News Page
9/3/2004
USA Wrestling/
Steven Blackford, 28, a three-time NCAA All-American wrestler at Arizona State, was killed in an automobile accident in Colorado on Friday afternoon.
Blackford and 2004 Olympic silver medalist Sara McMann (Colorado Springs, Colo./Sunkist Kids) were traveling Eastbound I-76 14 miles East of Brush, Colo. when, according to Trooper Gilbert Mares of the Colorado State Patrol Accident Reconstruction Team, the jeep they were in rolled off the right shoulder of the highway. Blackford was ejected from the vehicle.
“We do not suspect that alcohol or drugs played a role in this accident,” Mares stated.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the families, as well as all of their friends within wrestling,” said USA Wrestling Executive Director Rich Bender. “We are also holding Sara in our hearts, hoping for her recovery from this tragic accident. Steve was a fine young man who was a great athlete and an impressive individual. It is a sad day for the wrestling community.”
“The U.S. Olympic Committee extends its condolences to the Blackford family and we grieve with the entire wrestling community at this tragic hour,” stated U.S. Olympic Committee Chief Executive Officer Jim Scherr.
McMann is reportedly in the Colorado Plains Medical Center in Fort Morgan, Colo. Hospital officials could not disclose her condition.
Blackford was enrolled as law school student at Catholic Univ. of America in its Columbus Law School, located in Washington, D.C. McMann was moving from the U.S. Olympic Training Center to live in the Washington, D.C. area to be there with Blackford.
They had just returned from Athens, Greece, where McMann had won a silver medal at the 63 kg/138.75 lbs. Division in women’s freestyle wrestling.
McMann left Colorado Springs, Colo. this morning, joined up with Blackford and they were on their way to the Washington D.C. area.
Blackford placed fourth in the 1999 NCAA Championships, third in the 2000 NCAA Championships and fifth in the 2001 NCAA Championships competing at 165 pounds for Arizona State Univ. He was also a USA Wrestling FILA Junior National freestyle champion in 1997.
He is originally from Des Moines, Iowa, where he where he was a two-time Iowa state wrestling champion for Dowling High School.
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Olympians show many faces of Eli athletics
9/3/04
While Michael Phelps was breaking world records in the pool and the U.S. softball team was shutting out opponent after opponent during the Olympic Games in Athens last month, two Yale women were also quietly making history. Sada Jacobson '06 and Patricia Miranda LAW '07 each became the first athletes to ever win Olympic medals in their sports, women's sabre and women's wrestling, respectively.
These women competed in sports that garner little TV time and even less interest from Yale students, but their accomplishments mean that maybe it's time Yale students rethink their ideas of what it means to be a great athlete.
Jacobson, who was ranked first in the world in her event, the women's sabre, going into the Games, regrouped after an unexpected loss to claim the bronze medal. In doing so, Jacobson became the first Olympic medalist in the women's sabre, which was just added to the Games this year, and the first American woman to ever win a fencing medal. In another Olympic first, Miranda won the bronze medal in women's wrestling, which, in Athens, became an Olympic event for the first time in history. Isabelle Kinsolving '02, a former captain of the Yale sailing team, also performed well, winning fifth place in the women's double-handed dinghy sailing competition.
The competitiveness of these women is inspiring. Their sports are complex, grueling and require finesse and grit. As an undergraduate at Stanford, Miranda competed on the men's wrestling team, going for four years without a single win. Miranda earned her first win as a fifth-year senior and then deferred her entrance into the Law School to train for the Olympics. Jacobson also took time off of Yale to train. But until this summer, neither of their events had ever been included in the Olympics. These women have devoted their lives to these sports, and their goals could never have been an Olympic medal. And Jacobson and Miranda won't make a career out of wrestling or fencing. There's something refreshing about seeing athletes training purely for the love of the sport, without thoughts of or pro contracts or athletic fame.
The performances of Jacobson and Miranda are all the more poignant because they came in sports that aren't even on the horizon for most students here at Yale, where "sports" generally refers only to the big three: football, basketball and hockey. Rather than using the football team's the three-year losing streak in The Game as evidence of the paucity of Yale sports, students should expand their conceptions of athleticism.
Yale teams and athletes regularly win Ivy titles or national honors and rarely do many students take notice. The women's sailing team won nationals this summer, as did the women's squash team last year. Jacobson was ranked number one in the world throughout last year. And still, a favorite Yale pastime during halftime of a basketball game seems to be rethinking admission offers from Stanford or Duke.
Most athletes here never play in the Harvard-Yale game and never have that many of their peers watching and cheering for them. There are a lot of great athletes here that deserve our support and attention, and it shouldn't take an Olympic medal to make us notice them.
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New Student Rep Aims to Make Her Presence Felt: By MATTHEW ARTZ
8/31/04
Anyone who has seen Berkeley’s Board of Education in action has to feel a little bit sorry for this year’s student representative Lily Dorman-Colby.
In return for access to power and a guaranteed head-turner on her college applications, the 17-year-old senior will be asked to sacrifice alternate Wednesday nights to a school board known for shutting down after most local pubs.
But those late hours might be a thing of the past, said Dorman-Colby, who has plenty of incentive to keep the board on schedule.
Her wrestling tournaments are Thursdays. After years of passing through foster homes and vanquishing boys in her 120-pound weight class, the ninth-ranked female wrestler in the country last year isn’t afraid to twist the arm of any school board director that stands between her and a full night’s rest.
“These meetings are ending at 10 p.m.,” she said, tongue partially in cheek. “If they have questions I’ll tell them, ‘Talk to me before the meeting, I’ve got a tournament tomorrow.’”
The role of student director, although lacking a formal vote, is still vital to the board, said Director Shirley Issel. “It keeps us in touch with the kids,” she said.
When the gavel falls, the school board can expect a different brand of student representation from Dorman-Colby, who hails from a more progressive student slate than Bradley Johnson, last year’s representative.
Though Johnson has given Dorman-Colby some insight into board politics, the two disagree on the most divisive academic issues facing the school.
For one, Dorman-Colby is a critic of Academic Choice—the high school’s semi-autonomous program that picks its own teachers, promises more rigorous coursework and traditionally attracts mainly white students. The problem with it, Dorman-Colby said, is that the program sucks up the best teachers and widens the achievement gap.
“Students who can’t do the advanced stuff end up with a poorer teacher when they need a better one,” she said.
Dorman-Colby also supports Identity and Ethnic Studies (IES), a mandatory class for freshmen, that critics, including Johnson, have labeled a dispensary of political correctness and academic fluff. Last year, the board, against Johnson’s urging to scrap the whole program, voted to rename the class and beef up the curriculum.
When the subject moves outside the classroom, Dorman-Colby promised to unify students against unpopular board actions like last year’s decision to implement a new get-tough attendance policy.
Nearly universally condemned by student leaders, the policy calls for truants to lose a letter grade for every five unexcused absences they record in a semester. Three tardies count for one absence.
“Wealthy parents won’t let their kids lose a letter grade. It will only make the achievement gap worse,” said Dorman-Colby, who has lobbied the administration to broadcast the new policy during daily announcements so students have fair warning.
Although Dorman-Colby’s vote on the board is only advisory, she plans to use the bully pulpit of her position to pressure directors to heed student concerns.
“I embody student morale,” she said. “If I say a lot of good things parents will think the high school is doing well. If I say bad things they’ll say the high school has problems.”
To ensure that she isn’t a voice in the wilderness—a place Johnson found himself last year debating the attendance policy—Dorman-Colby is organizing student council elections early this year and formulating a student e-tree so students can be mobilized to defend their interests before the board.
Dorman-Colby got her start in student politics in seventh grade by protesting, of all things, pepperoni. As a vegetarian who qualified for free lunch, she started a petition drive to force the Longfellow Middle School to offer a pizza without the meat-based topping.
At the same time she began to grasp her natural strength.
She joined Longfellow’s football team, but excelled most in mercy, the schoolyard tradition of locking hands to see who can bend their opponents’ wrist backwards.
“I beat everybody, the whole boys’ basketball team had to challenge me,” Dorman-Colby said.
After taking a pounding against boys twice her size her freshman season on Berkeley High’s junior varsity football squad, she took her love of tackling to the wrestling mat.
Dorman-Colby won just three matches her freshman year, but skyrocketed to sixth in the country among girls as a sophomore. Last year she placed ninth in nationals and first in North California and Oregon in her weight class. Against boys, the 5-foot, 2-inch Dorman-Colby finished second in her league, but wasn’t allowed to advance to a regional tournament which didn’t allow inter-gender matches.
While Dorman-Colby shot up the wrestling ranks, her homelife took a tumble. When she was 12, the county removed her and her three brothers from their parents’ house and split them into different foster homes.
“I moved five times in two years,” said Dorman-Colby, who now lives at a friend’s house and visits her parents periodically.
Having never had parental discipline, Dorman-Colby adopted her own strict code of conduct, based on personal responsibility and healthy living. “I’ve never had anyone to rebel against, so I never had a reason to drink or smoke pot,” she said.
Dorman-Colby said her experience both as one of the few white kids in her South Berkeley neighborhood and then as a foster child at the home of an African American family in East Oakland has shaped the beliefs she will take to the school board.
“When you grow up poor you see how African Americans are treated and how no one stands up for their rights,” she said. “I live in a lot of different worlds; worlds that aren’t represented at the school board.”
Dorman-Colby thinks her wrestling career will probably end after this year, but insists her public life is just getting underway.
“I want to be a politician,” she said. “I want to change the world.”