Archive for November, 2008
Hooping it Up
On Monday morning, my colleague Jayson Jackson and I made our way across campus for the annual United Way Charity Stripe Challenge. We had a reputation to maintain.
Some background: The Charity Stripe Challenge is a free-throwing shooting contest featuring three-person teams from throughout the University competing to raise money for the Centre County United Way. I was recruited last fall to be part of the Alumni Association’s team, joining Jayson (associate director of online communications, aka our Web guru) and executive director Roger Williams. We did pretty well last year, so I guess I should’ve been excited about doing it again.
Nervous is more like it.
I think I’ve stepped on a basketball court twice in the past year, a fact that did little for my confidence on Monday morning. Also, I used to work for a basketball magazine, information that led some of my co-workers to mistakenly assume that I’m actually a good basketball player. I’m not — I did dunk, twice, in Rec Hall as an undergrad, but that was a looooong time ago — and I walked onto the practice court at the Bryce Jordan Center on Monday feeling anything but confident.
Maybe I should lack confidence more often. With a few teams ahead of us, Jayson and I warmed up on a side basket for about 15 minutes, then stepped up to take our turn. The Charity Stripe format has each teammate taking five shots at a time, which is helpful — the breaks make it harder to dwell on your misses and easier to re-focus on the deceptively difficult act of tossing a ball through a hoop — then rotating through the three-person lineup, until all three shooters have taken 25 shots.
I shot first. We were offered five warm-up shots if we wanted them. I made my first three warm-ups and was told I could retro-actively count those as the start of my “real” shots.
I did. I’m not stupid.
I finished with 21, matching Jayson’ team high from last season and surpassing my wildest dreams. Jayson knocked down 18, which disappointed him, but is still pretty good. And Roger? Due to a scheduling mix-up, Roger didn’t get to the gym until well after we finished, which meant we couldn’t shoot as a team. I know that would’ve thrown me off, and I think it might have affected Roger, who had to shoot without us and made eight shots. (I’m expecting him to double that number next year.)
The final tally? We finished ninth out of 28 teams, which isn’t bad at all. Personally, I took pride in making more shots than former Penn State basketball player (and current Nittany Lion Club rep) Nate Althouse, who I covered as a Collegian reporter back in the early-mid ’90s, and Brian Siegrist, the sports information contact for the men’s basketball team, who should’ve outshot me by default. (Brian, if you’re reading this, please don’t revoke my credential…) More humbly, I should shout out Doug Anderson, dean of the College of Communications, who somehow shot with four different groups and broke 20 every time — including a University-high 24. As a Comm grad, I must say, I’m proud.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
Where Story Ideas Come From
We get story ideas for The Penn Stater magazine from all over. Readers suggest ideas. We see something in the news that makes a story idea occur to us. We have Google Alerts set to all kinds of Penn State-related names and phrases. The boss suggests ideas. (Not too often, actually—he’s great about that.)
On Saturday I went to an informal lecture that gave me an idea for a story, or maybe more than one story. Before every home game, the Alumni Association holds a “Huddle with the Faculty” program at the Nittany Lion Inn, where a faculty member talks about a topic related to his or her area of expertise. The one before the Indiana game was Peter Dillon, chair of the surgery department at the Hershey Medical Center. He gave a great PowerPoint about how surgery has become soooooo much more technologically advanced, especially in recent years. He talked a lot about minimally invasive surgery, in which tiny little instruments can be threaded into various spots in the body and images can be displayed on high-resolution monitors in the OR. As a result, incisions are smaller, surgery can be done more quickly, and recovery time is shorter.
He showed some cool photos of surgical “supersuites,” which have all kinds of computers, video monitors, and the like. This photo of a supersuite at Hershey doesn’t quite do justice to it (I just grabbed it off the Public Information Web site), but suffice it to say the supersuites are very high-tech:
(Photo by Greg Grieco)
Hershey has five supersuites and has 11 more fancy operating rooms (I can’t remember if he said they would qualify as “supersuites” or what) in the design phase.
Anyway, I’m sure there’s a story for The Penn Stater somewhere in here. One possibility might be a feature-length Q&A—we’re trying to do more of those, and Dillon is very articulate and quotable; he really can explain stuff in lay language. He talks about how the U.S. compares to other countries in terms of developing new surgical technologies, he talks about how some of these technologies have changed cancer treatment, and he talks about what advances we might see next. He got an appreciative round of applause when he said, “CT scans may eventually replace such lovely annual events as colonoscopies.”
Another approach for us in covering this might be a photo essay. Maybe when the next supersuite is completed, we use that as our “news peg” to run some photos of one of these ORs. Dillon says there’s so much technology and so many monitors everywhere that it’s like walking into Circuit City.
Anyway, the idea might not come to fruition in the form of a story for many months, if at all. Dillon doesn’t even know I’m thinking about it—I didn’t even get a chance to meet him after his presentation; there was a gaggle of alumni wanting to ask him questions. And I haven’t even mentioned this idea to the staff—it is Sunday, after all. But his presentation yesterday definitely got the wheels turning in my head.
Tina Hay, editor
The Hartranft Horror
We’ve received a couple of e-mails from readers who noticed that our November/December “Faces Behind the Buildings” [p. 18] put Hartranft Hall in the wrong part of campus. (We said it was East Halls, when it’s really in Pollock.)
I’m the copy editor for the magazine, which means (among other things) that I read everything in The Penn Stater and try to make sure it’s correct. For me, the Hartranft situation is a good illustration of something I’ve discovered about editing: If I get really fixated on making sure that one item in a sentence is correct, there’s probably something else wrong that I’m overlooking elsewhere in the sentence. I was so worried about spelling “Hartranft” right that I missed the fact that we had given the dorm a new address.
Thanks to readers for catching the mistake….
Chas Brua, contributing editor
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