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(10/22/20 10:00am)
For this week’s Throwback Thursday, we revisit two spectacular weekend performances by the women’s cross country team, led by Middlebury Hall of Fame inductee Karin Von Berg ’81. Not only did Von Berg start off with a 15th place finish in the Bonne Bell 10,000-meter mini marathon on Oct. 9, she also led the Panthers to victory at the Oct. 14 Cross Country NESCAC Championships.
Because she found Vermont to be “lacking in competition,” Von Berg traveled to Boston to compete in the Bonne Bell race against a field of 4,500 women from schools nationwide. North Carolina State’s star runner Joan Benoit ultimately took the gold, setting a road race world record with a time of 33:15. Although Von Berg ran with the top four finishers for the first two and a half miles, she eventually dropped back during the middle of the race. Most notably, she was passed by Duke University’s Ellison Groodall, who almost won the 1977 NCAA Cross Country Championships, and Marth Cooksey, who had the third-fastest marathon time of 1978. Von Berg herself crossed the finish line in an impressive 15th place with a time of 35:39.
Only one week later, at the NESCAC Championships, Von Berg took the lead from the very beginning and never looked back. She easily captured the NESCAC title with a 5K time of 20:50, setting a new course record and finishing an entire one minute and 19 seconds ahead of her teammate Alice Tower ’81, who took the silver medal. Fellow Panthers Tara McMenamy ’82 and Anne Leggett ’81 finished in 6th and 11th place, respectively.
According to the Oct. 19, 1978 edition of The Middlebury Campus, “although the NESCAC meet is not scored by teams, the Panthers showed that they were far and away the strongest squad in the conference” and captured the unofficial conference gold.
Von Berg later went on to win the 1979 Friehoffer’s National AAU 10K Championship, beating nearly 600 competitors and finishing with a personal best time of 34:26. She also won the 1,500- and 5,000-meter races at the 1979 NESCAC Track Championships, and her time of 4:28.9 in the 1,500 still stands as the current school and NESCAC meet record.
(10/15/20 10:00am)
Middlebury Panthers rallied behind a different sort of competition this semester: trying to outraise each other in financial aid fundraising for the college’s two-day MOVEMIDD Challenge.
The MOVEMIDD Challenge called on the Middlebury community to come together and raise money for the college’s financial aid budget from Sept. 30 to Oct. 1. College trustees set the overarching goal for the campaign, promising that if 1,800 donors joined the effort (a number set in honor of Middlebury’s founding year), they would donate an extra $220,000 to celebrate the college’s 220th birthday. The fundraiser ultimately raised $985,405 from 2,976 donors, exceeding the college’s expectations for both donor and monetary support.
“With nearly 3,000 donors participating, we are thrilled with the results,” Alanna Shanley ’99, the executive director of annual giving and donor relations, said.
The Middlebury Athletics Office used the fundraiser to create friendly competition among teams, challenging current and previous student-athletes to contribute to the campaign. In a promotional video produced by the Athletics Office to support the MOVEMIDD Challenge, Director of Athletics Erin Quinn ’86 called upon donors to support the nearly 30% of Middlebury students who compete in a varsity sport.
“Top-level athletes choose Middlebury because they want to be challenged in the classroom and they want to excel at the sport they love. That’s why the MOVEMIDD Challenge is so important,” Quinn stated in the video. “Gifts to financial aid allow the best student-athletes to enroll at Middlebury, regardless of their financial circumstances. With a gift to the MOVEMIDD Challenge, you’ll help to ensure that we never have to turn away the athletes that make our Panther program strong and competitive.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/CFzMstPBKLr/
Kitty Bartlett, the director of annual giving, said the goal for the so-called Panthers Give Back athletics sub-campaign was set at 1,200 donors because that was roughly the number of gifts contributed by athletes during last year’s Proud to be a Panther Challenge. Although only 1,140 Panthers donated this year, the athletes still raised a total of $104,936 for financial aid. Men’s and women’s lacrosse topped the respective male and female donor leaderboards, in large part due to their “very active alumni networks [which allowed them to] attract the highest rate of participation from their rosters of alumni,” according to Shanley. Men’s lacrosse’s 268 donors raised $27,222, while women’s lacrosse’s 58 donors raised $5,638. Football also raised a notable $26,493 from 147 donors.
According to Shanley, the MOVEMIDD Challenge was hosted through an online crowdfunding platform that showed real-time progress toward the college’s goals during the two-day campaign. The fundraiser was promoted through postcards, emails, texts and social media. Volunteer class agents, representing different decades of Middlebury alumni, also reached out to their classmates personally to encourage support for current Middlebury students. The Athletics Office promoted the challenge through coaches and athletics staff, who worked with the Office of Advancement and volunteers to share the challenge with alumni, parents and friends of varsity sports.
Of the 2,976 total donors, the largest numbers came from Massachusetts with 558 donors, New York with 360, Vermont with 263 and California with 236. Of Massachusetts's 558 donors, 250 were athletes. The challenge also extended its reach worldwide, with 21 donors from the United Kingdom, nine from China and five from Canada, in addition to other donations from Brazil, Germany, India and France.
Shanley said she hopes Middlebury will build upon the success of this year’s MOVEMIDD Challenge and continue to support Panther financial aid in the future, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. “Thank you to the amazing Middlebury community — alumni, parents, friends, coaches, faculty, staff and students — for coming together to support students in this most unusual year,” Shanley said.
(03/12/20 10:00am)
A 17-year-old girl, the oldest of six children, was offered the chance to go to leave her town and make money for herself and her family. She was brought by a male acquaintance to Delhi, where she proceeded to work as a maid for a family. By the time she realized she wasn’t being paid, it was too late. Her “friend” was long gone with the money, and she was left with only the hope of being rescued.
This is the labor trafficking story shared by one of the 106 girls who attended the second annual East India Hockey Project (EIHP), a weeklong field hockey camp and tournament aimed at combating trafficking by helping female athletes ages 14–17 gain self-confidence and leadership skills to bring back to their communities. The EIHP is run through a partnership between Middlebury College, the US State Department, the Indian Consulate and the anti-trafficking NGO Shakti Vahini. It was led by head coach Katherine DeLorenzo and assistant coach Rachel Palumbo, with support from five alumnae who attended the first camp in November of 2018 and seven current players: senior Kelly Coyle, junior Erin Nicholas and sophomores Grace Harlan, Riley Marchin, Grace Murphy, Hannah Sullivan and Joan Vera. The program is based in Jharkhand, one of the most remote and impoverished regions in India. Each girl who attended the camp is at a high risk for human trafficking.
“On the surface level, it seems like we’re just playing field hockey, like what is that doing?” Coyle said. “But it’s the small, intangible things about telling the girls to speak up, plus their additional workshops [that teach them] how to use their voice in all those scenarios, that make a difference. Seeing all that together, it made it seem like the impact was a lot bigger than just coming to the field and playing hockey.”
Although the camp only ran from January 27 to February 3, the field hockey girls arrived in India on the 5th, along with eight members of Middlebury’s BOLD Scholars, a women’s leadership program. The students all traveled to Delhi and Kolkata together, and while the athletes helped with the EIHP, the BOLD Scholars worked at a school peace fair. During their travels, Baishaki Taylor, vice president for student affairs, and Rebekah Irwin, the director and curator the Special Collections & Archives, taught a special winter term class for the students, focusing on gender in Indian society.
“It’s really easy to come in and do a workshop and leave,” Taylor said. “Given our commitment and our mission statement, we want Middlebury students to be able to leave this campus and be ready to address and actually make meaningful contributions to the communities that they live in, no matter where it is. [We want them to] be able to address some of the world’s most challenging problems, not just go in and do a project. The class part provided some glimpses to get a sense of the differences and similarities the world’s largest democracy has [in common] with the world’s strongest democracy.”
It is estimated that over 30,000 young women are trafficked each year from Jharkhand alone, and the EIHP aims to combat this tradition. In addition to practicing field hockey from 8 a.m to 4 p.m each day, the players attended informative workshops. The Shakti Vahini leaders taught the girls practical skills to bring home, such as learning how to spot human traffickers, how to intervene in different situations and how to record evidence on a phone to build a case against a trafficker. At night, the girls were encouraged to share their stories with each other through performative arts, and at the end of the camp, four stories were selected to be professionally reproduced.
“The girls were all inspirations to everyone who traveled from our team,” said Nicholas. “We kept saying the whole trip that we were probably getting out of it more than they were because we were learning from them the whole time. They have been through so much, and then would come to the field everyday so excited to learn. They’d be dancing in circles and laughing and having a great time and finding the joy in every little moment that they had.”
At the end of the week, the Panthers hosted a tournament for the girls, an event attended by local press and students and even Marie Royce, the assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs. On the last day, the five most outstanding campers were invited to come to Middlebury in April, where they will have the opportunity to attend the spring field hockey training camp and immerse themselves in the American culture.
“One of the girls who I coached all week had won the ‘Most Outstanding Defensive Player’ award had a smile on her face the entire week,” Coyle said. “She was always giggling, always laughing. But on the last day, she started [crying]. One of the interpreters explained that she had never experienced this kind of attention or award or recognition in her life and it was completely overwhelming for her. [She] received awards and people [were] paying attention to her and honoring her in a way she had never [had] before in [her] life.”
(04/11/19 9:55am)
As you probably know, NCAA March Madness is officially over as Virginia beat Texas Tech 85-77 on Monday night. If you’re looking for a technical recap of the game, look elsewhere. We here on The Campus will leave the hard-hitting Division I reporting to the professionals because we know what our readers are really craving: the results of the 2019 MiddMadness school-wide bracket.
Coming in first with an incredibly strong showing was Abraham Beningson ’21, who will receive $150 in his declining balance. Beningson finished with 1710 points, a full 230 points ahead of the second place finisher. Beningson correctly predicted each team that made it to the Final Four and picked Virginia to win it all against Texas Tech, 67-61. He placed 164th overall among all NCAA March Madness brackets. When asked about his selection technique, Beningson said he did a little bit of research but mostly balanced realistic expectations with some personal bias. “I started out by picking a fair amount of upsets in the first round because those are fun to cheer for and fun to get right,” Beningson said. “These were generally due to a small amount of stat research: if the team had a good defense or shot a lot of 3s, I was inclined to pick them – or for bias, like with UVM. Ultimately though, I wanted to have a good chance at picking the winner because that’s worth the most points, so I went with Virginia. I couldn’t go with the complete fa- vorite in Duke because that would be boring.”
Last year, Beningson used the same strategy but placed in the middle of the college’s bracket, and he attributes this year’s success to chance. “There’s absolutely no question about
it: the only reason I did this well was by being totally lucky,” Beningson said. “The tournament is just so unpredictable that an infinite amount of knowledge about college basketball really isn’t that much better than no knowledge at all. I’m just concerned that I’ve used up all my good luck for the foreseeable future.”
Coming in 342nd place, in a tragic last place finish, was freshman Jake Gaughan. Despite following college basketball “fairly closely” throughout the year and doing “pretty average in his other brackets, Gaughan finished the MiddMadness bracket with only 210 points. Gaughan predicted Vermont would take it all the way, despite their first-round loss. He told The Campus, “I always pick the Catamounts. They have three brothers [Robin, Ernie and Everett Duncan] on the team, and if that isn’t enough to win a national championship, I don’t know what is.”
The Campus checked in with Ben Yamron, the bottom finisher in last year’s Roll Pants! bracket, to see how the sophomore fared this time around. This year, Yamron finished in 333rd place, nine places higher than last year, but said he used the same selection strategy. “It is just instinct, you know?” Yamron said. “You see two teams in the matchup, and a sign hits you and you just know. You gotta go with your gut. Last year, this worked out very poorly, but this year I improved, so if I keep going with the process and and keep my eye on the prize, by senior year I’ll have a bracket I can be proud of.”
By 2021, The Campus hopes to see Yamron crack the top 200.
(03/14/19 9:56am)
Sports Editor’s Note:
I am a member of the women’s varsity swim team. I spend 20 hours a week selling my soul to the pool. Water is my natural element.
That being said, log rolling is hard. Really hard. For someone so confident, I spent a truly embarrassing amount of time sinking below the surface, rather than spinning on top. The movement itself seemed simple enough as I observed from the deck. However, once on the log, it didn’t matter how many times I was told to stop jutting my butt backward and flailing my arms; I simply couldn’t stay up for longer than 10 seconds.
I sincerely applaud the log rolling team on their amazing abilities and focus. Best of luck this weekend!
Middlebury’s log rolling club will host the 2019 Middlebury Invitational this Saturday, March 16 in the Natatorium. The event will begin with an informal coaching workshop from 12:00-1:00 p.m. and then transition into the tournament from 2:00-5:00 p.m. The Panthers will face off against teams from George Mason University and the University of Vermont. Middlebury students of all log rolling abilities are invited to join both parts of the event.
“We’re just going to be rolling here all day Saturday,” social chair Chloe Fleischer ’21.5 said. “Even if people have never rolled before, we still encourage them to come out because there’s a lot of people who will be rolling for the first time at the tournament. It will be super casual and fun.”
In a log rolling competition, two rollers stand side-by-side on the log and must manipulate the log by spinning and rocking in order to knock the other person off. Participants may not touch each other or cross the center line but are allowed to splash as a means of distraction. If the rollers are facing the same direction on the log, it’s called a running match; if they are not, it’s called a bucking match, and a roller receives a point each time their competition falls off the log first.
A typical tournament begins with a round-robin session in which participants are placed in small groups and compete within that group in a best out of three format. Based on the results, rollers are then seeded into the actual tournament bracket and compete in a best out of five match.
Middlebury’s team meets twice a week on Sunday afternoons from 3:30-5:00 p.m. and Wednesday nights from 7:00-8:30. Club president Sarah Howard ’19 first joined the team after being exposed to log rolling during international orientation and said that even though log rolling is technically classified as a recreational club, she considers it to be a real sport.
“It’s physically exerting, and there’s a lot of learning and skill development,” Howell said. “It doesn’t come naturally to anyone. You have to get used to the sensation of something rolling under your feet in the water and get over the idea that you’re not going to die and hit your head. When I first got on the log, I was on for a split second, but now I’ve greatly improved.”
Middlebury boasts the oldest ties to log rolling on any college campus; it was approved as a PE credit in 2005 and as an official club in 2011. The sport came to the Panthers with the arrival of the Hoeschler sisters: Katie ’03.5, Lizzie ’05 and Abby ’10. The three were trained by their mother, a world log rolling champion, and their family donated the first log to the college. Abby is now the founder of Key Log Rolling, a company that makes the 65-pound synthetic logs the team currently rolls on. Key Logs spin like traditional 350-pound wood logs but are much more accessible for college campuses.
Today, the club is coached by Danielle Rougeau, an Assistant Curator of Special Collections and College Archives. Rougeau initially signed up to log roll when Katie hosted an informal class in 2004 but became immediately hooked on the sport.
“I saw it offered and I thought, ‘How cool is this? I will never have an opportunity to do this again,’” Rougeau said. “But there’s nothing else that feels like rolling. It was really about centering yourself and balancing yourself, and I just loved the sport. It was low-impact, not dangerous and a ton of fun. It was really quite addictive.”
Under Rougeau’s leadership, Middlebury’s team has already won numerous past tournaments and looks to be a favorite this weekend. Rougeau said the Panthers “sweep most competitions” because Middlebury is one of few schools with regular access to logs for practice and has a core team of about seven passionate rollers.
“My rollers are now getting good enough that they beat me,” Rougeau said with a smile. “For me, coaching is a true joy. [I love coming to practice] because I get to be a better teacher and they get to be better rollers. Then, hopefully they’ll keep teaching other kids for years to come.”
(01/17/19 10:50am)
(09/13/18 10:00am)
Sarah Staver ’19 (right) begins a serve during this past weekend’s tournament. To start off the season, the women’s volleyball team competed in the Wheaton Invitational. The Panthers started off strong, beating Worcester State 3-0 on Friday, September 7.MICHAEL BORENSTEIN
The team continued their momentum on Saturday, winning against Farmingdale State 3-0 in the morning. The ladies eventually fell to Wheaton College in the afternoon, finishing their last tournament match with a score of 3-1. Junior Chellsa Ferdinand was a key player in the tournament, with 62 assists, 14 kills and 4 service aces, and was named to the all-tournament team. On Tuesday, September 11, on the road at Plymouth State University, the Panthers won 3-1, setting their overall record at 3-1. Women’s volleyball looks forward to their first home game against Amherst on Friday, September 14.