The Case Western Reserve University women’s track and field team had a pair of conference champions and totaled eight All-University Athletic Association honors during the 2025 outdoor season.

Graduate student Michaela Burkhauser and senior Rachel Ginn both brought home gold for the Spartans at the 2025 UAA Outdoor Championships held at the Icahn Stadium in Manhattan, New York. On the first day of the competition, Ginn won the hammer throw with a toss of 50.61 meters, a personal best mark. Graduate student Ailean Duffie placed second in the event with a heave of 48.86 meters to receive All-UAA honors for the second time in her career. Burkhauser thew the discus at least three meters further than the rest of the competition, taking the UAA title in the event with a toss of 45.06 meters. Earlier in the meet, she placed second in the shot put, giving her two All-UAA honors at both the indoor and outdoor championships. Junior Michelle Lee placed second in the discus throw to earn her third career All-UAA award.

Overall, CWRU placed fourth in the conference for the second consecutive year and third time since the 2022 championship. Sophomore Holly Schreiber was on the conference podium for the first time in her career, placing second in the pole vault by clearing 3.57 meters. Participating in her first career conference championship, first-year Sarah Viveiros received the silver medal in the javelin throw with a toss of 38.46 meters. On the track, junior Ayla Grabenbauer placed third in the 3,000-meter steeplechase with a time of 11:00.94, picking up her first career All-UAA honor.

Burkhauser (discus throw), Ginn (hammer throw), Grabenbauer (3,000-meter steeplechase), and Schreiber (pole vault) each received All-Great Lakes Region recognition for their achievements at the conference meet by placing in the top five among schools in the region in their events.

CWRU performed well at the Sparky Adams Invitational hosted by Baldwin Wallace on April 18 and 19. The team placed third out of 12 teams with 111.0 points with season-best times or marks in five events. At the end of the season, junior runner Lauren Iagnemma recorded the third-fastest time in program history and 42nd-fastest time in Division III in the 5,000-meter run (17:03.07) at the Harrison Dillard Twilight, also hosted by BW.

In the classroom, five members of the team were honored by the College Sports Communicators as members of the Academic All-District Team. They included Ginn, Grabenbauer, Iagnemma, Schreiber, and junior Ashley Novak.

Members of the CWRU women’s track and field team received the following individual honors during the 2025 outdoor track and field season:

The following were top times/marks by Spartan track and field athletes during the outdoor 2025 season:

The success of Georgia Southern volleyball has been spilling into the summer. 

The Eagles are coming off a season in which they went 22-7, including going a perfect 14-0 at home and, for the second straight season, head coach Chad Willis took the Eagles to the postseason.

Recently, Willis saw a record number of more than 300 high school players and teams come to the Georgia Southern campus to participate in their sixth annual summer team camp.

“It’s great to see the level of talent and teams that have been coming here for three or four years in a row,” Willis said. “To see their growth as teams and the trust they put in us to come back every year says a lot. It’s a great chance to give back to the community and to continue to foster relationships with coaches and players from throughout the state and beyond.”

This was actually the third camp the Eagles have hosted this summer, as they had their all-skills camp in June and then their college ID camp a couple of weeks ago. The most recent camp was to teach skill training and to allow the teams to go up against each other in friendly competition. Willis said the camps are not only a way to pass on knowledge to area teams but they also use them for recruiting purposes.

“Obviously our college ID camp is the main camp for identifying talent, but we also see a lot this week with our team camp,” Willis said. “We have over 300 kids from Georgia and South Carolina here for three days so you get to expose them to our campus but we also see some younger age talent we get a chance to evaluate as well.”

Many of the teams in town came from at least a few hours away. The team with the shortest bus ride to Hanner was Statesboro High. Head coach Bob Massee and Willis have a great relationship and he feels it’s important for his team to get in as much work as they can in the off season.

“This is actually the first time in 15 years I have been able to bring our team to a camp in the summer,” Massee said. “We are seeing a lot of drills and are able to play a lot of games against other teams we don’t normally see too much. Coach Willis runs a smooth camp with plenty of opportunities for learning as well as playing which is great for our team.”

Helping to work the camps are members of the Eagle volleyball team. Willis feels this is a great opportunity for the players to not only understand where the coaches are coming from, but he thinks by teaching it also helps the players work on their fundamentals.

“Sometimes I feel we get as much as the players that are here watching and learning from us,” said Eagle outside hitter Sam Bowron. “It is cool to see how some of the drills we are teaching them can really improve a team just by doing it for a few hours. I never got a chance to go to a camp like this when I was in high school but I think something like this would have been great and we take a lot of pride in working with these players here.”

The Eagles open the season Aug. 23 as they take on South Carolina in an exhibition game at 7:00 at Enmarket Arena in Savannah.

An exclusive Manhattan nightspot that’s counted Meghan Markle, Kamala Harris and Leonardo DiCaprio as customers is a hotbed for sexual harassment among employees — who used spray bottles to take cocaine during their shifts and had a rating system for good-looking customers, a bombshell lawsuit alleges.

The swanky Polo Bar, a bar and restaurant owned by fashion icon Ralph Lauren and located on East 55th Street at Fifth Avenue, has a “toxic culture … and rampant drug use and alcohol consumption at work,” a veteran former server claimed in a federal lawsuit.

Male bosses groped underlings under the guise of checking their uniforms and managers and servers often openly used cocaine, Frank Nobiletti claimed in court papers.

One server allegedly sold the drug on-site, and workers “regularly mixed cocaine with water in a spray bottle and used that bottle to ingest cocaine” through their skin “during service,” he contended in the legal filing.

Michael Lewis, the bar’s events manager, and Darnell Dodson, its international hospitality directory, both touched Nobiletti, 42, inappropriately at different times, he alleged.

Dodson was known to hire only attractive men, even if they had zero experience, “hoping to have a sexual relationship with them,” Nobiletti claimed in the lawsuit. “Male employees who had a sexual relationship with him … would receive preferential treatment.”

Workers also allegedly played a twisted “Rating Game” where “women customers are rated based on attractiveness.

“The male servers frequently made offensive and graphic sexual comments about the women customers,” the suit alleged.

Since opening in 2015, Polo Bar has been one of the most exclusive celebrity haunts in the Big Apple. The establishment is popular with bold faced names like Tom Hanks, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George Clooney, and U2’s Bono.

Its menu boasts caviar and potatoes for $145, pan-seared Dover sole for $80, and even $18 pigs in a blanket. One of its cocktails, The Family Reserve — which contains Jose Cuervo Reserva de la Familia Extra Añejo Tequila, D.O.M. Benedictine and Brandy, Crème de Cacao, and Amaro Averna — will set you back $50.

Nobiletti claimed he “faced terrible sexual harassment” and was fired in February 2024 after he complained human resources.

Supervisors told him he was being let go “for drinking at work even though, since the Polo Bar opened in 2015, management and staff regularly drank alcohol and used illegal drugs during work hours with little to no consequences for such actions,” he said in the legal papers.

“While the restaurant and its hard-working staff do everything they can to ensure that their guests have a first class experience, defendants completely failed to guarantee that their employees had a safe and legal work environment,” he said in the July 22 filing.

In a statement to The Post, Polo Bar said: “We have high standards for how employees conduct themselves and no tolerance for misconduct, so we take swift action when these standards are not met. This includes Mr. Nobiletti’s termination that was based on clear evidence of his misconduct. Because we take all employee-related concerns seriously, we thoroughly investigated Mr. Nobiletti’s allegations and determined they have no merit.”

Nobiletti is seeking unspecified damages. His attorneys declined to discuss the case. Lewis and Dodson could not be reached for comment.

Colorado State University’s art and art history department recently welcomed Greg Dickinson, a professor from the communication studies department, as the new chair.

Dickinson was announced interim chair through a post on the College of Liberal Arts Dean Kjerstin Thorson’s Instagram July 7, alongside two other new chair appointments.

In addition to being chair of the department of communication studies, Dickinson is the founding director of the Joe Blake Center for Engaged Humanities: a multidisciplinary research center focused on subjects in the humanities, such as history, rhetoric, English, philosophy and art history.

The Blake Center is slated to receive a space on the second floor of the revitalized B wing of the Andrew G. Clark Building following renovations, alongside the Center for Public Deliberation and other liberal arts research and engagement centers, Dickinson said.

“I have some experience having been chair,” Dickinson said. “And, gosh, being chair is not the sort of thing that really anybody knows — unless you’ve done it — what it means. And certainly undergraduate students or graduate students don’t know what it means.”

Dickinson’s academic career includes experience researching and writing about the intersection between communications and art, something he believes lends himself to the job of interim chair.

“When you think of communication studies, you don’t think of buildings or visual art,” Dickinson said. “But if you’ve taken a visual communication class, then suddenly you realize how communicative the visual is and how communicative space is. And so I’ve spent almost all my career writing about things like museums, including art museums, (and) everyday places like coffee shops and churches. … I have this passion for the visual, for beauty, for our embodied responses to the world.”

Dickinson’s appointment as chair will last through the next school year as the department and College of Liberal Arts continue restructuring the requirements for the bachelor of fine arts degree, which will allow for more flexibility across artistic disciplines.

“Many artists, in fact, move across disciplines,” Dickinson said. “They paint; they want to do some metalsmithing. They think, even though they want to do those things, they understand that they might get a job in graphic design. And so we want to build a BFA that has more ways for students to move through the degree.”

Part of the curriculum’s restructuring will provide flexibility for students who join the art department later than their first semester, including exploratory studies or transfer students.

“Creative people don’t just do one kind of thing,” Dickinson said. “(And) it’s a little hard to get into the major a little later in college. And so (the restructuring) also has to do with being responsive to who we are as Colorado State University as compared to, say, a small art school.”

Dickinson said he had been exploring interdisciplinary collaboration opportunities for the art department, largely drawing inspiration from the CSU Annual Flower Trial Gardens and other scientific-based fields on campus. Other goals for the department include a one-year lecture series on the nature of matter versus the matter of nature.

“A lot of art departments won’t have metalsmithing or they won’t have both drawing and painting, and so the actual get-your-hands-dirty thing is possible here,” Dickinson said. “So to hold onto that and also allow people to kind of move through the degree with some fluidity so that we’re asking really pretty deep questions about, ‘What is art? What is art education? What do we think somebody with a BFA in art needs to have?’”

As a new class of art and art history students enter CSU, Dickinson invites them to continue creating and broadening their definitions of art through the department, especially amid polarization.

“How are we going to make our world together? And that making is partly the things that are out of sociology or political science — the making of our political world — but I also mean the actual material making of our world,” Dickinson said. “What should our neighborhoods look like? What should our art look like? What should our advertising do for us? How does that engage us as humans, as individuals (and) as societies? How does that bring us together? How does that push us apart? And so if you come to the art and art history department, you’ll both actually make stuff in the world and also think about: ‘What does this making do? How does this making matter?’”

Reach Allie Seibel at entertainment@collegian.com or on social media @allie_seibel_.

The West Bend West girls volleyball team earned an All-Academic Team Award for the 2024-25 season by the American Volleyball Coaches Associations, which requires a collective GPA of at least 3.3 on a 4.0 scale for the year.

West’s volleyball team didn’t just meet the minimum requirements, it exceeded them with a collective 3.74 GPA during the spring 2025 semester. Even more impressive, six Spartan student athletes achieved perfect 4.0 GPAs — Maddie Abel, Kylee Altendorf, Avah Banks, Amelia Dubey, Paige Guse and Breleigh Ustruck.

“The fact that more programs earned the Team Academic Award than ever before is evidence of how committed our coaches are when it comes to helping their players reach their goals as both students and athletes,” said AVCA CEO Jaime Gordon.

This year marked a milestone in volleyball academic achievement across the country, with 1,450 collegiate and high school teams earning the AVCA Team Academic Award — the highest number ever recorded.