National Champs! Stevenson 16, RIT 14

From near Ground Zero to the pinnacle in nine years.  When I joined the faculty at Stevenson, the lacrosse team, along with most other teams, played on the "front field" on the original Greenspring campus before standing-only "crowds" that could typically be counted in the teens.  Even for a Division III school, the program was small-time.  This past Sunday in Philadelphia, Nicky and I watched the Mustangs win a wild 16-14 game against RIT and claim the school's first national title in any sport.

We were up in the club level at Lincoln Financial Field, rather at a distance from the main clutch of SU supporters.  This was because we'd purchased our tickets early, right after Stevenson beat Salisbury in the semifinals.  It took the school a while to get up to speed and organize mass bus transportation for the 400-odd additional people who came up from Baltimore.  Happily, we were able to mingle with the others at a local watering hole before the game.  We also really liked the club level, which featured padded seats and separate facilities for food and drink and provided an excellent view of the action.

You can watch highlights of the game below.  The full video is available at the NCAA Web site.

Stevenson Plays for a Championship

 

On Sunday at Philadelphia's Lincoln Financial Field, Stevenson's men's lacrosse team will play Rochester Institute of Technology for the Division III national title.  After falling at the semifinal stage three previous times, the Mustangs finally broke through to the title game last Sunday by beating arch-rival Salisbury 12-6.  Nicky and I were on hand. 

Entertainment for the "Math"es

Last weekend, Stevenson hosted the Spring Meeting of the MD-DC-VA Section of the Mathematical Association of America.  Translation:  about 150 faculty and students from colleges and universities throughout the region descended upon the Owings Mills Campus for food, drink, quantitative enlightenment, and the renewal of old and/or continuing professional ties.  The visitors included my old colleague from Virginia State University, Dr. Dawit Haile, seen below on my left.  

   

... And, yes, that's the familiar profile of Nicky standing by the table.  She helped us out registering attendees before the Friday-night banquet and also with the book sale during Saturday's meeting.

This meeting was originally proposed by both myself and Dr. Susan Slattery as a way of "introducing" SU's Math Department, not to mention the school itself, to the wider mathematical community.  No such meeting had ever been held on our campus before.  Dr. Slattery's death in August 2010 left me to chair the planning committee and to try to draw together the many dozens of logistical threads that bind together a successful enterprise of this type.  With the help of other faculty, staff, and students, I think that we pulled it off quite well indeed.  The comments from our visitors were uniformly positive.  Well... some wished that they had been allowed to park directly in front of the School of Business and Leadership Building, where most of the events of Saturday morning and afternoon took place.  That night, unfortunately, was THE game of the year on the SU sports calendar: the men's lacrosse match with Salisbury.  Even the honored guests had to take a back seat to the tailgaters who had long since claimed the parking field by the SOBL for their pregame activities.  We wound up having the visitors park in the Mustang Stadium parking lot and take shuttle buses up the hill to the main campus.

So, how do mathematicians spend their time at these meetings?  Well, eating and drinking (the latter very much including extensive consumption of coffee, of course), attending talks by faculty and students, buying books at the book sale... and, as is traditional at our Section's Spring Meetings, mounting "just for students" contests.  "Radical Dash" is our version of The Amazing Race, with teams of students being given different quantitative tasks to complete over the span of the meeting.  These included figuring out how to move water in large containers from one place to another, using smaller containers.  It's not as simple as it sounds, which may explain why students seem to have perpetual trouble with those pesky "mixture" word problems you find in algebra texts. 

And what would a gathering of enlightened wits such as ourselves be without a smokin' hot game of Jeopardy!  Only in this case, the categories include such "audience-targeted" fare as "Hey, Baby, What's Your Sine?".  We held this event in the SOBL's Pugh Courtroom, a space normally used for mock trials by Paralegal and Forensics students, which allowed the judges to really get into the judgmental spirit by sitting where "Your Honor" would normally sit.  Imagine Alex Trebek as Judge Judy...

I felt a great deal of satisfaction at the end of the meeting.  Best of all, perhaps, I felt that Susan Slattery would have been proud.

Nigel Holmes and F.W. de Klerk

Several big names visited Stevenson's campus this week, and I was able to attend presentations by both of them. Wednesday night, "explanation graphics" expert Nigel Holmes spoke by invitation of the SU School of Design. If you're a regular reader of such magazines as TIME and NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, you've no doubt seen a number of Nigel's imaginative designs, many of which get across quantitative information in memorable and humorous ways. His talk covered many of his basic principles of composition (including: keep it simple, don't go overboard with color, and try to make people smile) and included a brief history of the development of informative graphic design. (Ever wonder who came up with the idea of those generic human icons that you find adorning bathroom doors, street signs, and other public places? Find out more here.) Nigel also showed us some of his sketches and paintings, plus pages from a children's book that makes full use of a number of his techniques.

I had an ulterior motive for going to Nigel's talk. I do a lot of my lecturing in my Elementary Statistics classes with PowerPoint and wanted to find out how I could make the presentations more, well, sexy. (I suppose that "exciting" is an impossible dream when it comes to PowerPoint, but I can try, right?) I did get some good ideas (not to mention references) from the experience and hope to put them into practice.

Last night, former South African President and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate F.W. de Klerk became the latest notable to speak at the Stevenson-sponsored Baltimore Speaker Series. Nicky and I have gone to a number of these affairs -- including a pre-speech dinner with author David McCullough -- and this was one of the better talks that I can remember. De Klerk was impressive and compelling as he spoke of how South Africa ended apartheid and the lessons that the experience may hold for other nations undergoing dangerous but necessary transformational change (we're looking at you, Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, et al.). De Klerk also spoke on campus earlier in the day (while I was teaching, I regret to say), and I hope he got a good turnout. Last night, Baltimore's Meyerhoff Symphony Hall was jammed. Nicky and I remember the very first Speaker Series event we attended, when Jim Lovell was the guest and there were large clusters of empty chairs on the floor of the hall. The BSS has become a popular institution, and next month, the speakers for next year will be announced. Apparently, there have been some complaints that the speakers have been "too political" (though the roster has been ideologically balanced for the most part), so we're expecting a somewhat lighter tone in 2011-2012.

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This news just in from SU: Men's Basketball Coach Brett Adams is stepping down to devote his full energies to his duties as athletic director. The men have just concluded a 6-19 campaign (the girls were 4-21). Not exactly the best way to "protect the new house" at Owings Mills, but I expect that the "rising tide" created by the excitement of the new football program will have a "boat-lifting" effect on many of SU's athletics programs, including hoops. The lax team, which presently needs little leverage, won its first game and is currently ranked #3 in Division III.

Gridiron Gear-Up

The schedule for Stevenson's first season of football next fall has been released. The Mustangs are in a challenging, Pennsylvania-based league, and their first home game on Sept. 10 is against a team that made the NCAA Division III Tournament last year. We're getting all sorts of happy talk at the SU Web site about the brave new world of football competition, but my Mom's alma mater, which is about as old as Stevenson, introduced football just two years ago, and its record speaks for itself. If we can "break our duck" during the 2011 season, I'll be more than happy with that, even if we do little else.

The basketball teams are slogging through another poor season. The guys are presently 6-14, the girls 2-18. At least the new digs at Owings Mills are getting good reviews.

Only at Stevenson would you hear: "When does lacrosse season start?" Maybe football can do something about that starting later in 2011.

Four on the (Lucas Oil Stadium) Floor

Final Four time again, and at least I got one of the four participants right, picking West Virginia to defeat Kentucky. The young, talented, and clueless Wildcats cooperated in full by heaving up enough bricks against the Mountaineers to satisfy even Ignatz Mouse. I also correctly predicted the Butler-Kansas State and Duke-Baylor Elite Eight set-tos but got the winners wrong. Extenuating circumstances may be claimed in the former case, as the NCAA and CBS obliged K-State to play the early game last Saturday after the Wildcats had barely survived an epic double-OT thriller with Xavier two nights before. Nicky can vouch for the fact that I predicted that K-State would poop out long before CBS' Gregg Doyel made the same point in his blog after the fact. Between getting a fried opponent in the Regional final and playing an Arinze Onuaku-less Syracuse in the Sweet 16, Butler's first Final Four appearance benefited from a huge helping of good fortune. Remember that the Bulldogs only beat Murray State (the school in Kentucky, not the dancing academy) by two points in the second round. Butler getting to play the national semi a few miles from its campus in Indy is a great story, and I certainly wouldn't mind if they scratched out two more wins in their unspectacular but effective fashion, but my gut tells me that Michigan State's experience will prevail in Saturday's first Final Four game.

The game between Duke and West Virginia will probably decide the national champion. Here, I think that Duke's team intelligence will rule the day. Mike Krzyzewski is not going to stand idly by like a mannequin, as John Calipari did while Kentucky was melting down and missing shot after shot. I figure that, given the extra time to prepare, Coach K will figure out how to get his shooters good looks. I like Duke over WVU by a handful of points. Then, in Monday's final, last year repeats itself as Michigan State hits the wall, Duke wins relatively easily, and Krzyzewski bags his fourth national title -- and his most unexpected one apart from 1991, when a youngish Blue Devil team shocked unbeaten UNLV in the national semis.

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Speaking of big-time (relatively speaking, that is) sports showdowns this weekend, #1 Stevenson plays #2 Salisbury in men's lacrosse on Saturday afternoon at the Owings Mills athletic complex. The two schools' women's teams will play in the morning. This is as big as it gets for Stevenson athletics -- the games have been hyped on Stevenson's home page for a solid week -- and I hope to get over there with Nicky to see at least part of the action. Neither of us "get" lacrosse, but it is definitely an "in" sport around here and the laxers are the closest thing Stevenson has to big athletic stars on campus.

Our "Predominantly Losing" Season

(Advance apologies to Pat Conroy for riffing on his title.)

Stevenson University's death march of a basketball campaign is finally over. The men finished 2-23 (with both wins coming against Gallaudet), the women 5-18. Though some unintentional levity was provided along the way, it seriously remains to be seen whether the programs can be competitive in the Capital Athletic Conference. The men are a combined 15-61 in their three years since joining the CAC, while the women have gone 18-56. With a new gym set to open next year and football set to debut as a varsity sport at SU in 2011, the need for basketball to improve becomes all the more imperative. Far be it from me to dismiss out of hand SU's current status as a D3 power in lacrosse, but, once the pigskinners begin their fall exercises, the old-fashioned pecking order in college sports -- 1. football, 2. basketball, 3. all else -- is bound to assert itself.

SU's student newspaper, THE VILLAGER, tried to put the best face on things by describing the men as suffering through a "predominantly losing" season. I know the writer's heart was in the right place, but I couldn't help but be reminded of Jimmy Carter's description of the failed Iranian hostage rescue mission as an "incomplete success."