Category: Pursuits
February 7, 2012|Pursuits
In a meeting room in the Frick Center, Elizabeth Romano was casting an icy stare at Joey Carrillo, asking him one more time to tell her the truth about what really happened that fateful night at Chuggy’s Bar.
Romano and Carrillo are members of Elmhurst’s mock trial team, and Chuggy’s is the fictitious nightspot at the heart of the criminal case they and hundreds of other collegiate teams are trying this year. In mock trial competitions, students and their teams earn points for convincingly simulating the roles of attorneys or witnesses in an ersatz courtroom trial. So in this early-morning practice session, Romano was playing a prosecuting attorney; Carrillo, a defendant charged with murder after the death of a passenger in the car he crashed following a long night of drinking at Chuggy’s. Romano’s mission was to punch holes in his account of the night.
“Did you turn on your radar detector even before you started your car for your drive home that night?” Romano’s prosecutor character asked at one point. And when Carrillo, seated in front of her, hesitated, she asked again: “Did you know you were going to drive recklessly that night?”
Romano, Carrillo and the other members of the mock-trial team have been grilling each other like this since August. That’s when they began preparing to try this year’s case, the details of which are laid out in a 300-page black binder supplied by the American Mock Trial Association. Every mock trial team in the nation gets the same black binder, and mastering the evidence and the statements between its covers is one of the basic tasks for competitors. But that’s the easy part. The real challenge has less to do with knowing your facts than with convincing everyone else in a courtroom that you know your facts.
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December 6, 2011|Pursuits
When Meghan Merklein heard the pop, she knew she was through with basketball for a while.
Merklein already was a high-scoring hoops standout at Plainfield Central High School when, late in her sophomore year, she landed awkwardly after leaping for a rebound and badly injured her knee. Doctors would later tell her that she had torn both her anterior cruciate ligament and her medial collateral ligament. But the pop she heard when she injured the knee had already told her all she need to know.
“I knew I was done,” she remembered recently. “It was the worst pain I’ve ever felt.”
Now, nearly six years later, Merklein is a senior pre-med major at Elmhurst leading the Bluejays women’s basketball team to one of its best starts ever. The Bluejays top scorer and rebounder, Merklein scored her 1000th career point last week in the team’s fifth win, a 64-58 road victory at Webster University. Two dates loom large in her plans for 2012: Merklein hopes to lead the Bluejays in NCAA tournament play in March; and in June, she intends to take to take her medical-school admission tests.
The pain she felt in the aftermath of her knee injury helps explain her determination to succeed at both challenges.
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November 22, 2011|Pursuits
MiddleWestern Voice, Elmhurst’s stylish, student-produced arts journal, is both a national award-winner and something of a local mystery.
Last month, the magazine won an Associated Collegiate Press Pacemaker award, sometimes called the Pulitzer Prize of student media. Winning recognition on campus, though, has proven more difficult.
“I’ll tell people that I work on MiddleWestern Voice and they’ll say, ‘MiddleWestern Voice? I didn’t know you were in the choir,’” Creative director Annie Balavitch, a senior graphic design student from Muskegon, Michigan, said in the MWV offices in the basement of the Frick Center last week. “They don’t know we exist.”
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October 7, 2011|Pursuits
When Chris Martin, the new assistant coach of the Elmhurst men’s basketball team, walks from the team’s locker room to the courts in Faganel Hall, he must pass a supersized photo of himself playing for the Bluejays half a decade ago, one of a series lining the corridor. Passing his own framed likeness every day is, Martin admits, “a little weird.” And, he said, the current Bluejays don’t hesitate to give him a hard time about the photo.
Not that Martin minds the teasing. He plays along and fires back. “I tell them, ‘Do things right, and you’ll have your own photo up there someday,’” Martin said after a team workout earlier this week.
Martin did a lot of things right when he was playing for Elmhurst.
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September 7, 2011|Pursuits
Aaron Armstrong would like to tell you something about cheerleaders.
Armstrong is the coach of Elmhurst’s 15-student cheer squad, and at a recent practice he made sure to set the record straight about cheerleading.
“There’s this stereotype out there,” Armstrong told a visitor during a water break. “People think cheerleaders are all about being . . . peppy.”
But forget about the stereotype. What Armstrong and his cheerleaders want you to know is that cheerleading is a sport. And to succeed in a sport, you have to be an athlete.
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March 23, 2011|Pursuits
On the last afternoon before the start of spring break, the suite of student life offices in the Frick Center looked a little like a hotel lobby. Hurried people wheeled luggage around, traded goodbye hugs, wished each other happy travels. In one of the offices, Kevin Scheibel and Katie Schroeder were looking forward to a week of manual labor.
Scheibel, a sophomore, and Schroeder, a senior, each are leading one of the four teams of Elmhurst students fanning out across the country during the break to build new homes for Habitat for Humanity, the nonprofit organization that provides affordable housing for people in need.
Scheibel’s team will be working in Biloxi, Mississippi; Schroeder’s in Americus, Georgia. Others are heading to New Mexico and South Carolina, to put up siding, shingle roofs, install windows, cut wood trim and otherwise do what they can to help a good cause.
If your idea of a college spring break is limited to some combination of beaches, bikinis and beer, you probably haven’t heard students like Scheibel or Schroeder talk about the value of a different kind of spring break.
A year ago, Scheibel went to New Orleans with a few dozen other Elmhurst students to work on a Habitat project. He spent most of that week putting up siding, a job he had never attempted before, but one that became his specialty.
“It was one of the greatest experiences of my life,” Scheibel said last week, as he prepared for this year’s trip.
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November 24, 2010|Pursuits
The first meeting of Elmhurst College’s newest student organization had just begun, and already from a back corner of the Blume Board Room in the Frick Center came a question. “Are we going to wear capes?” someone wanted to know.
You don’t ordinarily hear a lot of discussion of cape-wearing in the Frick Center, but then there is nothing very ordinary about the Elmhurst College Quidditch Society. Quidditch is, of course, Harry Potter’s favorite game, and the ECQS must be the only club on campus devoted to translating a fictional pastime into an actual one. It won’t be easy. Harry Potter’s game is played above the rooftops by teams of wizards on flying brooms. The members of the ECQS, because they lack Potter-like magical powers, will have to play a more earthbound version that has lately become popular on college campuses: Players race around a field with broomsticks between their legs, scoring points by whipping volleyballs through elevated hoops.
The prospect of playing quidditch on the mall—and of turning Elmhurst, even for a few shining moments, into a quasi-Hogwarts—was enough to inspire an impressive turnout for the club’s first meeting. Thirty-five new quidditch players signed up. “What Harry Potter fan hasn’t dreamed of playing quidditch?” said first-year Christopher Puenner, when I asked him about the game’s appeal. “I mean, not to be corny, but this is like a dream come true.”
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