SOUTHLAND COMMISSIONER’S LIST SPRING 2025

– The New Orleans Privateers had 96 student-athletes from spring sports that were named to the Southland Commissioner’s List which was released by the conference on Monday morning.
 
Student-athletes from men’s and women’s basketball, men’s and women’s tennis, men’s and women’s track and field, golf, baseball and beach volleyball must have been eligible to compete and must have achieved at least a 3.0 GPA for the spring semester.
 
There were 22 student-athletes who achieved a perfect 4.0 GPA. The most came from track and field which had nine perfect GPAs in the spring (six from the women’s team and three from the men’s team).
 
The most total representatives came from baseball, which got 23 student-athletes on the list. Four baseball student-athletes (Alexander Saunier, Anthony Ruiz, Cole Syversen and Jahlani Rogers) all had a 4.0.
 
There were 16 student-athletes from basketball: 10 from the women’s team and six from the men’s team. Gabbi Cartagena earned a 4.0 GPA during the spring semester and six basketball student-athletes earned a 3.5 or better.
 
Men’s and women’s tennis had all 15 student-athletes (nine men and six women) represented with five 4.0 GPAs: Marc Mail, Matthew Armbruster, Julian Franzmann, Ananya Dhankhar and Iris Danne.
 
There were 12 beach volleyball representatives and eight golf representatives to make the list. Three beach volleyball student-athletes in Ivana de Carvalho Peixe, Jaedyn Newman and Mona Salgado earned a 4.0 while Gabriel Gallego from the golf team also earned a 4.0 for the semester.
 
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General | 5/29/2025 12:16:00 PM

ROCHESTER, NY – Seven student-athletes, the 2001 and 2002 women’s volleyball teams, and the first-ever coach of the men’s/women’s cross country and track and field programs, Scott Love, will be inducted to the Nazareth Sports Hall of Fame in 2025. The ceremony will take place on Saturday, September 20, 2025 in Beston Hall at Nazareth University.
 
The athletes from the class include 2016 men’s lacrosse graduates Luke Wooters and Troy Haefele, Alyssa Johnston ’13 (women’s lacrosse), Tim Zyburt ’16 (men’s volleyball), Taylor Pierson ’16 (women’s track and field), Brian Seeley ’05 (men’s golf), Ben Klempka ’05 (men’s tennis). The class is rounded out by the 2001 and 2002 women’s volleyball teams that advanced to the Elite 8 in consecutive seasons, and Scott Love who began the men’s and women’s cross country/track and field programs in 2003. The 2001 and 2002 women’s volleyball team will be inducted as “one” team.

Wooters is the all-time leader in men’s lacrosse program history with 363 points on 190 goals and 173 assists in 71 career games. Up until 2025 he was the all-time leader in goals scored before Quinn McKercher overtook the mark. The dynamic attackman was three times named a USILA All-American, including twice on the second team. The 2013 Empire 8 Offensive Player of the Year was named to the Empire 8 First Team three times and second team once. During his freshman campaign, he racked up 64 goals, which continues to be the best single season mark at Nazareth.

Haefele proved to be another standout on the lacrosse field for the Golden Flyers with 178 goals and 109 assists for 287 points. His 178 goals is the third best mark in school history, while both his assists (109) and points (287) rank fifth. Haefele was a four-time All-Empire 8 First Team selection and named USILA Honorable Mention two times. Haefele, along with Wooters, teamed up to win the Empire 8 Championship in 2013, while also making an NCAA Tournament appearance in 2015.

 

Johnston joins the 2025 hall of fame class after excelling in the midfield for four seasons, collecting four Empire 8 All-conference selections, including three on the first team. Her 149 career draw controls (2^nd), 81 caused turnovers (3^rd), along with points at 214 (6^th) and goals 155 (6^th) all rank among the program best. She was three times named all-region, including a first team selection in 2013. For three seasons, she was Nazareth’s leading score (2011-2013), including scoring at least one goal in 58 of 64 games. During her four-year run, Nazareth made the Empire 8 playoffs each season and she was an all-tournament selection in 2013. 

2016 graduate Tim Zyburt was a monster outside hitter for the Golden Flyers. Upon graduation, Zyburt held the kills record at Nazareth with 1,411. That record held until 2025, when Owen Wickens surpassed with 1,508. He is second all-time in attack attempts (2,996), 8^th in digs (55), 10^th in total blocks with 257, sixth in sets played (428), and fifth in matches played (131). He was impressively a three-time all-american, including a first team selection as a junior and senior. The Wheaton, IL native was also a three-time First Team All-UVC honoree. The team leader in kills four years in a row, Zyburt helped the squad to a four-year mark of 105-28, with NCAA Tournament berths in 2013 and 2015.

Pierson made her mark in just three seasons for the Golden Flyers as a dynamic sprinter and long jumper, appearing in five NCAA Championships. She twice earned all-american honors after finishing 8th in the long jump at the 2013 NCAA Outdoor Championships at 5.73 meters (18 ‘ 9.75″) and fifth in the 2014 Indoor Championships in the long jump 5.55 meters (18 feet, 2 1/2 inches). For indoor, she won the long jump at Empire 8s and was part of the 4 x 400 winning team in 2013. For outdoor she was a two-time champion at Empire 8s in the long jump (2013, 2015). She is all over the Nazareth record book for top marks for indoor and outdoor in the long jump and 200. For indoor, she is among the best in the 60-meter, the 300, and the 4 x 200 and 4 x 400 relays. For outdoor she ranks among the best in the 100 and 4 x 400 relay.

2005 graduate Brian Seeley was a two-time Empire 8 Men’s Golf All-Star, including being named the Player of the Year in 2004 as a junior. He won the Empire 8 individual title in fall of 2004 with rounds of 77 and 75 to finish with an 8-over-par total of 152 at Seven Oaks Golf Club in Hamilton, NY. Seeley’s season scoring averages were 81.24, 80.00, 79.52 and 81.42 for a four-year average of 80.39 for 71 rounds. For his career, he delivered six other top 10 career finishes, including a seventh-place at the Empire 8 Tournament in fall of 2002. In his senior season, he was named a recipient of Robert A. Kidera Scholar-Athlete award in 2005.

Rounding out the individual student athletes is men’s tennis star Ben Klempka who ranks as the program’s all-time wins leader with 147 total (71 singles and 76 doubles). He was a three-time First-Team singles player for the Empire 8, three-time First-Team in doubles and one-time second team. In his freshman season he won 41 matches (18 singles and 23 doubles) in 2001-02 and 39 matches (18 singles, 21 doubles) as a senior in 2004-05.

The 2001 and 2002 women’s volleyball teams were among the best-ever at Nazareth, with each team advancing to the Elite 8 of the NCAA Division III Women’s Volleyball Championships. Coached by Linda Downey, Nazareth went 36-3 (7-0 in Empire 8) in 2001, falling to Wellesley in five sets in the NCAA Quarterfinals. In 2002, Nazareth was 36-6 overall (7-0 in the Empire 8), and falling to Trinity in the NCAA Quarterfinals at Nazareth.

Scott Love, who started both the men’s and women’s cross country, as well as track and field programs in 2003, completes the hall of fame class. Love coached back-to-back Empire 8 Men’s cross country runners of the year in Brendan Epstein (2007) and Nick Stenuf (2008). In 2007, Stenuf, Epstein and Jessica Brown all became Nazareth’s first qualifiers for the NCAA Championships in cross country. Stenuf returned to the cross country NCAAs in 2008, placing 19th to become the first-ever cross country all-American. Love coached the first-ever track and field all-American in 2006 with Nick Stenuf in the 800-meters.

ABOUT THE EMPIRE 8 CONFERENCE

The members of the Empire 8 Conference are committed first and foremost to the pursuit of academic excellence and the league is regarded as an outstanding NCAA Division III conference. The membership has distinguished itself among its peer group for its quality institutions, spirited and sportsmanlike competition, outstanding services and highly ethical policies and practices. Its commitment to serve the educational needs of its student-athletes is the hallmark of the E8. For more on the Empire 8 visit www.empire8.com.

 

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When Jenny Nguyen was in her twenties, working as a chef in her home town of Portland, Oregon, she became a regular at pickup basketball games organized by a group of “lawyers, plumbers, women from all walks of life,” she told me recently. “The only thing we had in common was basketball.” Some of the women became her close friends, and one became a longtime girlfriend. When they weren’t playing, they got together to watch women’s games at sports bars—or tried to. Persuading a bartender or a manager to turn one on was a “constant situation,” Nguyen, who is now forty-five, recalled.

On April 1, 2018, the group got lucky when they met at a bar to watch the final of that year’s women’s N.C.A.A. tournament, in which Notre Dame defeated Mississippi State by just three points, with a player named Arike Ogunbowale—now a point guard for the Dallas Wings—hitting the game-winning jumper with 0.1 seconds left on the clock. As they were leaving, Nguyen remembered, “I hugged my friend, and I was, like, ‘That was the best game I’ve ever seen.’ And she goes, ‘Yeah, can you imagine if the sound was on?’ ” In the excitement, Nguyen had barely noticed that they’d been relegated to a small, silent TV in a corner. “I was really frustrated, not just with myself but with the whole situation,” she told me. “I said, ‘The only way we’re ever going to watch women’s sports the way it deserves is if we have our own place.’ ”

Exactly four years later, Nguyen opened the Sports Bra, a pub that exclusively screens women’s sports, in a storefront in Northeast Portland that was once occupied by a gay bar called Jocks. In the years before it opened, the concept was a running gag among Nguyen’s friends. “Whenever somebody would turn us down at the bar, we’d be, like, ‘Oh, at the Sports Bra they show volleyball,’ ” she said. Today, the Bra, as Nguyen calls it, is an institution imbued with that puckish idealism. Most of the twenty-odd beers on tap come from breweries that are owned or operated by women, and there are drinks named for the pioneering golfer Patty Berg (an Arnold Palmer with a cherry on top) and for Title IX. The homey space, panelled in dark wood, recalls a nineties coffeehouse, chockablock with sports memorabilia and flyers advertising community events: an adult L.G.B.T.Q.+ summer camp, an Asian climbers’ meetup called ElevAsian.

I planned my visit to the Bra to coincide with an Indiana Fever game, in the hope that the beloved point guard Caitlin Clark would draw a crowd. A few days before I arrived in Portland, Clark strained her left quad, an injury that would bench her for at least two weeks. Still, in the course of the day, a healthy stream of patrons showed up, some just to eat and drink: in addition to classics like burgers and fries, Nguyen offers a rack of ribs, adapted from her mother’s recipe for thit kho (pork braised in coconut soda), and wings dressed in “Aunt Tina’s Vietna-Glaze” (brown sugar and fish sauce) or a house-fermented buffalo sauce. Pretaped footage of women’s sailing, hockey, beach volleyball, and gymnastics played on the bar’s TVs until the Fever game aired live.

Jenna Dalton, an artist in her forties dressed in a tie-dyed tunic, with corkscrew curls cut in an asymmetrical bob, watched the game with her partner, George Kunz, a bespectacled, retired educator with a white ponytail. “I don’t like sports at all, and I have a rule that we don’t watch sports in my house,” Dalton told me. “But, I’ve got to tell you, I like watching the W.N.B.A.” Part of it is the pleasure of “watching women succeed in things,” she said. “But I also just like that it’s a little more scrappy. I find the N.B.A. to be very polished and boring.” Kunz added, “You feel like you’re not just watching a game—there’s a movement.”

Another couple, Katie Camarano and Brandon Fischer, on vacation from Champaign, Illinois, sat on a banquette, sharing a soft pretzel. “I’m a Fever fan,” Camarano said. “I like the pickups, I like the pace that they’re playing at. It’s just a lot more fun to watch. I mean, he can tell you”—she gestured at Fischer—“I used to not give a crap about basketball. It didn’t seem very important to me, men playing. Cool, you can dunk a ball—you’re seven feet tall, I don’t understand how that’s meant to be impressive!” Fischer winced. “I can feel myself getting under his skin a little bit,” Camarano said, then proceeded undeterred. “They miss a ton of their free throws. It’s a free point, how are you missing that? I feel like the women have to play a little bit more, physically, because no one that I’ve seen is tall enough to get in the air and dunk.”

At halftime, three young women wearing Fever gear got up and left, before the Washington Mystics won by six points. A trio of gray-haired women wandered in: a local married couple named Peggy Berroth and Sara Kirschenbaum, and their friend Lisa Hurtubise, who was visiting from Minneapolis. Kirschenbaum and Hurtubise met in 1984, in Columbus, Ohio, when they organized a women’s peace walk, trekking almost two hundred miles from Akron to Dayton in the course of ten days, protesting in front of nuclear-weapons facilities.

“I’m a sports fanatic,” Berroth, a retired labor-and-delivery nurse with a pronounced Boston accent, told me. Title IX was passed when she was in high school, in Massachusetts, but she found that female athletes were still given short shrift. “I was on the track team,” she said. “I was a miler, I ran the eight hundred for the relay, and I also threw the discus. There was no coach, there was no uniform. I went to the school board and I said, ‘How come the boys have two pairs of shoes, and we don’t have any shoes?’ They didn’t give us the time of day.” Berroth is a season-ticket holder for the Portland Thorns, the city’s pro women’s soccer team, and likes to watch away games at the Bra, when she can get a seat. “When I see twenty-six thousand people sitting in those stands, it just makes my heart sing,” she said.

As a prerecorded rock-climbing competition played on the TV nearest their table, Hurtubise, whose two daughters played hockey in Minneapolis, approached a bartender and asked whether they might consider putting on an N.B.A. game instead—the Minnesota Timberwolves were playing the Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference finals. She shrugged agreeably when the bartender declined.

When Nguyen told her parents, who immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam in the seventies, about her plan for the Bra, they were skeptical. “The very first thing my mom said was ‘Do you think right now is a good time to open a lesbian bar?’ ” Nguyen said, laughing. “At no point in the conversation did I say I was opening a lesbian bar, but Mom knew that that Venn diagram looks very much like a circle.” The moment proved to be the right one. Not only was there a dearth of places to watch women’s sports—as far as Nguyen could tell, hers would be the first bar in the U.S. devoted to screening them—there was also a lack of queer and specifically lesbian spaces, even in a city as progressive as Portland.

The Bra was met with some hostility—Nguyen said that she received death threats, and that vandals broke windows—but it was also an immediate success. Hundreds of people showed up to the opening, which was the day after Portland lifted its indoor mask mandate, and in the middle of the N.C.A.A. tournament. “It was mayhem, hugging and crying,” Nguyen said. “There was lots of exchange of fluids.” The place was buoyed, too, by a groundswell of support from “the lesbian network”: friends of friends who were eager to help with accounting, general contracting, washing dishes. The Bra stirred strong emotions among both patrons and staff. “When I was a server those first couple years, I had a bruise here,” the general manager, Katie Leedy, remembered, showing me how she would pinch the skin between her thumb and pointer fingers. “Because I would just be, like, ‘I can’t cry every time I talk to a table.’ ”

Earlier this month, Nguyen announced that the Bra was franchising and expanding into four new cities—Indianapolis, Boston, Las Vegas, and St. Louis—with the help of an investment from Alexis Ohanian, a co-founder of Reddit, better known to some as Serena Williams’s husband. In 2019, after he learned that Megan Rapinoe’s team, the Seattle Reign, sold for just three and a half million dollars, Ohanian “rage-tweeted” about women’s sports being undervalued, and vowed to buy or start a team. (He’s the founding control owner of Angel City F.C., L.A.’s pro women’s soccer team.) Some commenters called him an idiot. He felt a kinship with Nguyen when he saw people ridiculing the Bra online. “If you’re polarizing people this early with an idea, it means you’re really on to something,” he told me. “People are not going to waste their time hating unless they feel very threatened.”

By the end of the year, there will be more than two dozen women’s sports bars open across the country. Jax Diener, who opened Watch Me! Sports Bar, in Long Beach, California, last year with her wife, told me that she and Nguyen are members of a Slack chat with the owners of similar establishments, including A Bar of Their Own, in Minneapolis, and Rikki’s, in San Francisco. “The founding mothers,” Diener said, are a tight-knit group, generous with advice and emotional support.

“I think lesbians are always searching for more community spaces,” the comedian and “Daily Show” correspondent Grace Kuhlenschmidt told me recently. Kuhlenschmidt, who grew up in L.A., was not much of a sports fan until she went to her first New York Liberty game, in 2021, and found the Barclays Center filled with “almost exclusively women and older lesbians,” she said. “I was, like, ‘I’m in Heaven.’ ” Now she hosts Liberty watch parties—complete with seafoam-green Gatorade-and-Midori slushies—at Singers, a campy Bed-Stuy queer bar. When I mentioned Watch Me!, Kuhlenschmidt told me that she had family in Long Beach and spent many holidays there. “One time, my mom called me out of the blue and was, like, ‘Grace, guess what? There’s a huge lesbian community in Long Beach!’ And I was, like, ‘That is awesome. Is that the only reason you called?’ ” ♦

Tucked along the shores of Lake Michigan, Beachwalk is both a resort and a neighborhood – a place where families spend their summers or put down roots for a more permanent life on the beach. It’s a vacation community offering a blend of luxury and tranquility in Northwest Indiana, with chances for kayaking, fishing, beach volleyball, tennis, and more.

Managed by 1st American Management Company, Beachwalk maintains its charm and order through year-round care. With its scenic views, plentiful amenities and leisure activities, and a close-knit neighborhood, many families stay for decades. One of those long-term residents is Rich Murphy, who, along with his wife Jill, has called Beachwalk home for 25 years.

“I was initially drawn in by the Lake Michigan and Dunes lifestyle,” he said. “It’s as if a beach of southern Spain was dropped into Indiana, but in the fresh waters of Lake Michigan. We’re raising our family here, and have three daughters.”

Murphy’s love for the community led to his election to the Beachwalk Property Owners Association. His involvement extends beyond residency, and he noted that Beachwalk attracts visitors from all over the world.

“I think people might be surprised that we get residents from all over the country and the world,” he said. “Beachwalk is a destination, and I’ve heard people say that our beach is among the best they’ve ever experienced.”

While some residents only stay during the warmer season, Murphy values the year-round experience.

“My favorite part of living here is our friends, family, and neighbors who all have homes here,” he said. “I also appreciate the changing dynamics of Lake Michigan. You can see the Mediterranean-like blue waters of the summer, the shelf ice of mid-winter, and all the blazing sunsets over the Chicago skyline. The beauty of Lake Michigan is always there, but ever changing.”

Daniel Sullivan, a five-year resident of Beachwalk, feels that most of the community shares Murphy’s admiration.

“I think the vibe of the community is of a shared appreciation for the environment,” Sullivan said. “We all love these homes that have a traditional feel of a beach community, spending time with family and friends surrounded by white picket fences and stunning architecture. You get the sense that you’re on vacation all the time.”

“Beachwalk is a beautiful community. I think many people, especially those of us from Northwest Indiana, take Lake Michigan and all it has to offer for granted. From salmon and perch fishing to pleasure boating, miles of sandy beaches and breathtaking sunsets, it’s truly a special place,” said Michael R. Bottos, President and COO of 1^st American Management Co., Inc.  “We’ve built a strong relationship with the residents of Beachwalk and are excited to see what the future holds for this community.”

To explore rental opportunities and discover everything the Beachwalk community has to offer, visit beachwalkvacationrentals.com and funatbeachwalk.com.

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Several individuals from the Adel-DeSoto-Minburn Track and Field Team are being recognized with postseason honors for their performances at the state meet in May.

ADM was recently named the Class 3A Champions for the second consecutive year, and have been selected for many events by the Iowa Association of Track Coaches in the All-State and Elite All-State divisions.

For All-State, junior Elise Coghlan and senior Josi Dufoe got in for the 100 meter hurdles, while Dufoe qualified for Elite All-State. Coghlan was also named All-State in the 400 meter hurdles, while senior London Warmuth got All-State and Elite All-State for the High Jump. Then, the Tiger relays of the 4×100 (Dufoe, Calli Seehase, Jada Grove, and Peyton Standley) and 4×200 meters (Dufoe, Seehase, Grove, and Aniston Tollari) made All-State, with the Girls Shuttle Hurdle Relay, consisting of Dufoe, Coghlan, Bella Smyth, and Haley Nelson achieved both All-State and Elite All-State as they captured a state meet record of 1:01.15.

In addition, ADM Head Coach Bart Mueller was named the Class 3A Coach of the Year from the IATC.