude - including the Autry Court renovation, the new Recreation Center, the Collaborative Research Center and Duncan and McMurtry Colleges. Even with a dramatically transformed campus, the construction-free horizon is getting farther away, because a new, complex project is on the drawing board. Dean of Undergraduates Robin Forman is spearheading a $70 million, 14-month renovation that will affect Baker, Will Rice and Lovett Colleges. All students at Baker and some at Will Rice will be displaced in the academic year 2009-'10 during their colleges' renovation.
Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.It is a Zulu phrase that I picked up while studying abroad in South Africa, and it represents a concept that I believe can bring new life and greater beauty to our world. Africans claim the phrase is difficult to translate into Western language, but Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu tries his best when he explains it as, "My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in what is yours." Another South African explains, "I am because you are, and you are because we are." It means your joys are my joys and your suffering is my suffering. It means until there is peace in the world, there cannot fully be peace in my heart.
The baseball team's accomplishments this past weekend surely kept fans' hearts pounding from beginning to end, although not all of the drama was on the field. No. 11 Rice (28-10, 10-2 Conference USA) almost dropped two games to the University of Alabama-Birmingham after holding substantial leads, but was saved by late-game heroics both times. The series with the Blazers (14-21, 1-8 C-USA), the worst team in the conference, also brought the return of junior reliever Bobby Bell, who took the mound for the first time since Feb. 2007 after undergoing Tommy John surgery. Rounding out the week's action, the Owls took down No. 8 Texas A&M University 11-2 in College Station. Off the field, senior starter Cole St. Clair was honored at the senior athletics award banquet with the annual Bob Quin Award, the highest athletic honor for a male Rice athlete.
