Sports Shorts

Athlete Of the Week

First-year Bret Petersen from Greenville, Mich. has made quite an impact as a runner on Oberlin’s track team, both during the indoor and the outdoor season.
Most recently, Petersen shattered a nearly 40 year-old Oberlin College outdoor track record by completing the 400m dash in 48.5 seconds at the Baldwin-Wallace Invitational last Saturday.
His time was enough to provisionally qualify him for the NCAA Division III Championship meet and also earned him Runner of the Week honors from the North Coast Athletic Conference.
Petersen was also a member of Oberlin’s conference-best indoor 4x400m team. Not only did the team win the event at the North Coast Athletic Conference Championship, the team set a school record with 3:27.37.

The team will participate in the NCAC outdoor championship meet today and tomorrow.

Quote of the Week

“The first four innings were great.”
–Jane Wildman
Softball Head Coach

On the perfect game Denison’s Courtney Zollars threw against the
Yeowomen. The game was 1-0 in favor of Oberlin until Denison scored
eight in the fifth

Marquee Event

NCAC Women’s Lacrosse Championship Tournament

SEMIFINALS, Friday:
Denison vs. Kenyon, 3 p.m.
Wooster vs. Ohio Wesleyan, 5 p.m.

FINAL, Saturday, 1 p.m.

The Yeowomen may be out of the tournament, but there is plenty of great lacrosse left to be played on Oberlin’s athletic fields.

In the Locker Room with. . .

Under the harsh, artificial light of Stevenson dining hall, sophomore lacrosse player Maggie Douglas and I discuss our inspirations, from eccentric old women to parades to biotechnology. Before the interview even begins, she comments:

MD: By the way, I loved you at Drag Ball.

This obviously makes me like her immediately.

So what's your major?
MD: I've been trying to declare a philosophy major for a semester now. It doesn't seem to be working out. At first I lost the form and then my advisor was away on academic leave. I have lots of good excuses.

What is your favorite thing about lacrosse?
MD: Probably just really beautiful moments in lacrosse. Lacrosse can be a really beautiful sport when it's well-played. Also just battling people for balls.

So I can't think of a question. What have you been thinking about lately?
MD: Lately, I've been obsessed with eccentric old women. Especially the woman from Harold and Maude, because she doesn't have a license, which I relate to. She's a free spirit who goes around taking cars the keys are left behind in and driving them around until she finds a new car.

Hmm.
MD: Yeah, last night I was doing research for this project, and I found a documentary called Grandma's Bottle Village, and it's about this woman who had a 17,000-pencil pencil collection and decided to build a house to hold her pencil collection. So bricks and stuff were too expensive, so instead, she goes to the junkyard and starts collecting old bottles. Now, keep in mind, she is 60 years old. She seriously collects a million bottles, and she makes all these houses, five or six of them, made of layered glass bottles with cement. It's crazy. The documentary is...

It is only now that I realize that this is not a fictional account.

Wait! This is a real person?
MD: Yeah. She's now 84 years old. She manages this bottle village. The documentary is about her and her 92 year-old sister sitting around just rambling about her bottle village and the 17,000-pencil collection. It was so awesome because she just woke up one day and built this bottle village with her bare hands.

It seems like she's been a great inspiration to you.
MD: You could say that. And she doesn't have a license either, but she drives every weekend to the junkyard to collect stuff.

So she's still building?
MD: Not really. She just maintains it now. Just watching her is seriously incredible. She had no ambitions to build something that people would want to come and visit. It seemed obvious to her she just needed a house to put her pencils in….When is this issue coming out?

Friday.
MD: Then I should also plug the Big Parade. I've been working on the quilt. It's a big community quilt meant to be a banner for the parade.

Will the parade be much like Mardi Gras?
MD: It is gonna be pretty crazy. I hear there are gonna be llamas involved somehow. You can't miss that. And giant dinosaur floats.… Wouldn't it be great if Oberlin offered an all-expenses paid trip to Mardi Gras? Yeah, we're not in a budget crisis.

What is your position on cloning?
MD: Well, I'm not for it. But I think it's on a continuum with other reproductive technologies that could help infertile and homosexual couples to reproduce.

Why are you against cloning?
MD: I think it's one more step in the direction of biological technologies that we don't understand. We wouldn't understand the implications when we started.

There have been few technologies whose implications we've understood before developing them. Look at cars, for example. They're ruining the environment. Would you have voted to ban cars had you known what their effects would be?
MD: Yes. I'm against cars. I don't even have a license.

All right, Maggie. I have nothing more to say to that.