Dixie State University hosted its second annual Day of Giving on April 13. The Trailblazer Day of Giving allows anyone to donate to a specific organization or department on campus.
“Trailblazer Day of Giving was a success,” Development Officer Brooks Burr said. “We raised a total of $93,120.”
DSU more than doubled its donations this year compared to last year’s donations totaling around $42,000, Burr said. The funds donated went to areas in need across campus, such as academic programs, scholarships, student programs and more.
“As a donor-centric university, we encourage donors to give to the areas that are most meaningful to them,” Development Officer Lance Brown said.
Director of Development Ken Beazer said student scholarships received the most donations at $20,000, with DSU Athletics coming to a close second.
Burr said several programs are still in need of more funds, and there always will be, but scholarship funds will always be an area of greater need.
“Donating to scholarship funds helps keep costs low for our students,” Burr said.
He also said funding for the Greater Zion Stadium and the upcoming Science, Engineering and Technology building continues to be at the top of the list for areas of greater need.
This year’s donation amounts give the development officers hope that each year will come with a better influx of donations and help given to DSU’s students and programs.
“As we continue to learn and implement changes to our Trailblazer Day of Giving, we fully anticipate each year to be bigger, more successful, and have a greater impact upon our students and programs,” Beazer said.
The development officers’ plan is to use the previous year’s total donations as a new standard and hope that it will grow with each year’s day of giving.
“We have learned a great deal in managing a day of giving in the last two years,” Burr said. “In 2022, we plan to implement what we learned in 2021, so we are hoping that with time and experience, the momentum will continue.”
Trailblazer Day of Giving raised the hopes of organizations all across campus to see such support coming in from people.
“It is encouraging to see support pour in from all around the country,” Brown said.
The development team is encouraged by this year’s turnout and has high hopes for future days of giving.
“It has been humbling to see the many generous individuals and organizations come together to provide support for our students,” Burr said. “Trailblazer Nation unified to create a positive change on this campus. We can’t thank those that support us enough.”
We’ve all been there, walking into a classroom, hearing chatter all about topics learned throughout the year. As you sit down next to your peers, the nerves become overwhelming, and you begin to question if you’ve studied hard enough. The exam is passed out, and the grade you earn on this exam will hold a weight of 25% of the final grade in the course.
The clock continues to tick and there are only 10 minutes left with 20 still unanswered questions. The realization of potentially failing the test and lowering your overall grade begins to settle in, and your dreams begin to fade. This makes the feeling of stress completely overwhelming, and the guessing game comes into play for the final portion of this exam. The feeling of defeat is agonizing, and you can only hope you can still pass the class.
From the time kids turn five and attend kindergarten to the day the final exam is given in their education, there is one overarching factor that determines how well a student was perceived to understand the information taught: grades. The focus on earning an “A” or getting a high GPA is something students hear every year to create a standard for what the instructor expects.
However, does a letter grade really define how well you know the information? Absolutely not. The focus in education should not be based on how well they could fill in 100 bubbles on a sheet of paper, but rather, how well the student learned this information based on a hands-on activity.
Edutopia states, “Though multiple choice tests are relatively easy to create, they can contain misleading answer choices—that are either ambiguous or vague—or offer the infamous all-, some-, or none-of-the-above choices, which tend to encourage guessing.”
There is still a need for testing, and it is extremely important to know if what is being taught is being retained and learned by the students. There are just better ways than multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blanks, or essay-question tests.
“Project-based assessments are an alternative to tests that allow students to engage with their learning in more concrete ways,” Elizabeth Trach from Schoology stated. “Instead of merely studying theory, a hands-on project asks students to apply what they’ve learned to an in-depth exploration of a topic.”
For example, in a general biology course, students may be required to take a multiple-choice exam based on the functions of the organelles in a cell. However, a different way this could be done would be for a student to create a PowerPoint on this information and share it with the class, create their own cell and make the organelles in an at-home project, or to let the students pick an organelle for themselves and write a paper on the function it has.
The information taught in a semester should be retained and not just “crammed” into a day or two of studying for an exam. Creating a hands-on exam or project creates an environment where the student must be learning about the topic continuously, so they are unable to memorize the information in one night only to have it leave their head the minute after they are finished with the exam.
If a student is responsible for creating their own unique version of the information learned in class, it would be quite obvious if they based it off of other students’ work beforehand.
The International Center for Academic Integrity shows between 2002 and 2015, 68% of all undergraduate students in college admit to cheating on exams. With hands-on projects, there is no opportunity in the classroom for the student to cheat like there is in a normal 50-minute exam given at Dixie State University, and that class period could be used for additional lecture, as opposed to taking the exam.
Creating an opportunity for students to show they have learned the information in a hands-on project rather than a multiple-choice test provides a more accurate view of whether the individual retained the information or not. Multiple choice, free response and fill-in-the-blank exams need to be replaced with project-based assessments.
Dixie State University men’s soccer has an athlete on its roster who, before his time at DSU, shared a locker room and practice facilities with Major League Soccer team Real Salt Lake.
A.J. Ciampini, a freshman recreation and sports management major from Riverdale, attended the RSL Academy High School and played for the RSL Academy U19 and U17 teams. During his time with the development academy, Ciampini would train for two hours twice a day and attend classes as a full-time scholarship athlete, but playing soccer always came first.
“I was only [in school] to play soccer,” Ciampini said.
This rigorous academy experience is not uncommon for soccer players in the United States. All MLS teams have developmental academies for developing talented youth soccer players into professionals. Although these academies are meant to develop professionals, that doesn’t guarantee every athlete in one of these academies a professional contract.
Ciampini said of the 60 players he graduated with, only two signed professional contracts. Most of the remaining student-athletes went to Division I schools to continue playing and to get an education.
“I think even if I was offered I still would’ve gone to college,” Ciampini said. “Getting your education is important.”
Ciampini said although he is glad he’s in school, college has been significantly more mentally, physically and emotionally taxing on him. High school was always soccer first and school second; now, both are a balancing act. In high school, Ciampini had unlimited time to practice and work with coaches, but now he has a limited number of hours he can spend with coaches and his team, but he has to balance school and work there.
“It’s not so much as you rely on how good of a soccer player you are [in college]. You have to physically be as strong, as fast, as physical as everyone else.”
A.J. Ciampini, a freshman recreation and sports management major from Riverdale.
Head coach Jonny Broadhead said: “MLS academies are designed to try and produce future professionals, not necessarily future student-athletes.”
The transition from academy to college isn’t just difficult off the field, but also on the field. College soccer is traditionally a more physically-demanding and intense style of soccer than more tactically-based academy soccer.
“It’s not so much as you rely on how good of a soccer player you are [in college],” Ciampini said. “You have to physically be as strong, as fast, as physical as everyone else.”
Ciampini said while in the academy, he was coming from a style where the ball is played on the ground, hardly ever kicked up in the air, and clean tackles are made; he now plays a game that has the ball in the air a lot, as well as down and back running, and aggressive tackling.
This difference in the type of soccer played and the way the athletes are trained is why athletes who come from academies are viewed differently by coaches looking to recruit. Some coaches favor the more technically-trained athletes, while others don’t.
“There’s several coaches that I know that they will pretty much only recruit kids that come from MLS academies,” Broadhead said. “But I also know coaches at the Division I college level that refuse to recruit kids from MLS academies for that [difference in training].”
The more prolific academy soccer becomes, the greater the assumption that it is the only path to professional soccer in the United States.
“Yeah, more kids end up making it going that youth to professional route, getting recognized there and signing with a professional team at an early age,” Broadhead said. “But the college soccer thing is still a very good way of giving yourself a great chance. It’s all just if the right person sees you.”
That idea of the right person seeing you is how Ciampini ended up at DSU. Ciampini played for Broadhead’s brother as a part of a youth Olympic Development Program when he was a kid. From there, Broadhead kept tabs on Ciampini, and when Ciampini needed a school to go to, Broadhead knew him and was willing to give him a chance.
“Every day is a tryout, that’s how you have to approach life,” Broadhead said. “You’re on a tryout every single day, [and] you never know who is watching. If the right person is impressed, then you never know what opportunities are going to come.”
For Ciampini, his opportunity comes at DSU. Although he’s still a freshman, he saw a good number of minutes off the bench in his first year for the Trailblazers.
As DSU moves to year two in the Western Athletic Conference in the fall, Ciampini has an opportunity to continue to grow his game and adjust to college soccer and prove that perhaps academy teams aren’t always the right path to professional soccer.
Imagine it’s pitch black outside, you’ve found yourself kayaking in the middle of a lake, and you can’t see anything but dark water and trees for miles.
You can’t seem to remember how you ended up here.
You’re not alone either. You are with an old friend from high school… Or so you thought. Your memory slowly returns and you realize you have found yourself with a dangerous creature who took the form of a friend to lure you into this lake.
This was the scene of the winning short story for the Naythan M. Bell Award given by DSU’s literary arts journal The Southern Quill, where people can submit short stories and other works.
The award was created in honor of a creative writing student, Naythan Bell, after he passed away. It was first funded by the Bell family, but the DSU Undergraduate Research Office started sponsoring the award in 2020.
The Undergraduate Research Office took over the funding “because we are supportive of traditional research and creative activity,” said Olga Pilkington, assistant director of undergraduate research. “We support any kind of creative, artistic expression and want to sponsor students who want to do projects in dance and arts and so on.”
The award is given to DSU students selected from the fiction section of The Southern Quill.
When it was first created in 2018, the judges were originally looking for stories that spoke to professional writers, but the focus has shifted to what the general reader would think of the piece, Pilkington said.
“It’s more for broad assessment, just what would the general reader think of these stories instead of what do professional writers think of them,” Pilkington said. “That’s the biggest change in how the award is judged.”
An important aspect of the winning pieces is the emotional response a reader gets from reading the piece, she said.
Abigail Patterson, a sophomore English major from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, won the first place prize for the 2021 Naythan M. Bell Award for her horror short story “Hair of the Dog.”
“It fueled the most authentic creativity I have, which is with the horror genre.”
Abigail Patterson, a sophomore english major from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin
The inspiration for this story formed from her love for the horror genre and is based on the lake she grew up next to.
“It was always sort of a fun thing between my friends growing up to make up these really spooky situations, these spooky myths about where we lived,” Patterson said. “It was heavily forested, then you have this murky lake and it was a breeding ground for fear, and I really liked turning that into art.”
After getting a horror short story published in the Southern Quill last year, Patterson felt more motivation because she realized there is a market for this sort of genre.
“It fueled the most authentic creativity I have, which is with the horror genre,” she said.
Patterson said winning an award like this comes down to authenticity. Even with taking criticism and feedback into consideration, it’s important to stay true to the origins of your story, and that’s why she believes she won.
“I feel so honored to have recieved [this award],” Patterson said. “It makes me feel so honored that something in this genre can be taken so seriously and win an award. It speaks to how the arts have progressed.”
The first runner-up for the award is Spencer Soule, a senior English major from Portland, Oregon, for his piece titled “Whatever it Takes.”
His story brings attention toward deep troubles such as alcoholism; he highlights an unorthodox method to dealing with these sorts of issues and what a person does to overcome them.
“The inspiration for it came from seeing people who have started off in a bad position but overcome their struggles,” Soule said. “Then they turn around and see people in similar positions and don’t have that same level of empathy, they don’t have the ability to see themselves in someone else.”
Soule said the work it takes to be published comes down to writing all the time and being willing to make the necessary changes to your piece, even if it means cutting out parts you really liked.
“I [submit to the Southern Quill] because I really enjoy putting out fiction for people to read; I like writing stories that people want to see themselves in or be taken to a different place for a little while,” Soule said.
Second runner-up Brianna McFadden, from Las Vegas and a graduate student from the technical writing and digital rhetoric program, submitted a similar genre piece to Patterson’s, hers titled “An Unfulfilled Craving.”
This horror story follows the perspective of a serial killer, but the twist is he fails to kill his prey.
McFadden said she first wrote the piece when she was 14 years old, but decided to scrap it and rewrite it, keeping the original bones of the story: writing from the killer’s point of view.
“I was really surprised,” McFadden said. “I turned it into Southern Quill and didn’t know I would be eligible for an award.”
McFadden emphasizes that the importance of creative writing is to focus on the visuals and the “showing versus telling” aspect of writing. While it is hard at times, she said this is what she focused on and believes it helped her win third place.
The first place winner won $300, the second place winner won $200 and the third place winner won $100.
“Any time you get published, it’s an accomplishment and it makes you feel like, ‘Hey, I do have a voice and I do have something that people understand … and they vibe with it,” Soule said. “It’s a good feeling to know and makes you more connected in the world.”
Women’s softball senior day is this Saturday, and it is a particularly special day for Kirsten Quigley, a graduate from Dixie State University’s psychology program from Othello, Washington.
Quigley decided to stay at DSU to play a fifth year due to her senior season being canceled last spring, and she will finally get her senior day.
“I am really excited; obviously, it is different because I am not out playing on the field with my original graduating class and the girls that I was with all my last year,” Quigley said. “We will get to see everyone because we are doing a joint senior day.”
Senior day will highlight last year’s seniors and the current 2020-21 seniors. Head coach Randy Simkins said it is a big moment for Quigley since she is getting the opportunity to finish out a season and get closure.
“I graduated with my degree last spring, and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my degree, so it was nice to have this extra year to figure that out in my head and decide what I really want to do,” Quigley said.
Quigley said her passion for the game is what drives her to keep going.
Shea Clements, a sophomore exercise science major from Las Vegas, said: “Quigley had the most experience of all of us on the team, and me, being a freshman last year and the year getting cut short, I was kind of going into this season not really blind but with not much experience. So having Quigley being like a partner, but also like a support system and she knows what to do in a full season, was good.”
Quigley is a valuable player on and off the field since she has five years of experience as a DSU student-athlete. Her teammates admire her work ethic, honesty, grit and kindness toward everyone.
“We recruit ‘good person, good student, good athlete’ and she epitomizes that,” Simkins said. “She has a heart of gold, she’s nice to all of her teammates, she is very patient with the young kids, wants to teach them, [and] wants to learn from them.”
In Quigley’s time being on the team, she has experienced a lot of good times along with a few challenges. Simkins said as a right-handed hitter she started developing problems with her shoulder, as it would come out of the joint when she would swing. She had to have surgery on it and missed part of a spring season.
“We turned her around and made her hit left-handed; well, the same problem happened left-handed,” Simkins said.
They had to think outside the box and ended up turning her around and making her play as a left-handed slapper because that did not have the full follow-through on her swing.
“So, she’s trying to do a skill at the collegiate level that takes a lot of lefties five, six, seven years to be really good at and she’s trying to do it in a year and a half,” Simkins said.
Last year, Quigley started almost every game as a short stop and hit almost .300 as a converted slapper. This year, she is hitting over .250 and her on-base percentage is about .300.
“Through all the stuff this girl has been through, her drive to come back, taking these challenges that are thrown at her head-on with no hesitation, it is truly just inspiring,” Clements said.
Off the field, Quigley is currently building a home with her boyfriend and owns a self-made T-shirt company called Washed Out Customs.
Meagan Anders, a senior psychology major from Las Vegas, and has been Quigley’s roommate for the past two years at DSU. Simkins said their relationship and bond outside of playing softball helps with their playing time on the field.
“It was really nice getting another year together because I really do enjoy having her in my life and she’s a great friend and it gives me an extra year with her to build our relationship on and off the field,” Anders said.
Competing during a pandemic and transitioning to Division I, the Dixie State University track and field team had a new head coach brought on in the middle of the school year. Despite all those challenges, the team has managed to have a record-setting season.
This winter, the team hired head coach Derrick Atkins to lead the program. He comes with a decorated background in the sport as a two-time Olympian, world silver medalist, and Bahamian national record holder in the 100-meter dash.
Having a new coach certainly can be a challenge, but for the team, it seems to have been a jumping off point for the most successful season in program history. The team has seen nine new team records set across all disciplines.
One of the athletes that has helped set those records is Gwyndalynne Romrell, a sophomore exercise science major from Riverton. She set the team record in the 400-meter hurdles.
“It’s been really good with coach Atkins; he is knowledgeable and motivating,” Romrell said. “It was tough to have a new coach come in in the middle of the year, but if he wasn’t here, we wouldn’t be close to where we are today.”
As much as a coach can do for a program, Atkins said he gives the credit to the athletes. He said they have believed in themselves and believed in the program. Romrell said they have “been putting in the most work that they can.”
Another part of the transition has been moving up to Division I, but coming from the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference, it may not have been the same leap it was for other teams across campus.
“We were coming from the No. 1 running conference in DII,” said Justin Decker, head cross-country coach and distance assistant for the track team. “The RMAC is probably a tougher conference, at least for distance, which I coach. There were three programs in our conference in DII that would probably be ranked in DI.”
Other athletes said it hasn’t felt much different. Sara Fish, a senior exercise science major from Cedar City, also the lone senior on the team, said she and her teammates have faced the same teams in most meets they had while competing at the DII level.
The biggest challenge is competing while dealing with the challenges presented by COVID-19. The limited action in the fall 2020 semester made training tricky, especially for those athletes who — in addition to track — compete in cross-country. While cross-country is typically a fall sport, this year it was held in the early part of the spring semester.
Latest in Sports:
Decker said: “The adjusted season didn’t give our distance team much time to specialize in different events. We were going through the end of February running cross-country, which is 6K and 8K distance. In a normal year, we have a lot more time to have some speed focus to prepare runners for the 800 and 1500.”
Along with the challenges of training, sprinter Rachel Myers, a freshman exercise major from St. George, said it has created unique challenges mentally.
“One thing that has made it hard during COVID is not being able to see your family after meets,” Myers said. “Track is very mental, so it’s always nice to go up to your mom and dad after your event, so that’s what’s made it hard for me, and I know some of the other girls have felt that way too.”
While the season has already included record-setting performances, there are still more chances to perform. The team will travel to Provo this coming weekend to compete at the Brigham Young University Robison Invitational, then travel to Rio Grande, Texas with a team of 16 runners for the Western Athletic Conference Championship May 13-15.
“I think the best is yet to come,” Atkins said. “We have a meet this weekend, and I think [the runners] can continue to drop their times.”
When the team competes at the conference championships, Atkins said as much as they want to score in every event they enter, if they walk away with 16 personal bests, that will be a win in his eyes.
Seeing records beaten is something the coaching staff hopes to continue in years going forward. Atkins said it will be the trend for a few years until they get to a point that the records are very hard to break.
The record-setting performances shouldn’t come as a surprise either. The track program at DSU is still very new. Decker, who has been here since its creation, has seen it trending in this direction.
“The track program has been here since 2017,” Decker said. “We didn’t compete last year, so this is year four of the track teams, [and] each of those four years it has grown more and more every year, taking huge steps forward. And with the recruits for next year, it’s going to be another big step forward.”
The program is looking to make strides to keep this momentum going. They have already committed seven new athletes who will join the team next spring, including some whose high school marks would already put them in contention to make the medal stand in the WAC. Atkins said with the additions, the talent level will only increase.
It has been a successful season so far for the program, but when looking to the end of the year and seasons to come, as Atkins said, “The best is yet to come.”
Despite the challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the department of education is seeing its largest graduating class of 40 students from its Elementary Education Program in May.
“This year of 40 is a big group,” professor of education Chizu Matsubara said. “For us, it’s usually 20 to 25 graduates, so this is a very unusual year.”
Zac Olson, academic adviser for the College of Education, said that out of 25 students, only two left the program, making the graduation rate above 90%.
“This graduating group had a lot of challenges because they were student teaching and all of a sudden everything goes online and they were not actually trained to do that,“ Matsubara said. “We think as faculty that this group has a more special expertise now because of that. Most of the students had to learn on the spot; even the district wasn’t sure of what they were doing this year.”
Substituting is not part of the education program, but professors encourage their students to take on the paid position.
Angie Child, associate professor of education, said due to COVID-19 she has seen a huge need for substitutes, and although substituting is not a requirement for the ELED program, students have stepped up this year to serve as substitutes.
Janna Heiligenstein, assistant professor of education, said: “They get better classroom management techniques where they learn from experienced teachers. They also get exposed to different grade levels.”
Erin Warner, a senior elementary education major from St. George, is teaching an optional extended kindergarten class instead of student teaching as her capstone, an opportunity that all capstone professors agree is hard to come by.
“The big thing is getting to know my students, and that’s something they really push in the program,” Warner said. “They also include the ESL endorsement, something that other programs don’t offer.”
Taiylor Myers, a senior elementary education major from St. George, participates in the Student Enhanced Experience (S.E.E.) program, a program that most participate in during their capstone. She teaches a second grade class, and she said masks have been the hardest thing for everyone.
“The masks make it hard because I don’t see my students’ faces,” Myers said. “Sometimes at recess, they take them off and I’m like, ‘I do not imagine you looking like that.’ I forget that I know what the top of their head and eyes look like, but sometimes I’m oblivious to who I pass in the hall.”
Christine Olson, a senior elementary education major from Santa Clara, had a trial by fire, only having one week to prepare to take over her mentor’s fourth grade class after her mentor was diagnosed with cancer.
“I took over full-time in February,” Christine Olson said. “I was just thrown into it, but I’ve actually learned so much. Dixie has prepared me so well.”
Christine Olson said she believes her experience resonates with DSU’s “active learning, active life” motto.
Danielle Simkins, a senior elementary education major from Enterprise, is part of the S.E.E. program and has been part of a third grade class for her student teaching capstone.
Simkins said the biggest thing she has learned in the program is helping students whose first language is not English through its ESL endorsement.
Professors across the education department all agree that becoming a teacher is not an easy task.
“Many of our students come to us and say, ‘I want to become a teacher because I love kids,’” said Kari Gali, assistant professor of education. “Yes, you have to love kids, but really, you have to be flexible and problem solve because every day is a completely new day.”
Gali said kids come from different social and emotional situations, and student teachers have to deal with all of those factors and still try to get the same results.
“You still need to hit academic standards,” Gali said. “It makes [teaching] a real challenge, but that challenge is awesome.”
College students all over the world go into debt just from paying for tuition, and students who transfer from community colleges, or any college for that matter, are put into much more debt than they should be.
When students transfer to a new college, not all of their credits follow them to their new school, thus forcing them to retake and pay for the same class all over again. Colleges shouldn’t make students retake classes they’ve already passed.
Transferring schools can disrupt a lot of things in a student’s college career. Credits won’t always transfer over, and if they do, it may only be for elective credits. It will then, in turn, take longer to complete your degree. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, on average, transfer students will lose 13 or more credits they’ve already taken and paid for. The same source also cited that about four in 10 students have no credits that can transfer at all.
I will most likely need to transfer schools in a couple of years, and after looking into several different schools, most of the credits I’ve taken at Dixie State University will not transfer over. It’s ridiculous that some colleges won’t let students in who already have hours of credits and are forcing them to spend thousands more dollars to get their degree.
There are websites and links through specific colleges that will allow you to see how many credits you’ve taken that will transfer over. If a student is trying to transfer to a new college, they should look at these in depth and see just how many credits they would need to retake because it could affect the chance of them attending that college.
According to data from 2014 by College Board Research, students who transfer only once can take five years to earn their degree compared to those who don’t transfer only taking three to four years. Along with the extra time, students who transfer schools will spend an average of almost $95,000 on tuition, housing and other fees, whereas students who stay in one school will only spend around $80,000 on average.
This could all be solved if colleges accepted all students’ course credit equally. More students would graduate on time, spend less money and gain the education they’re looking for. It makes it so much harder on people if they have to take into account the credits they’d have to retake and the cost that would come with that.
For students who need to begin their academic career at a community college, they need to take into account the schools they would be able to transfer to without losing any credits. No college is required to accept transfer credits unless there is an articulation agreement or state policy in place, and only specific colleges will transfer them over. Salt Lake Community College is one of these schools that transfers all credits, but it only accounts for colleges in Utah; anyone else coming from another state won’t have the same luck.
Students come from out of state all the time, especially from states close by like Arizona, Nevada and California. But these students are also paying thousands more dollars to come to Utah schools. The fact that students want to go to a certain school should be a sign to those colleges that the education they’re looking for is with them. Making them pay more and spend so much time trying to make up for that degree will discourage them from attending there.
People would be much happier knowing they aren’t risking their entire college career by transferring to a new and better school. If a student is trying to transfer to a certain college, those colleges should look at the classes they’ve taken and see how they pertain to their degree. If it’s helpful toward their education, it should transfer over, period.
The Dixie State University women’s basketball team took an entire semester off, missing its first Division I season. Until now, the coaches and players weren’t commenting on this decision.
Together, the team decided to opt out of its season because of personal obligations, school struggles, health and financial obligations.
“We were not speaking about the decision immediately after due to personal challenges each student-athlete was going through,” head coach J.D. Gustin said. “It was obviously a difficult time, early January. Our sports information administrators did a great job of respecting the wishes and privacy of our players and coaches.”
Gustin said several of the players had contracted the coronavirus. When the team canceled a game for the third time, they came together to vote on whether to continue the season or not.
Gustin said he was shocked that the majority wanted to stop; however, enough teammates voted in favor that they potentially could have continued playing.
It came down to Gustin acting in the best interest of his players’ well-being, and he felt they could use the break.
There were mixed reactions to the results.
Forward Shay Potter, a senior exercise science major from Murray, said she was bummed to miss her senior year of playing.
Gustin said some players felt taking the year off put them behind, as they would have benefited from playing by building the team and using basketball as an outlet, but not playing also had its benefits. The players took care of themselves and were able to be with their families, he said.
Other universities felt the same way. Billy Witz, reporter for The New York Times, was one of the first to get answers from the team. Witz said DSU was one of six, beyond the Ivy Leagues, to take the semester off. Those teams all had their own reasons.
Potter said the team didn’t practice during this time, but the players retained their scholarships.
Spring workouts started back up for the team’s fall 2021 season.
The DSU community can look forward to next season starting in August with three exhibition games in Costa Rica.
After being on the road for 11 out of 13 games, the Dixie State University baseball team was back home for a four-game series April 16-18.
This home series was different for the Trailblazers because it brought back memories to some of the older players on the team who took on former PacWest foe California Baptist University.
“In a way, it felt like we were in the PacWest playing [CBU] again playing them [on Friday],” pitcher Brayden Bonner, a communication studies major from Murray, said. “There were only a couple guys on the team that has actually played them that are still here, me included, [and it was surreal playing them again].”
DSU won games one and two against the Lancers by a final 3-1 and 2-1. The highlight for both victories was the phenomenal pitch by the Trailblazers. The DSU pitching staff only allowed 10 hits, gave up two runs, and tallied up 15 strikeouts through the two games.
“The starters gave us a chance, and then the relievers came in and did a knockout job,” head coach Chris Pfatenhauer said. “That’s the kind of games we want to play. When we were in the PacWest with [CBU], the scores were 3-2 or 4-1 and that’s how we want to play the game, and we’re getting there.”
Then CBU’s bats came alive for games three and four to claim both victories over the Trailblazers by final scores 4-7 and 8-14. The Lancers wracked up DSU’s pitchers with 32 hits, and eight hits going for extra bases, four of those hits being home runs.
Pfatenhauer said there were moments in both games when his players were leading the game heading into the sixth, seventh or eighth innings, but they let the game slip away.
Pfatenhauer said, “To lead all four games and put ourselves in a great position to not to just win the series, but to sweep the series, we just didn’t get the right hits in moments.”
Outfielder Lane Pritchard, a senior psychology major from Red Bluff, California, was the most consistent hitter for the Trailblazers by having .692 batting average, logging one home run and collecting two RBIS.
Pritchard said he found success throughout the series by staying disciplined and keeping a consistent pitching speed.
Despite dropping games three and four, DSU still gets the split over CBU, and it’s a big deal because the Lancers currently stand at No. 2 in the Western Athletic Conference.
“Coming out and getting a series split against the No. 2 team in the WAC right now is pretty good for our camaraderie and going into the couple of series,” Bonner said.
Even though the Trailblazers picked up two big wins over the No. 2 team in the conference, Pfatenhauer said he doesn’t want the series splits to continue being a trend for the team.
Pfatenhauer said: “We don’t want to start hanging our hat on splits [because] we were about winning series [and] obviously this year that’s been pretty tough for us, but we’ll take wins, and it’s always good to compete against [CBU]. They’re a really good program, they’re doing it right, and that’s who we want to be like.”
DSU will have a quick turnaround road trip on April 20 to take on Brigham Young University, as well as a three-game road series against San Diego State University April 24-25.
![i-9qmnNQt-X2[1]](https://sunnewsdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/cceffb0c-i-9qmnnqt-x21-1024x682.jpg "First Dixie Giving Day approaching")
