WRITING

The following are articles I've written for a news writing class.

Penn State's Men's Hockey's Innagural D1 Season

On October 12, the Greenberg Ice Pavilion played host to Penn State’s debut division one men’s hockey team, with an overtime thriller against American International. Although the Nittany Lions came up short in the 2-3 loss, the inaugural game was a success.

While the event may have looked like your standard college hockey game, the story of how the game came about delves much deeper than one might think at first glance. This game was the outcome of a five-year, wishy-washy deal that included a club hockey team, a dream and $102 million.

The story begins in the fall of 2005 with a phone call out of the blue from Terry Pegula, Buffalo Sabre’s owner, to Joe Battista, the Associate Athletic Director.

Pegula is a Penn State alumnus, and owns a house in State College. After sending his son to several of Battista’s (former PSU Hockey Coach) hockey clinics, Pegula began to ask why the hockey program wasn’t playing teams like Minnesota and Michigan.

“If I had a dollar for every time I got asked that question, we’d have enough money for a rink,” said Battista, who explained that the lack of an adequate arena was a large part of why Penn State didn’t have a division one team earlier.

The two agreed to discuss the answer at Kelly’s Steak and Seafood in Boalsburg.

“He [Pegula] cut right to the chase. He said, ‘What’s it going to take [to build a rink]?’ and I said $50 million, and he goes, ‘I think I can help you with that.’ So I said, okay, you got my attention,” Battista said.

The plans for the Pegula Ice Arena, and consequently a division one hockey team, were underway. The original request of $50 million proved to be less than half of the final donation of $102 million. Battista, along with an entire committee, was then put in charge of hiring a head coach.

“We put together a list of 35 characteristics that we looked for in the perfect coach. I went around the country, talked to a lot of my friends in the NHL, and college hockey, and slowly but surely, people would say, ‘Hey by the way, you should take a look at Guy Gadowsky at Princeton. He’s good, young and energetic,’” said Battista, who was instantly impressed with Gadowsky.

Battista and Gadowsky drove up to Philadelphia to meet with Pegula, who wanted a say in the hiring, and Pegula said after just half an hour that they had found their head coach.

Penn State's Men's Lacrosse Bone Marrow Donation Search

The men’s lacrosse team joined up with the National Marrow Donor Program through a “Be the Match” drive on Nov. 13 through Nov. 15. A “Be the Match” drive is designed to add people to the national registry and find bone marrow matches for people who need donations.

The initial reason for the drive began when senior lacrosse player Drew Roper’s mother was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, her third relapse. A bone marrow donation was her only option after radiation and chemotherapy proved to not be enough to rid her of the disease.

Kim Roper, Drew’s mother, was originally diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2009 after doctors noticed a lump. She went through radiation therapy and thought she was cancer free.

On her one-year check-up, doctors discovered that the cancer had returned. She then had five months of chemotherapy and thought she had beaten it again, but it returned after six weeks. By September, the cancer had spread, and she needed a bone marrow transplant preceded by chemotherapy.

Kim was told that there were no matches for her bone marrow in the national registry. When Drew approached his teammates about the issue, they all chose to join the registry, according to senior teammate, Eric Davidheisser.

“When our teammate told us about how his mom needed a bone marrow transplant, we all got tested,” Davidheisser said. “None of us were a match, so we that’s how we ended up hosting [the Be the Match drive].”

The original goal, according to Davidheisser, was to find a match for Kim, but it has since evolved into something bigger.

“We started out just trying to find a match for [Kim], but now, we just want to get people on the registry,” said Davidheisser, who also pointed out that you never know when someone close to you could be in need of a transplant.

The bone marrow transplant list is primarily made up of patients with leukemia or an immune system disease. There are roughly 10,000 people on the transplant list. Parents and siblings are usually the best matches, but sometimes, patients need to go to the national registry.

Students who volunteered to join the national registry had to fill out some paperwork, and then have their mouth swabbed to be entered into the registry. If the student is a match to someone who needs bone marrow, they have to go through a physical before undergoing surgery to extract the bone marrow.

Sophomore David Glancy, who chose to be entered into the registry, said that entering wasn’t a difficult decision. “It’s not like it took a bunch of time, and all it took was a swab of the mouth,” Glancy said. “I had some free time, so I did it.”

Other students, although admitting that it was for a good cause, were more hesitant about donating. Donating meant that at any time, you could be called and asked to go through surgery to have bone marrow extracted.

The Roper family has made additional efforts to find a bone marrow match for Kim in the form of a website, match4kim.com. According to the site, Penn State’s lacrosse team has also reached out to other teams, including Furman University, University of North Carolina, and University of South Carolina, just to name a few, who have hosted “Be the Match” drives of their own.

Since Oct. 15, as of Dec. 13, Match4Kim has added 3,607 names to the national registry, raised $5,767 in donations, and still no matches for Kim.

Future of the NCAA

Through the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism, a panel of five experts on the NCAA hosted the conversation titled, The Future of the NCAA and Its Membership on Wednesday Oct. 3, where most signs pointed to separation between that schools and the NCAA.

The verdict of what exactly the NCAA future holds, however, was about as certain as the future of the US economy. One thing that was made clear was that the NCAA is changing everyday.

The panel was comprised of two former NCAA presidents (Gene Corrigan and Cedric Dempsey), spokesperson for the Knight Commission Amy Perko, Penn State teacher of sports philosophy Robert Kretchmar, and USA Today sports journalist Thomas O’Toole.

The panelists, who sometimes differed over issues regarding Penn State’s recent issues, all seemed to agree on the concept of the “haves and the have-nots” arising more and more everyday in the NCAA. The “haves” being a group of about 60 BCS schools that are more concerned about earning money for themselves rather than for the entire NCAA.

“Something’s going to happen in the future of a greater separation,” said Dempsey. “You see something everyday. Ohio State indicated they’re not going to play the Mid-American [Conference] anymore. That’s separating again the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, and that’s happening all across the country.”

As more and more schools create these kinds of rules for themselves, such as Ohio State’s exile of MAC programs, more inequalities in revenue sharing would result, causing a significant rift between schools in the NCAA.

“The football bowl series, or the BCS group of schools, and it’s continuing to separate itself more and more from the rest of the membership,” said Dempsey. “I had one commissioner that said, ‘That’s not my job. My job is to make as much money for my conference,’ and if you take that position, that means there’s going to be a lot of have-nots at some point.”

This financial separation, while good for the larger programs, would in time dwindle the NCAA down from 120, to possibly 60, and even less if the same attitude persists. And of course, the concern of maintaining a steady educational theme throughout collegiate athletics becomes endangered as programs begin to earn more and more money.

“[One major challenge is] the huge financial revenues coming in for football and the diverging revenues, if you will, between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, and the situation that’s created, but more so, with regard to the revenues is the answering the question: How are those revenues strengthening the educational missions of the university?” said Perko.

The most recent issue of academic misconduct came from the University of North Carolina, where the school was accused of faking transcripts and making fake classes for football players. The fear of separation also applies to the NCAA’s goal of a “student-athlete.”

“I read constantly where many schools say, ‘We’re going to take the academic sport services and move it away from the Athletic department so that they can be controlled elsewhere on campus.’ I strongly oppose that because all that does is separate more and more the role of athletics on a campus with the academic mission,” said Dempsey.

Save the discussion of Corrigan’s 16-team playoff, few positives of the NCAA were brought up, but Corrigan, with nods of approval from his fellow panelists, showed immense faith in the NCAA.

“The NCAA is a great organization in its heart, and what it does, the opportunities it presents for young people,” said Corrigan. “It does a lot of terrific things. The NCAA and the conferences, when they’re focused on doing the right thing, nobody does it better.”