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OPINION Column: Deleting your Facebook is a healthy way to get back to reality p. 4DOWNLOAD OUR APPScan the QR code at left for blogs, o� ers and more SPORTS Terps women’s lacrosse team wins � fth straight ACC title over North Carolina p. 8
Univ. app challenge aids local servicesFirst-place app helps modernize county’s parks department site
By Madeleine ListSta� writer
For some smartphone users, it’s im-possible to imagine completing the sim-plest of tasks without the help of an app.
With this in mind, students in the Code for Community Challenge de-veloped new apps to mobilize com-munity service.
On Thursday, a panel of judges from Prince George’s County, Baltimore and this university selected first-,
second- and third-place teams from a total of six submissions, though the students did not compete for prizes. Rather, they all earned the honor of benefi ting their communities.
“This shows that students are com-mitted to helping communities,” said Alex Chen, urban studies and plan-ning professor and challenge organizer. “There’s social consciousness among students to devote their time to service.” See challenge, Page 2
Team P_Recs came in fi rst place with their Web app for the Prince George’s County parks and recreation depart-ment. The app will increase the mo-bility of the department’s website, allowing smartphone users to look up park resources and facilities easily, said Joan Zhang, sophomore bioengineering major and Team P_Recs member.
State lags on degree goalsProjections indicate 8 percent gap by 2025
threw a party to celebrate a fresh start under Danielle Newman’s leadership.
The lyrics, “You can’t hide your lyin’ eyes,” rang through the news-room. It was a line from an Eagles song, “Lyin’ Eyes,” the anthem for the 1996-97 Diamondback staff, which had grown infuriated with its editor in chief, who members said constantly lied to them.
Blair, who declined several re-quests for comment, ended his tenure early without citing a reason, staff members said. About a year later, he
landed a job at The New York Times, where he went on to destroy his jour-nalistic career and may have cost two high-level Times editors their jobs in 2003 after an internal investigation found he plagiarized and fabricated dozens of stories. The cataclysmic incident was unfathomable at a place like the Times, a place reserved for journalism’s most elite players.
Blair resigned from the Timesnearly 10 years ago on May 1, 2003. It surprised many journalism college faculty members, who saw Blair as an
eager — albeit immature — and prom-ising young black reporter who could improve diversity in the newsroom.
But it was hardly surprising for the students who had worked alongside him at The Diamondback in his two years there. He lied both as a reporter and editor in chief of the paper, sta¡ members said, yet remained a favorite among journalism college faculty. He continued to receive strong recom-mendations to help secure high-profi le
See blair, Page 3
team p_recs, comprising students Elisa Escapa, Neelnavo Kar and Joan Zhang, took home � rst place in the Code for Community Challenge for its county parks and recreation department Web app. photo courtesy of elisa escapa
Student concerns prompt DOTS changesBy Matt BylisFor The Diamondback
Citing student concerns and rid-ership data, DOTS will make changes to the Green and Purple bus lines in the fall to better serve students.
For several months, Residence Hall Association officials worked with the Department of Transpor-tation Services to address student concerns about safety and e£ cien-cy on the Green and Purple lines. DOTS agreed to make changes to the routes, and students should expect to see them this fall, according to an April 25 news release.
“It was a gradual process to fi gure out the changes, but we worked hard with [DOTS Director] David Allen to find the solution,” said Omer Kaufma, RHA student groups See buses, Page 2
See completion, Page 2
By Jim BachSenior sta� writer
Although Gov. Martin O’Malley and the state legislature have continued to keep ample state funding flowing to higher education, the state is still projected to fall short of its degree at-tainment goals.
By 2025, the state plans to increase the percentage of state working-age adults who hold a college degree from the latest fi gure of 39.3 percent to 60 percent. But at the current pace, projection rates show the state would instead be at 52 percent, signifi cantly short of the stated goal, ac-cording to a 2012 report from the Lumina Foundation, a private group aimed at expanding access to higher education.
While challenging, closing this gap is not out of reach, said Dewayne Matthews, policy and strategy vice president at the Lumina Foundation. However, it will take more investment and innovation in higher education to achieve that 60 percent fi gure, he said.
The issue is more than just a matter of having more high school students enroll in the higher education system — it will also require reaching out to those who dropped out just before getting a degree, Matthews said. Students often drop out of college because of fi nancial problems or poor grades.
“College completion rates is the Achilles’ heel of the American higher education system,” Matthews said.
Green, Purple buses to reroute for e£ ciency
and organizations liaison.The Purple evening service route
will bypass North Campus, taking stu-dents directly from Courtyards apart-ments to Stamp Student Union. DOTS plans to add North Campus stops to the Green Line, allowing students to travel directly to Fraternity Row and the Graham Cracker.
For students who live in Courtyards, getting to downtown College Park can be a time commitment, DOTS offi-cials said.
“Passengers traveling to and from The Courtyards apartments ex-pressed a desire to have service to central campus and downtown that didn’t require having to first travel through the north campus residence halls which are already serviced by
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NEWS 2 OPINION 4 FEATURES 5 DIVERSIONS 6 CLASSIFIED 6 SPORTS 8INDEX Submit tips to The Diamondback at [email protected] For breaking news, alerts and more, follow us on Twitter @thedbk © 2013 THE DIAMONDBACK
JAYSON BLAIR: 10 YEARS LATER
By Yasmeen AbutalebSenior sta� writer
Jayson Blair had grown intolerable. “Just go already,” the 1997 staff
members of The Diamondback quietly whispered among themselves.
Blair, the daily independent student newspaper’s 1996-97 editor in chief, walked out the newsroom doors for the final time in April 1997. After a reign full of missed deadlines, ques-tionable ethics and little leadership, the sta¡ was ready to move on. They
photo illustration by charlie deboyace/the diamondback
a rise predicated on liesBefore torrid career at The New York Times, Jayson Blair wooed journalism faculty while infuriating Diamondback sta�
PART 1 OF 3
2 THE DIAMONDBACK | NEWS | MONDAY, april 29, 2013
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The old website was not user-friendly, and the Web app makes it more streamlined and intui-tive, which will help get the word out about everything the depart-ment has to o�er, she said.
“I think it’s a really great way for people to take advantage of the county,” Zhang said. “This way, people can see what’s available. If they knew about all the features that the parks had, they would be more likely to go out there.”
Zhang worked with Neelna-vo Kar, a sophomore computer science and mathematics major, and Elisa Escapa, a junior com-munication major.
Zhang said she hopes to continue working on the app with her group to add more features, such as a cal-endar, to help advertise events.
Mobile apps are a great way to get the word out about events and opportunities because so many people are glued to their smartphones, said Dylan Zingler, a member of Team Mobile App Developers. His team came in second place with an app that advertises community service opportunities around Prince George’s County, the sophomore computer science major said.
Zingler and his team members — senior computer science and economics major Vinnie Ven-demia, Ely Shamouilian and Oluwabori Oludemi, both senior computer science majors, and junior computer science major Kemari Legg — created the app to help high school students complete their required number of service hours, but it can be used by anyone, Zingler said.
“I feel like if you’re willing to get involved, it gives you a good avenue to do that,” he said. “And having it be so local, it’s going to be very central to the Prince George’s County area and the University of Maryland campus.”
Organizers can contact the Mobile App Developers club if they want to advertise a volun-teer opportunity, Zingler said, whether it’s weeding an on-campus garden, planting trees or making birdhouses. The group hopes to work more closely with local high schools and develop a feature through which students can officially log their hours in a personal account through the app, he said. Other apps focused on helping busy students orga-nize their hectic lives.
Third place went to Team Pa-rameTerps for its Web app that would allow users to log on to a website, create a reminder and
have it sent to its creator via text or email at a specified time, said Michael Wang, team member and junior computer science major. That app is not currently live.
“For people who are forget-ful, it’d be really nice to just use this app to remind yourself when you have to do things,” he said. “I think it’s easier to remember with text messages since every-one checks their texts.”
Community organizers would also be able to use the site to send reminders to lists of contacts so they do not have to remind each person individually, Wang said.
“A lot of people just forget about events if they get just an email a week before,” he added.
Wang worked with team members Everett Lum and Jairam Param, both junior computer science majors, and Priscilla Tang, a junior electrical engineering major.
Overall, the challenge made the community a little more high-tech and left the students with a feeling of accomplishment, Chen said.
ChallengeFrom PAGE 1
“In every state, there are very large numbers of people — adults — who go into college and never finish.”
As of 2010, 21 percent of the state’s adult population, or 651,000 workers, had gone to college but never finished. If just half of those individuals were to come back and finish, Matthews said, it would add 10 percentage points to the degree attainment numbers and bring the state closer to its goals relatively quickly.
“Many, if not most, of these people actually still want to go back to college,” Matthews said. “They see the value of completion.”
But getting in touch with these individuals — or “near-completers,” as they are often called — requires effort from schools and universities, Mat-thews said. It could be as easy as looking through university databases to identify these in-dividuals and sending out emails, because this information is often still stored somewhere, he added.
In many cases, near-com-pleters would like to return but
are afraid to call their schools and make the first move, Mat-thews said.
“There’s literally shame in-volved,” he said.
State legislators identified near-completers as an integral part of meeting degree attain-ment goals in an omnibus edu-cation reform package, adding a provision for a marketing cam-paign and incentive program targeting these students. The College and Career Readiness and College Completion Act of 2013 passed earlier this month and will go into e�ect in July.
“We cannot let these students spend their money, come in and then not finish,” said Bernie Sadusky, executive director for the Maryland Association of Community Colleges, at a March committee meeting for the bill.
But with billions of dollars going into higher education each year and some legislators calling for a freeze on the amount of money going into the univer-sity system, Matthews said it’s going to continue to be a costly — albeit rewarding — process.
I n ve s t m e n t s s h o u l d b e focused on bringing innova-tion into the classroom with the
use of technology to make for a more efficient cost structure, Matthews said. The current system, he added, needs some level of reform in this direction to keep higher education costs from ballooning and to make sure the funding goes toward a working system.
“There’s in fact no way you could scale up the current system and its cost structure to get to these much higher levels of attainment,” Matthews said. “This means that we have to think very di�erently about we how deliver higher education and make it more a�ordable to larger numbers of people, while at the same time assuring that the education people receive is of just as high quality — if not better — than the education they received in the past.”
But though the U.S. Depart-ment of Education and state lawmakers set benchmarks for degree attainment, some have criticized the drive for more college graduates as a short-sighted goal, George Mason University economist Walter Williams said in a November in-terview with The Diamondback.
“If everyone has a B.A. degree,
completionFrom PAGE 1
the #115 Orange route,” wrote Beverly Malone, DOTS assistant director, in a news release.
The Purple route constantly drew complaints that it was too long, as it made a loop from Stamp to Courtyards and then passed through North Campus on its way to Route 1.
“Earlier this year I rode the Purple from Stamp because I knew that it stops near my dorm [at Easton Hall],” said Hashem Hraky, a freshman neurobiology and physiology major. “It was super annoying. The route makes no sense and takes forever.”
Students who frequented the Green route, though they were few and far between as the Green line had one of the lowest riderships of the evening service routes, also complained about ine¢ciency, as well as safety. Sophomore kinesiology major Je� Bowen rushed a fraternity this spring and said he felt uncomfortable on the long commute from his North Campus dorm to his fra-ternity’s house.
“I used to take the Orange from Elkton to Frat Row, and then have to walk almost 10 minutes
in the pitch black,” Bowen said. “I was always checking behind me while I walked.”
The Green line will continue to service Stamp, the Leon-ardtown community, Frater-nity Row, downtown College Park and the Graham Cracker neighborhood, but DOTS of-ficials hope that by adding stops, they can increase the route’s ridership.
“That would have saved walking distance, hassle and time,” Bowen said.
Most students who regularly ride both lines won’t need to make any changes to their usual commutes, DOTS o¢cials said, as the evening service routes will continue to service each of the existing stops.
RHA officials said they’re pleased with the changes. Changing the routes serves a twofold purpose: working to address the concerns about both lines symbiotically, Kaufman said. “People’s concerns about the Purple coincide perfectly with other concerns about the Green,” he said. “We are short-ening a line that was too long and lengthening a line that was too short, all while improving safety for our students.”
busesFrom PAGE 1
DOTS officials plan to adjust the Green and Purple bus lines in the fall after students expressed concerns about the e�ciency of the evening routes. �le photo/the diamondback
Despite the large time commitment, students said they enjoyed the ex-perience, and many hope to further improve their apps next year.
“It’s awesome that people were able to come together on top of all their schoolwork and do some-thing for a better cause,” Zingler said. “I think all the apps submit-ted had good ideas and definitely had something going for them.”
where are we going to get me-chanics or electricians or all these other jobs that are non-professional?” Williams said.
Having a number as high as 60 percent, however, helps lawmakers and higher educa-tion o¢cials fashion substantive policies, rather than just moving toward an abstract goal of simply increasing degree attainment numbers, Matthews said.
“You look at that di�erently than if you’re saying, ‘You know we just need to have more stu-dents finish college, or more students go to college,’” Mat-thews said. “Those kind of small sorts of incremental changes are frankly not enough.”
But Williams said higher edu-cation attainment isn’t necessar-ily synonymous with a flourish-ing economy.
“In 1787, at the time of the Constitutional Convention, we were a third-world nation. … Up to the 1920s and 1930s [and] 1940s, nobody came out and said, ‘We need so and so number of people in college,’” Williams said. “We became the richest country in the world.”
“it’s awesome that people were able to come together on top of all their school work and do something for a better cause. ... all the apps submitted had good ideas and de�nitely had something going for them.”
DYLAN ZINGLERSophomore computer science major
internships and served as a reminder of life’s unfairness, former Diamondback sta� members remembered.
If he continued down the treach-erous path he began at the student newspaper, his contemporaries knew his disgraceful fall from journalism was inevitable.
“It was cynical, but it was like, ‘Oh my God, he finally got his comeup-pance,’” said Newman, who took over as editor in chief the night Blair left. “He got busted. It took a long time for him to get busted. He should’ve gotten busted earlier.”
WARNING SIGNS
That Blair kid was everywhere, staff members recalled. He had just started writing for The Diamondback in January 1995, but he immediately took to gossiping and socializing. His distinct cackle — a cross between a hyena and Woody Woodpecker, said Tom Madigan, who worked with Blair as a sports editor and later ombuds-man — became well known throughout the newsroom and journalism college.
“It was impossible not to know Jayson — he was everywhere,” said Carl Stepp, a journalism college pro-fessor. “He was the best schmoozer as a student I’ve ever seen.”
Sure, he was often annoying, sta� members said, but he was harmless.
“It was easy to forgive that sort of thing because there was something sort of cute about it,” Madigan said. “He was nonthreatening. He was just an overeager kid, and he made a few mistakes, but so does everybody.”
But Blair’s personality only took him so far before his work began to speak for itself. He was sloppy, sta�ers said, and he had a poor work ethic. He turned in his articles late and continu-ally made careless errors.
MONDAY, april 29, 2013 | NEWS | THE DIAMONDBACK 3
BLAIRFrom PAGE 1
So editors worked with him and gave him tips to improve. He would vigorously nod in response.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it,” he’d say over and over, Madigan recounted.
“He really, really wanted you to know he was listening to you,” Madigan added. “None of these amounted to a red flag, exactly. It was just a kid trying a little bit too hard to fit in.”
Blair knew how to smooth talk, journalism faculty and Diamondback colleagues said, which helped his re-porting. Despite his minor errors, he still landed on the front page several days a week.
And strangely, Blair requested his middle initial be placed on his byline, which some sta� members said they found presumptuous. “Jayson T. Blair,” it read.
But the staff could deal with those little annoyances. The real problems surfaced when his lack of report-ing — and eventually, fabrication — became evident.
When Blair went out with another reporter to gather quotes for a story one night, he came back with a handful of quotes. But the report-er didn’t see Blair talk to anyone, Newman said.
Editors called the registrar’s o�ce to check the names of students Blair had provided. None of them were listed students at this university.
He wasn’t having the same prob-lems in class, however. Chris Harvey, now the journalism college’s intern-ship and career development direc-tor, who taught Blair in an intensive reporting class, remembered checking the source lists she required from all of her students. She called the sources herself to make sure students had ac-tually talked to everyone listed. And Blair’s list checked out.
Diamondback editors didn’t do an
exhaustive investigation of all his stories, Newman said. But Blair was fired after he failed to turn in three stories during one semester — then a minimum standard required from any staff writer. Blair left and worked for Capital News Service, the journal-ism college-owned, student-driven wire service.
NEW LEADERSHIP
Blair had an impressive resume: reporting and copy editing positions at The Diamondback, an internship at The Washington Post, reporting at Capital News Service.
Eager to boost that resume, Blair applied for The Diamondback’s editor in chief position — which is named in April — in the spring of 1996.
Dave Murray, the then-sports editor, seemed the obvious choice and the newsroom favorite, staff members said.
Maryland Media Inc., a non-profit company separate from the univer-sity that oversees The Diamond-back, Mitzpeh, Eclipse and the Ter-rapin yearbook, chooses the editor. The company consists of paid board members, along with alumni. Chris-topher Callahan, then an associate dean in the journalism college who helped Blair land high-profile intern-ships, strongly advocated for Blair for the position, according to a 2004 Baltimore Sun article.
The board elected The Diamond-back’s former reporter, and staff members were furious. Murray had put in his time. How could Blair possibly be qualified when he didn’t have any leadership or managing experience?
So the editors convened in the middle of the night at Plato’s Diner on Route 1. They would go on strike, they said, until the board came to its senses.
The editors tried to tell the board why Blair couldn’t be in charge. All they heard in response, Newman said, was that they couldn’t handle the success of a black man.
“We’re not racist,” the editors told the board. “This has nothing to do with the fact that he’s black.”
It didn’t matter what they said. Blair would begin helming the news-paper in a few weeks.
MISHANDLING MONEY
Maybe working on the paper was frustrating, but at least they were making the money they needed, re-porters and editors thought. That could keep them going.
But when they went to pick up their paychecks, they found far smaller payments than in past years. They had no idea where the money was going, but suspected Blair was paying his assistant — a friend named Susan Freitag who had no prior experi-ence on The Diamondback — a large portion of the honoraria.
The editor in chief is given a sum of money — an honorarium — to pay his or her staff. Reporters were paid a standard rate for every article they wrote, and editors were paid per shift. Staff members would submit a list of how much they worked to the editor in chief.
In past years, the managing editor looked over the pay amounts as an independent auditor of sorts. But Blair only allowed Freitag — whom no one else on sta� really knew — to look at them, Madigan said.
There was a general lack of orga-nization under Blair’s tenure, staff members said. It wasn’t clear who should read and edit stories, who should design pages and when and how the pages should be sent to the printer.
And while many editors came in at 5 p.m. and stayed until the paper was sent to the printer at about 1 a.m., Blair broke editor in chief protocol and rarely stayed the whole night.
But the editors grew accustomed to his consistent absence. It only became intolerable when that lack of organiza-tion began a�ecting their personal and financial lives, they said.
Blair’s leadership was difficult enough to work under, many staff members thought. The smaller pay-checks — which they often needed to help with tuition or other expenses — were inexcusable.
Both managing editors and two news editors left after Blair’s first semester as editor in chief, Newman said.
After dedicating time as a sports writer and editor in his early college years, Madigan took on fewer re-sponsibilities at the paper during Blair’s tenure. Staff members knew Madigan was one of the few people B l a i r re s p e c te d , so t h ey a s ke d Madigan to talk to Blair about the way he was handling the honoraria during the second semester.
Madigan sat in the editor’s office with Blair for 30 minutes, requesting he see exactly how much people were being paid and how Blair distributed the honoraria. But it was more like the same five-minute conversation six times, Madigan recalled.
“Look, Jayson, you have people that are upset. It sounds like they have reason to be upset,” Madigan remem-bered telling him. “It would really help if I could come out of this room and have them believe me that everything is on the up and up. It would really help if I could see the numbers so I could do that.”
Blair closed his eyes and shook his head, pursing his lips, Madigan re-membered. It was as if Blair wished he could help but simply couldn’t.
“You know, Tom, I just don’t, don’t think I could do that,” Blair responded.
When Madigan walked back into the newsroom, sta� members looked at him hoping for some relief.
“No,” Madigan told them. “I didn’t see the numbers.”
SUCKING IT UP
They were going to miss their deadline — again. It was 3 a.m. in the newsroom, days before spring break, and staff members still had plenty of work left on a special insert.
The server crashed. It wasn’t unusual, Newman said, but they needed access to the production o�ce across the hall from the newsroom to send the pages to the printer. Blair was the only one, other than the pro-duction manager, with the key.
They paged him nonstop and called his dorm room for an hour, Newman said. They wondered, where the hell was he? He couldn’t even pick up his phone?
Clearly aware they couldn’t finish the insert in time, livid staffers re-turned a few hours later when the busi-ness managers could unlock the doors.
While Newman — the then-man-aging editor — was finishing up the supplement the following morning, a friend asked her if she had heard what happened to Blair.
“His roommate left the gas stove on, and he passed out and almost died,” Newman’s friend told her. “If his roommate hadn’t woken him up, he would’ve died.”
Blair showed up to the editors’ meeting at 5 p.m. that day, as he usually did, with a raspy voice that “got just a little less raspy” as the meeting wore on, Newman said. He told Newman he needed to go home to rest.
Sta� members, who didn’t believe the story, found it more amusing than anything else. They recounted the story for each other in emails after Blair left the newsroom that day.
“Get a load of this,” they wrote to each other.
But one sta� member was almost certain there weren’t gas stoves in the dorm rooms, so Newman called the Department of Resident Life and asked. There were only electric stoves
on the campus, she learned.Blair’s sloppiness carried over into
his course work, said Chris Hanson, a journalism professor whom Blair helped hire as a member of the search committee, as he turned in assign-ments late and his grades slipped. But faculty members didn’t see his care-lessness to the extent Diamondback editors did.
“The biggest single lesson of this is that it was Jayson’s fellow students who were onto him first,” Stepp said. “He was a smart and capable young man who was perhaps a little imma-ture. That’s true of so many students.”
While faculty may not have seen the extent of Blair’s shortcomings, the editors decided they had reached their breaking point. A couple of days after Blair’s gas stove story, they met to craft a plan of action.
“What are we going to do?” they asked one another. “Are we just going to suck it up and wait until he leaves in May, or are we going to go to the board?”
They decided to hold back. After all, they had made it this far. How much worse could the next couple of months get?
AN EARLY EXIT
Donald Gene Castleberry, a junior at the university, was found dead in the Delta Tau Delta fraternity house in April 1997. Local media outlets were covering the story, so Blair jumped at the opportunity to lead the coverage.
Rumors circulated that Castleber-ry died from a drug overdose. There
“he really, really wanted you to know he was listening to you ... none of these amounted to a red �ag, exactly. it was just a kid trying a little bit too hard to �t in.”
TOM MADIGANDiamondback alumnus
disgraced journalist jayson blair’s work as both an editor and reporter for The Diamondback in the 1990s was marred by factual errors. Former coworkers recounted how, as editor in chief, Blair directed a reporter to write about erroneous rumors that a student’s death was related to drug use. from the diamondback’s april 8, 1997, issue
weren’t any autopsy reports yet, but Blair decided the rumors were enough to warrant dispatching a reporter, Alan Sachs, to write a story, which ran on April 8, 1997, Newman said. But print-ing a story solely based on rumors violates basic journalistic standards.
“The cause of junior English major Donald Gene Castleberry’s death is still a mystery,” the lead of the front-page story read, “but many campus students have come to their own conclusions about the in-cident.” The story included student quotes that speculated he died from a cocaine overdose.
An autopsy released the following day, however, found that drugs were not responsible for Castleberry’s
death. The campus community was outraged, Newman said, and numer-ous readers wrote letters lambasting The Diamondback.
But Blair, who edited the story, didn’t stick around to deal with readers’ complaints. Closely fol-lowing the story, Blair announced his resignation without explana-tion, but still wrote two follow-up stories with Sachs. He’d intern at The Boston Globe that summer, and go on to The New York Times the fol-lowing summer, before eventually being hired without graduating from the university.
Typically, The Diamondback’s editor in chief-elect is named in early April and takes over about three or four weeks later. But Newman, the only applicant that year, had to take over the night she was named.
Hoping to squelch complaints after Sachs egregiously reported Castleberry’s death, Newman wrote a column apologizing for the rumor-based story.
But it was a small price to pay for Blair leaving. The Times could have him, sta� members thought.
“I was glad for him to go because it meant we could define a process,” Newman said. “We had a very ill-defined process because it changed whether or not he was there or whether or not he decided to be in-volved with something.”
Editors and former sta� members planned a party that night to celebrate an end to Blair’s term. His terrible reign was finally over, they thought.
For some reason, Newman said,
Blair decided to stay until the paper was sent to the printer that night — a rare occurrence.
“Just go so we can have our freaking party,” Newman thought.
At about 1 a.m., after the paper was sent to the printer, Blair finally left. “Lyin’ Eyes” came on minutes later, and everyone cheerfully sang along together.
“You can’t hide your lyin’ eyes.”
This is part one of a three-part feature on Jayson Blair’s rise and fall. Check back Wednesday for the story of Blair’s resignation from the Timesand Friday for the lessons learned at this university a decade later.
“the biggest single lesson of this is that it was jayson’s fellow students who were onto him �rst ... he was a smart and capable young man who was perhaps a little immature. that’s true of so many students.”
CARL STEPPJournalism professor
Deleting Facebook
TOMMY CREEGAN The perpetual confl ict among stu-dents, permanent College Park residents and city police has taken
a promising turn over the course of the past month, thanks to the joint e� orts of the SGA and Interfraternity Council. If these governing bodies have their way, complaints over noise violations and binge drinking could plummet as game attendance sees a significant spike. The solution: Convince the uni-versity to allow students to tailgate on the campus.
No longer would students tailgate before football games and other ath-letic events at houses in the Old Town neighborhood or other off-campus locations. By opening up designated on-campus tailgating sites to students, the culture of partying on game day would receive a dramatic face-lift far more appealing than the status quo.
As the university considers this pro-posal, which undoubtedly still needs to be developed before it could be im-plemented in the fall, city and police o� cials should work diligently with the Student Government Association and IFC to fi nd a way to actualize this initiative. Alternative e� orts to reduce noise violations and binge drinking, such as increasing fi nes, would do little toward fundamentally changing the problem at hand. Though some may believe “If they get fi ned, they’re less likely to do it,” a view expressed by District 3 Councilwoman Stephanie Stullich in a March 7 meeting, exces-sively punitive actions against stu-
STAFF EDITORIAL
dents can be subjective at times and are rarely e� ective.
Even with noise violations ranging from up to $500 for a fi rst o� ense to $1,000 for a second o� ense in a six-month period, students have shown they will continue to tailgate loudly and proudly on their own premises. So while raising the fi nes doled out to stu-
dents sounds nice in theory for the city, moving the tailgates themselves would likely enable police o� cers to better monitor unsafe and illegal drinking.
For the athletic department and the boosters in Terrapin Club, this initia-tive o� ers much more than addressing neighborhood tensions. On-campus tailgates may lead to students actually attending football games, which as of this fall 2012 was hardly a guarantee.
As the university prepares to join Big Ten schools such as Michigan and Ohio State, which ranked fi rst and second respectively in the nation for 2012 football attendance, Byrd Stadium has recorded its lowest average attendance since 2000. The 15 percent drop in at-tendance averages from 42,355 in 2011
to 36,023 in 2012 was the most sig-nifi cant drop among universities in the ACC and ranked just above Northwest-ern, which had the worst attendance record in the Big Ten last season. The program will need to produce more than empty seats and lackluster fanfare if it hopes to compete in the Big Ten and avoid slipping back into a vulner-able fi nancial position.
Instead of tailgating in far-o� loca-tions and forgetting about making the trek to the stadium, bringing students onto the campus and close to the game would go a long way toward boost-ing attendance. Sure, students would sacrifi ce some of the autonomy tailgat-ing at home may provide, but with the co-sponsorship of the SGA and IFC, students — including those in fraterni-ties and sororities — appear ready to compromise and accept heightened tailgating restrictions.
Tailgating in College Park should be about collectively celebrating our school pride and passion in a safe and appropriate manner. Bringing stu-dents onto the campus would only further that aim. By communicat-ing with other universities that have made such changes to tailgating re-strictions, similarly to how the IFC has based its proposal off Clemson University’s model, a jointly advan-tageous solution is within reach for the athletic department, boosters, students, city o� cials and residents a� ected by this policy. Let’s not waste this opportunity.
Open up the tailgate
OUR VIEW
Allowing students to host tailgates on the campus
would aid e orts to reduce neighborhood tensions and revive football attendance.
ASHLEY ZACHERY/the diamondback
EDITORIAL CARTOON
It was late November 2011 when I deactivated my Facebook account.
That was my worst semester of grades at this university. On a whim, I made the decision to deactivate my account. I made my last status about how I couldn’t be wasting time and how I would be back after the semester.
I have been living Facebook-free since then, and I’m here to tell you that you should join me.
It’s really amazing how large Face-book has grown. With more than 1 billion monthly users, the social network has truly revolutionized online communication. But while Facebook can provide entertain-ment, it is ultimately unnecessary and counter to natural interaction.
I’m certainly willing to concede that Facebook has useful aspects that enhance certain qualities of life. Distant relatives and friends are now able to communicate and stay in one another’s lives. People who once were not able to keep in touch now easily can. And I’m willing to admit I miss seeing pictures of my friends and myself. Now I don’t have any recent pictures of myself.
But in a somewhat narcissistic Facebook indulgence, we sacrifi ce genuine and natural human in-teraction — which detracts from what makes us human. In reality, people waste an incredible amount of time and attention on Facebook for empty rewards.
Facebook fulfills a social desire by letting users give idealized yet inaccurate representations of them-selves for others to see. Profi les are e� ectively a polished image of the self for others to see, showing what you “like.”
Think about the typical profile.
Your education, job, birthday, sexual preference, various pictures (uploaded by both friends and yourself) and sta-tuses (detailing your thoughts) are all on Facebook for display.
Anyone you are “friends” with can peer into this representation of you and see these fairly intimate details without ever having a conversation with you. As a result, people know details of your life without knowing your life story, flaws and all. Rather than getting to know someone through direct interac-tion, we construct concepts of other people from profi les, which robs us of the human connections and experience of getting to know our peers.
We bypass genuine connection for the ability to privately view others’ lives. People are now more prone to judge behind a computer screen and in person and “creep” on others’ lives. We become acclimated to comparisons, changing how we view people we know, people we don’t know and ourselves.
The way I see it, Facebook only pro-vides overvalued interactions. Tone, meaning, intention and how you think people perceive you can all be miscon-strued and over analyzed, all from the construct of your own mind.
We focus a lot of energy on this social platform, and the consequences, positive and negative, of this sort of activity are imminent.
Really, people should be aware of how they use Facebook and how it affects their lives. For some, it has little to no negative e� ect. For me, it started to get in the way of my goals, both academically and socially.
More and more people are deleting Facebook, and if you are on the edge, I hope I can give you that fi nal push. I’m telling you: The grass is greener on the other side.
When it comes to social interaction, nothing beats the real thing.
Tommy Creegan is a junior government and politics major. He can be reached at [email protected].
Near the end of the movie Primary Colors, Kathy Bates’ character gives a long speech lamenting how the po-litical process obscures the higher ideals to which politicians sup-posedly aspire. In a similar vein, I would like to lament the obfusca-tion of higher ideals through petty practices in journalism. Ratings and readers obviously matter, espe-cially in our culture of instant news. Media outlets, in an e� ort to adapt to this culture, have taken a gamble in forsaking careful dissemination of news for a rapid-fire approach. As members of the “now” genera-tion, we should demand our news outlets provide the coverage we once received, because it is the coverage we still deserve.
Social media has undoubtedly made access to news much easier. However, rather than viewing us as informed consumers of news, the media assumes we are all Willy Wonka brat Veruca Salt, demanding more information that only they, the submissive parents, can provide. We certainly rely on Twitter and Face-book for quick information and the even quicker spread of that informa-tion, but our options for receiving news are essentially limitless. With competition for viewers so fierce, journalists have seemed to stoop to a level of amateurism in their reporting that the publications on this campus do not tolerate and that should con-sequently not be tolerated by major media outlets.
The degraded standards of jour-nalism were on full display during the coverage of the Boston Mara-thon bombings and the ensuing manhunt for the suspects. Network news dripped with inaccuracies, false reports and sensationalism. CNN’s John King, for example, made the
erroneous announcement two days after the bombings that a suspect had been found, prompting speculation and false hope for a city in fear and a nation on edge. As a regular CNN viewer, I felt embarrassed to be watching the network, but I ultimately felt something else that I hadn’t felt on other occasions of CNN inaccuracies — anger.
My country was attacked on April 15. Innocent people died. I don’t care if CNN prides itself as the leader in breaking news: Racing to see who can break a story the fastest is childish and certainly does nothing to enhance the profession. I was angry because I was misled at a time when my country and I deserved the facts. I even began to question how much trust I should put into future CNN news bulletins. Of course, there probably wasn’t mali-cious intent to deceive on CNN’s part, but there was intent to attract viewers at the cost of false reporting.
We have the benefit of having a prestigious journalism school on this campus, along with quality media outlets. We expect The Diamondback and Capital News Service to adhere to basic principles when it comes to reporting and distributing news. We expect fair coverage and accurate pre-sentation. We expect that the source of a story is not a shady, unconfi rmed, anonymous high-level person. Our ex-pectations of how we receive news help guide the people who report the news by holding them to a higher standard.
Kathy Bates learned the hard way that politics is a dirty game. Journalism is not a game, but today’s media makes it so. From the race to attract viewers to the race to be fi rst, the media would rather claim petty victories in the ratings than claim praise for quality. Unfortunately, they have misjudged their audiences in these e� orts, and they should face the consequences. I’m feeling “now” weariness set in. Are you?
Aaron Aber is a freshman environmental science and policy major. He can be reached at [email protected].
Yo u p e o p l e h ave co l l e c t ive ly decided the book is better than the movie — always.
While this trend is acceptable because it is merely a matter of opinion, society’s default answer to this debate seems like it’s derived from a harmless, albeit frustrating, sense of superiority. On a case-by-case basis, though, the di� erence of opinion on the book versus its adaptation really has nothing to do with either — that’s too specifi c. Instead, the leg up comes down to a couple of general concepts: Reading is better than watching movies because it requires more intelligence, and people who read more may not necessarily be more intelligent, but they seem like they are and that’s what really matters.
I always prefer the movie to the book, but I am extremely biased because the entertainment I absorb is o� ensively stupid. My favorite actor is Nicolas Cage; my favorite television show is CSI: Miami, and my favorite scene in cinematic history is The Rock fi ghting Vin Diesel in Fast Five.
I also make a conscious choice not to read for entertainment because I don’t consider reading to be com-paratively enjoyable or challenging.
I learned to read in kindergarten, and when I read The Lorax as a 5-year-old, I loved it for its whimsical rhymes and pictures of silly trees and musta-chioed creatures — not for its deeper, subliminal environmentalist message. Then the books started getting longer and the pictures less frequent, and I gave up.
Today, the most notable example I can think of is Game of Thrones, the George R. R. Martin books and mega-hit HBO series. Despite never having read or watched Thrones, every Monday I find myself thrust into a conversation I have no place in but still cannot avoid. The fun-niest part is how my friends who engage me in their weekly analyses make sure I know they’ve read the books. Common conversation starters include: “Have you read the books? I have,” “Let me just start o� by saying I’ve read the books …” or my personal favorite, “That was so di� erent than what happens in the book.”
Game of Thrones is not a special case, but is instead the most recent exhibit in a long line of cultural ex-plosions. Ever since the Harry Potterfranchise started making movies, our society has become obsessed with having such national conversations with itself. And because of our hy-perconnected, nerdy culture, it has never been easier to continue those conversations. Fans can “like” their
favorite books and movies on Face-book and compete with one another over whose opinion is the most well informed.
In the past 10 years alone, in ad-dition to Harry Potter, we have had The Lord of the Rings, Twilight, The Hunger Games and the Millenniumtrilogy. I can’t imagine the Harry Potter, Hunger Games or especially Lord of the Rings books living up to their awesome movie adaptations. In other words, I’d rather see Legolas skim down a fl ight of stairs on a shield at Helm’s Deep and fire an arrow through an orc’s eyeball than read 1,500 pages of Sam and Frodo talking about food and how much their feet hurt. In fact, I think if J. R. R. Tolkien had lived to see his work in an IMAX theater, even he would have agreed.
Because books and fi lms are vastly di� erent forms of media, the experi-ences we garner from them are di� er-ent as well. It’s apples and oranges. People get more personal connections to books because they spend so much time with them and force their imagi-nations to work. I prefer TV or movies because they’re distracting — they let me turn my brain o� for a couple of hours — and because nobody can ad-equately put Nicolas Cage, The Rock or Vin Diesel into words.
Drew Farrell is a senior English major. He can be reached at [email protected].
The movie is better than the book
Tired of instant news
DREW FARRELL
4 THE DIAMONDBACK | MONDAY, APRIL 29, 2013
Opinion EDITORIAL BOARDMike KingEditor in Chief
DAN APPENFELLER Managing Editor
maria romasOpinion Editor
nadav karasovOpinion Editor
CONTACT US 3150 South Campus Dining Hall | College Park, MD 20742 | [email protected] OR [email protected] PHONE (301) 314-8200
Choose reality over a world of profi les
AARON ABER
POLICY: Signed letters, columns and cartoons represent the opinions of the authors. The sta� editorial represents the opinion of The Diamondback’s editorial board and is the responsibility of the editor in chief.
We deserve facts, not sensationalism
Popular novels can’t compare to a night with Nicolas Cage
Tyler Weyant Deputy Managing Editor
ACROSS1 Mondale, to pals 6 Dogie 10 Skin opening 14 Bizarre 15 1939 Lugosi role (var.) 16 Siberian river 17 Hamburger extra 18 Old ruler of Venice 19 Crusty cheese 20 Soup ingredient 22 Grid marker (2 wds.) 24 Shoe part 26 Flocks of geese 27 Germ killer 31 Gold Medal org. 32 Cel characters 33 Naive ones 36 Inc. cousin 39 Celestial bodies 40 Machine part 41 Cabby’s take 42 Playing marble 43 Frog relatives 44 Fogg portrayer 45 Possesses 46 Like new shoes 48 Friday’s companion 51 Mongkut portrayer 52 Warm welcomes (2 wds.)
54 Maria Conchita -- 59 Battery �uid 60 Do a fall chore 62 “-- -- You Knocking” 63 Sour pickle 64 LXVII x VI 65 Terra -- 66 End of a threat 67 NFL broadcaster 68 Matterhorn echo
DOWN 1 Deceive 2 Old Norse poem 3 Pack -- -- (quit) 4 Quick pace 5 Highest points 6 British FBI 7 Excited 8 Trademarks 9 More weird 10 Not private 11 Sen. -- Hatch 12 Drizzles 13 Gen. Robert -- -- 21 London lav 23 Tolstoy et al. 25 Pipe joint 27 Quark’s home 28 Petty or Loughlin 29 Actor Lee J. -- 30 Switch positions 34 Legal rep. 35 Domineering 36 Volcanic emission
37 Long hike 38 Refute 40 Water or oil 41 Old oath 43 Humorous Ogden
44 Make void 45 Leap over 47 Sine -- non 48 Photographer -- Beaton
49 Tracks 50 Hoople’s mutterings 52 Invited 53 Bounce
55 Pittsburgh river 56 Techie 57 No di�erent 58 Like some exams 61 Bonn single
CROSSWORD HOROSCOPE STELLA WILDER
Born today, you can some-times be very intense, but for the most part
you travel through life with a lighthearted, positive spirit that helps you navigate even the most difficult times with aplomb -- if not impunity. You can lash out against others when you feel that your back is against the wall, but you will do your best to avoid that kind of situation in the first place. Most of the time you are friendly, sociable and a joy to be with -- whether at work or at play. There is some-thing about you that inspires curiosity in others; the people around you are almost always eager to know what makes you tick -- though they are never likely to find out the truth. Your behavior can be quite disarming at times, particular-ly when you are to be found acting very casual in the midst of a crisis. Such behavior can be something of a tip-off, however: You know how to remain quite calm in a storm. Also born on this date are: Andre Agassi, tennis player; Uma Thurman, actress; Mi-chelle Pfeiffer, actress; Daniel Day-Lewis, actor; Kate Mul-grew, actress; Jerry Seinfeld, comedian; Dale Earnhardt, auto racer. To see what is in store for you tomorrow, find your birthday and read the corre-sponding paragraph. Let your birthday star be your daily guide.
© 2013 UNITED FEATURES SYNDICATE
TODAY’S CROSSWORD SPONSORED BY: PREVIOUS DAY’S PUZZLE SOLVED: TODAY’S HOROSCOPE SPONSORED BY:
COLLEGE INTUITION RICHIE BATES ROGER DOES COLLEGE MAX SISKIND
SU | DO | KU© Puzzles by Pappocom
Fill in the grid so that every row, column, and 3x3 grid contains the digits 1 through 9.
PREVIOUS DAY’S PUZZLE SOLVED:
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY:EASY
TUESDAY, APRIL 30 TAURUS (April 20-May 20) -- You can show someone close to you what you’re really about today, and in the end you’ll be much closer -- but is it too close? GEMINI (May 21-June 20) -- You cannot claim to know what someone else is doing, or why -- but you can combat his or her encroachment with a dedication that is all your own. CANCER (June 21-July 22) -- You may be surprised to learn that someone special has been looking out for you for quite some time. Today you can think things over. LEO (July 23-Aug. 22) -- Read between the lines today and you’ll learn an important lesson that can hold you in good stead throughout a trying time to come. VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22) -- A new idea comes your way today, and though you may not be able to take credit for it, you can surely make it work well for you. LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22) -- Taking things one step at a time may be the sensible thing to do, but you’re not feeling all that sensible right now!
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21) -- You may have to make someone else wait until you are truly ready before he or she can count on your own personal contribution. SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21) -- You won’t be able to use that old excuse today. You must be willing to do all you can. CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19) -- You may consider it a mistake to follow your instincts today, but it’s not -- though it may complicate matters. AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18) -- You’ll have to stick with what happens to you today. Trust that everything will turn out all right if you stay the course. PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20) -- You’re getting things all wrong at this time, and it would behoove you to get to the bottom of a situa-tion that you are misreading. ARIES (March 21-April 19) -- You have good cause to brag, but you’ll want to keep your opinions of yourself to yourself -- at least until you are among friends.
COPYRIGHT 2013UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC.
TODAY’S SUDOKU PUZZLE SPONSORED BY:
MONDAY, APRIL 29, 2013 | THE DIAMONDBACK 5
Features
6 THE DIAMONDBACK | MONDAY, APRIL 29, 2013
ONLINE All Classi�ed & Classi�ed Display Ads will run online at no additional charge.¿
ClassifiedRATES35¢ per word $3.50 minimumALL CAPITAL LETTERS 35¢ extra per wordBold Letters 70¢ extra per word
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CLASSIFIED DISPLAY ADS • Larger type • Sold in 1” increments • One column wide • $33.00/column inch • Run online at no additional costOFFICE HOURS 10AM – 4PM Monday – Friday • 3136 South Campus Dining HallDEADLINES The deadline for ads is 2PM • 2 business days in advance of publicationSPECIAL Run the same ad 4 consecutive days and get the 5th day FREE!
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Diversions
GETTING INTO THE SWING OF THINGSWashington swing dancing joint the Jam Cellar provides a refuge for those looking to escape from a high-pressure lifestyle
FEATURE | THE JAM CELLAR
Red Solo cups lined the piano-turned-table on a Tuesday night. Loud music echoed through the house’s nooks and crannies. The place crawled with young people standing in dresses, skirts, polos.
It wasn’t quite the typical house party. The cups — labeled with names in Sharpie — were filled with water. The loud music was 1920s-style jazz, full of smooth horns. People moved to the Lindy Hop and the Charles-ton, guided by a decades-old form of expression.
And they swing-danced.Their feet stepped in the same in-
tricate patterns of six-counts or eight-counts, triple-steps bustling together, kicking in the kind of precise synchro-nization that comes from months of classes. They danced in mostly male-and-female pairs, in tandem, a sort of magnetic movement of fiery soul.
The Jam Cellar is tucked into North-west Washington, nestled across from Meridian Hill Park and a few blocks from the U Street Metro stop. For seven years, the Josephine Butler Parks Center, a large building that houses the Jam Cellar, has been the home base for Washington swing dancers, a com-munity of people keeping an age-old style of dance alive.
Outside, the building is a golden yellow. Inside, it has a cute lobby and
an old-house charm, several rooms-turned-ballrooms, red carpets, ban-isters and flights of stairs.
The routine is simple. At 8 p.m. every Tuesday, a beginner class groups all the swing virgins together to learn the basic steps and the flow of the music. The lesson on that Tuesday in mid-April was packed as unexpectedly warm evening air blew into the room. One of the two instructors reminded the awkward dancers in the room that tension was the magic of swing.
Then, about an hour later, an open dance segment began in the second-floor dance room, soon becoming a smorgasbord of dance partners of every skill level.
Swing is an extended game of fol-low-the-leader. The leader (usually the man) does the bulk of steering and quick thinking to determine the next move, depending on the beat and mood of the current song. The follower puts complete faith in the leader and trusts the leader will non-verbally control the movements with a slight pressure on the back.
Quick steps. Fast turns. Sways and dips. It’s trust and leadership magni-fied to the highest stage of vulnerabil-ity: the dance floor.
“It’s not easy, what we do,” said Curtis Breitenlohner, one of the owners of the Jam Cellar. He spoke in a smaller meeting room as jazz music thudded from the main dance floor.
The Jam Cellar is celebrating the
10th anniversary of its founding in a cellar in Vienna, Va., after which it relocated to its 15th Street location in 2006. Breitenlohner was friends with the Jam Cellar’s sound manager for years. Now, he runs it.
He called his experience life-changing, a way for community members to express themselves that just isn’t done anymore. About 90 people — mostly graduate students in their late 20s — attend the Tuesday night dances, he said.
Je� Booth co-owns the Jam Cellar with Breitenlohner and Bobby White. Once a year, Booth teaches the en-tirety of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” routine in a six-week series — because no one can learn the whole video in two hours, he said.
Swing dance is more of a social street dance than a structured, restrictive form, Booth said. That’s why it boasts such a wide appeal — it’s freeing.
Baby, baby, it looks like it’s gonna hailBaby, baby, it looks like it’s gonna hailYou better come insideLet me teach you how to jive and wailIt was 1998, and a new Gap com-
mercial featured the 1956 Louis Prima song “Jump, Jive an’ Wail” to promote khakis. Young people sported the pants, all smiles in ’90s haircuts and shirts. And they danced swing. They hoisted each other up
and over, doing flips, kicking their legs in perfect synchronization.
It triggered Rachel Neugarten’s desire to swing-dance.
“Swing was in,” said the Columbia Heights resident, relaxing outside on the building’s terrace during her third visit to the Jam Cellar. She said the commercial started the resurgence of swing in the late 20th century, though the dance form was decades old.
“Anything from the jazz age is still kind of hip,” she said, citing the atmo-sphere that has never gone out of style.
She called it the “awkward-white-people dance” because of its acces-sibility over styles of tango and salsa dancing. And maybe she was right — the majority of dancers that April night were white.
Sam Fahlberg of Logan Circle said
the Jam Cellar is a refreshing gem in a Washington culture that values drink-ing over dancing. He loves the spon-taneity of swing and the ability to live in the moment.
Fahlberg agreed that the “fascina-tion by hipster culture” and the shift toward the love of the antique are be-coming more dominant in society.
As dancers head back to reality around 11:30, sweaty from the night of ditching worries for twists and spins and a classier way of life, they sport satisfied grins. For many, it’s an escape from a long week inside the Beltway, a long week of no expression, a long week of too much 2013 and not enough 1923.
S o n e x t T u e s d a y, t h e y w i l l swing-dance.
By Beena RaghavendranSenior sta� writer
WEEKEND BOX OFFICE
Rounded studio estimates courtesy of boxo�cemojo.com
1. Pain & Gain
$20Million
2. Oblivion
$17.44Million
3. 42
$10.73Million
4. The Big Wedding
$7.5Million
5. The Croods
$6.6Million
the jam cellar’s regular Tuesday classes o�er young Washingtonians of every skill level a way to blow o� steam by engaging in a form of expression older than themselves: swing dancing. photo courtesy of the jam cellar
monday, APRIL 29, 2013 | sports | The Diamondback 7
15 of the contest’s 22 draw attempts.
About midway through the first period, it seemed as if the Tar Heels would be able to parlay those possessions into their first conference champi-onship since 2002.
Midfielder Kara Canniz-zaro fired a free-position shot past goalkeeper Kasey Howard with 10:38 left to give North Carolina a 3-2 lead. But the Tar Heels never led again.
T h e d a m p c o n d i t i o n s prevailed throughout the contest. At another juncture, Tar Heels defender Courtney Waite slapped the ball out of attacker Alex Aust’s stick only to fall to the ground and lose the ball. But after the Terps recovered, the Tar Heels forced another turn-over and drove down the field, but Howard stopped attacker Abbey Friend’s attempt.
“You never knew what was going to happen,” Reese said. “It went that way all game. It’s challenging to play out there.”
After a series of saves by Howard, the Terps strung together a 3-0 run going into halftime to take a 5-3 lead.
After an even first half, it ap-peared the second half would yield more of the same, and the game would go down to the wire. After all, the top two-seeded teams took 14 shots apiece through the first 30 minutes.
But with a fifth-straight con-ference title just one half away, the Terps came out of the locker room with the same intensity from the end of the first half.
The hot shooting carried over, and the Terps rattled off seven of the period’s first eight scores to take a com-manding 12-4 lead with 14:06 remaining.
Though it continued to struggle on the draw, the Terps’ defense delivered what Reese called its “best game of
the season.” Defender Iliana Sanza, the
reigning ACC Defensive Player of the Year, led the e�ort with four ground balls. When-ever the Tar Heels appeared primed to penetrate through the Terps’ defense, they hit a swarming wall of defenders and were forced into either a wayward shot or a turnover.
“We tightened things up tonight defensively,” Reese said. “We were doubling. We were helping. Every chal-lenge, we wanted to have two people.”
But after a score from Friend, Cummings fouled and earned a trip to the sideline. Friend took advantage, finding the back of the net two more times.
T h e Te r ps o n ce a ga i n clamped down defensively. And on the offensive end, they simply held the ball to milk the clock.
By the time Tar Heels at-tacker Aly Messinger finally scored with 2:36 remaining to cut the lead to four, it was too little, too late.
On a day when the Tar Heels men’s lacrosse team won its first ACC Champion-ship in almost two decades at neighboring Kenan Memorial Stadium, coach Jenny Levy’s team couldn’t follow suit.
Fo r t h e fo u r t h yea r i n a row, the Tar Heels were forced to watch as the Terps celebrated — this time on North Carolina’s home field.
While there are still larger goals remaining for the Terps — the NCAA tournament begins in less than two weeks — they spent the moments following yesterday’s win celebrating yet another ACC Championship.
“You’re looking at the top conference for lacrosse in the nation,” Reese said. “It’s a matter of us doing what we’ve done all season, what we’ve made our focus and putting the pieces of the puzzle together.”
team erupted for nine runs in the sixth to seal a run-rule victory.
“Hitting is contagious when you have an o�ense where ev-eryone is getting on,” Acosta said. “As long as each person
is doing their job and making something happen, then it’s just going to keep going,”
Infielder Candice Beards — who hit .500 this weekend — began the scoring with a two-run double. Outfielder Amanda McCann blew the inning open with a three-RBI triple to make it 6-1. After a two-run homer from infielder Lindsey Schmeiser,
Carroll’s RBI single knocked in the game-winning run.
Though the Terps didn’t get the sweep, they still control their destiny. Their final three-game set at Virginia Tech next weekend will determine their seed for the ACC tournament.
Another late-season confer-ence series with far-reaching implications could bring the
same intensity and emotion as this weekend’s series. But the Terps have confidence they can cope with any hostility they may face.
“We’ve gone out and played well against everybody in the conference,” Watten said. “We know what we’re capable of.”
carolinaFrom PAGE 8
heelsFrom PAGE 8
No. 2 team would work the ball around the perimeter without penetrating the Virginia defense and eventually launch an ill-advised shot or o�-target pass.
The Terps, who trailed 1-0 after the first quarter, attempted just two shots on goal in the period and committed four turnovers. The inefficiency seemed to set the tone for Tillman’s team the rest of the game. The Terps finished with 18 turnovers and attempted just 12 shots on goal to Virginia’s 23.
“You try not to get too high or too low,” attackman Owen Blye said. “I don’t think there’s
a panic mode or sense of stress amongst the team.”
The Terps’ defense has usually kept the team in the game when the o�ense strug-gled to score this year, but Vir-ginia attackman Mark Cock-erton caused problems for the unit Friday.
Cockerton, who leads the nation in goals per game, notched three in the first half to stake a three-goal Cavaliers lead.
The Terps seemed reener-gized after halftime — they scored two straight goals after a pair of Cavaliers penalties to cut the lead to one.
Tillman’s squad outshot Vir-ginia, 13-5, in the third quarter and finally appeared to find an of-fensive rhythm. But the Cavaliers
delivered a pair of crucial goals in the period’s last three minutes to extend the lead back to three.
“Give Virginia credit,” Tillman said. “They come back and get two [goals] right away, and then it stopped that momentum.”
Then the Terps’ defense, which entered the game with the nation’s third-lowest goals-against average, allowed the Cav-aliers to notch five consecutive tallies to start the fourth quarter, putting the game out of reach.
Virginia’s 13 goals Friday are the most the Terps have given up in a game all year.
“Virginia’s attack, … they’ve been gelling in [recent weeks],” goalkeeper Niko Amato said. “They were just patient and found the open looks.”
The Terps now must shift their focus from winning an ACC Championship to simply finding their form before starting the NCAA tournament. They’ll have one chance — a Senior Day matchup with Colgate — to fine-tune their game before national postseason play begins.
On Friday, Virginia’s superior motivation helped it secure a tem-porarily season-saving victory. So when the Terps reach the single-elimination NCAA tournament, Tillman knows his team needs to replicate its rivals’ mindset.
“Maybe that sense of urgency, maybe staring down a little tougher situation,” Tillman said, “might do the same thing for us.”
cavaliersFrom PAGE 8
for strikes — in his complete-game shutout.
“I was trying to go right at hitters and make them put it in play and you kind of saw that,” Reed said. “I was pretty e¥cient for most of my start.”
Right-hander Brady Kirkpat-rick continued to struggle Sat-urday. He allowed two earned runs on three hits and two walks in the first inning before coach John Szefc went to his bullpen.
Right-hander Brandon Casas threw two scoreless innings in relief, and the Terps tallied three
runs in the second inning and two runs in the third to take a 7-2 lead. But the Blue Devils re-sponded with a five-run fourth inning, scoring two runs off Casas and three o� right-hander Bobby Ruse to tie the game.
The Terps took a 9-7 lead in the sixth on RBIs from Hagel and Wade, but the bullpen collapsed in the final innings. Right-hand-er Jared Price surrendered a run in the seventh, and closer Kevin Mooney let up three runs in the eighth to give the Duke an 11-9 lead it never relinquished.
The bullpen wasn’t needed yesterday, though. Stinnett, who started the year as the team’s closer, gave the Terps their
second complete game of the weekend, allowing an unearned run on five hits and one walk for his fifth win of the season.
Trailing 1-0 after five innings, the Terps scored two runs in the sixth inning and one each in the seventh and the ninth to cruise to a 4-1 win and their first ACC series victory.
“The bottom line is we got two just outstanding starts from Jimmy and Jake,” Szefc said. “That was the monstrous di�erence.”
Hagel hit 4-for-11 in the series with three runs scored and three RBIs. Wade went 3-for-12 with three RBIs and a run scored.
The Terps now have two con-ference series remaining — at
Clemson next weekend and at home against Boston College beginning May 16 — and they will likely need sweeps in both to secure the final spot for the ACC tournament.
Nonetheless, the Terps can now move forward with an ACC series victory.
“We’re a team that thrives when we’re confident going to the plate, confident on the mound,” Hagel said. “We play better. We know we should score runs, we know we can pitch against anyone, and we know we can play against anyone. And that’s a big deal for us.”
devilsFrom PAGE 8
By Paul Pierre-LouisSta� writer
Laura Watten stomped toward the third-base umpire in the second inning of yesterday’s series finale against North Carolina.
The Terrapins softball coach wanted to know why a Tar Heels runner wasn’t called out when Terps infielder Juli Strange appeared to tag her near third base. The umpire told Watten that Strange had missed the runner, and the bases were now loaded for the Tar Heels.
Two batters later, designated hitter Haleigh Dickey slapped a
two-run double, extending the Tar Heels’ lead to 5-0.
The Terps had a chance to cap an important sweep this weekend, but were denied by North Carolina in an 8-1 loss. The Terps won both games in Saturday’s doubleheader, 9-4 and 9-1, to jump to second place in the ACC but dropped to fourth after yesterday’s defeat at Robert E. Taylor Stadium.
“We played well defensively [on Saturday],” Watten said. “We pitched well. We hit well. [Sunday], we just came out either overanxious and going too fast or just didn’t slow down and focus.”
The pivotal conference series reached its pinnacle in Game 3, which featured significant moments that captured the emotion of the series.
The Tar Heels (38-18, 13-7 ACC) needed a win to maintain a top-three spot in the ACC, and they got o� to a fast start against the Terps (29-24, 11-7).
Catcher Amber Parrish whacked a high drive in the first that soared over the cen-ter-field fence for a two-run homer. Six Tar Heels would cross home plate in the first three innings.“UNC came out a little harder today, knowing that
they had two losses yesterday,” utility player Lexi Carroll said. “I just think they came out with a di�erent mindset.”
Pitcher Lori Spingola also re-bounded in Game 3 after a rough first outing. The right-hander held the Terps’ o�ense to only one earned run on six hits in her complete game yesterday, keeping batters at bay with her changeup throughout.
She hit Terps outfielder Sara Acosta with a pitch in the first, which prompted Acosta to slowly walk toward the circle before taking first base. The play set the tone for the contest, as
Spingola didn’t waver, retir-ing the side to end the inning. Acosta, on the other hand, didn’t record a hit in her three at bats on the day.
“There are things when we play the game that we can’t control,” Acosta said. “We can’t control the other team. … [We] tried to recuperate and get things together and keep the game going.”
The Terps were able to do that in the first two games, conjur-ing late rallies that swung the momentum in their favor. Down 2-1 in Game 1, they tallied five runs in the fifth, then another
three the next inning, after the Tar Heels cut the lead to 6-4.
Pitcher Kaitlyn Schmeiser s l owe d No r t h C a ro l i n a ’s o�ense in her first outing of the weekend, conceding two earned runs and notching six strikeouts in the game. An e�cient outing from pitcher Maddie Martin followed, as she threw only 84 pitches — giving up six hits and one run — in the Game 2 win.
It looked as if Martin’s quality start would be wasted, however, as the Terps were held scoreless in the first five innings. But the
Page 8 Monday, April 29, 2013
Sports TO THE NEXT LEVELFormer Terrapins football wide receiver Kevin Dorsey was selected by the
Green Bay Packers in the NFL draft. For more, visit diamondbackonline.com.ON THEBLOG
STATLINE
Terps baseball left-hander Jimmy Reed’sline in Friday’s 1-0 victory over Duke
5Hits
9Innings
0Runs
98Pitches
By Joshua NeedelmanSta� writer
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — It seemed nearly impossible. An unprecedented five championships in five years in one of the country’s most competitive conferences just seemed like too tall of a task for any program.
But as the clock showed all zeros at the ACC tour-nament final last night, it was coach Cathy Reese and the Terrapins women’s lacrosse team charging onto Fetzer Field and hoisting the ACC Champion-ship trophy, as they have every year since 2009.
The Terps rode a four-assist e�ort from tourna-ment MVP Katie Schwarzmann to a 12-8 victory over North Carolina and their fifth consecutive ACC Championship — and fourth in a row over the Tar Heels — before more than 650 fans in rain-soaked Chapel Hill.
“We knew coming into tonight’s game it’d be a battle,” Reese said. “I’m proud of these girls, proud of how hard they’ve worked.”
North Carolina attempted to contain the top-seeded Terps, but their high-powered attack and stifling defensive pressure was ultimately too much to overcome.
Schwarzmann, who scored five goals when the teams met April 6, didn’t find the back of the net. But her presence on the field opened up opportunities for midfielders Brooke Griffin, Taylor Cummings and Beth Glaros to each notch a hat trick.
Just as in the Terps’ 14-13 victory about three weeks earlier, the Tar Heels (14-3) played the Terps (19-0) tightly and physically. As the rain poured down, they bullied the Terps into com-mitting 15 turnovers and outworked them to corral
TERRAPINS 12, TAR HEELS 8
terps take �ve
MEN’S LACROSSE
mid�elder joe locascio and the No. 2 Terps took 13 fewer shots than the Cavaliers in Friday’s defeat. photo courtesy of chuck liddy/theacc.com
Cavaliers hand team most lopsided defeat of seasonBy Aaron KasinitzSta� writer
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Joe LoCascio held the ball behind Virginia’s goal midway through the fourth quarter of Friday’s ACC tourna-ment semifinal. The Terrapins men’s lacrosse midfielder — his team trailing 11-5 — wheeled around the goal in an attempt to ignite a late comeback.
But before LoCascio could make his move toward the crease, he lost his footing. The ball slipped out of his stick as he stumbled to the turf at Kenan Stadium in Chapel Hill, N.C.,
resulting in the Terps’ 18th turnover of the game.
That’s just how the No. 1-seed Terps’ 13-6 loss to the No. 4-seed Cavaliers seemed to unfold. Each time they had a chance to make a significant play or stage a run, something would go wrong.
Meanwhile, Virginia — a team that likely needed to win the ACC Championship to earn a spot in the NCAA tourna-ment — took advantage. The Cavaliers grabbed five more ground balls than the Terps, took 13 more shots and kept their opponents from gaining
any momentum all game long.“When your back’s to the
wall, you know, I think there is that added motivation,” coach John Tillman said. “It seems like this year, the team that’s been the hungriest has had a little bit of an edge.”
The seven-goal loss marks the Terps’ worst margin of defeat all year and is the squad’s second stumble in three games.
The struggles started early. Each Terps possession in the first quarter played out in a similar manner. The nation’s
See cavaliers, Page 7
Virginia bounces Terps, 13-6
BASEBALL
Stinnett, Reed key series winTerps take 2 of 3 at Duke in ACC play
By Daniel PopperSta� writer
For the first time this season, the Terrapins baseball team emerged vic-torious from a conference series.
Behind complete-game performanc-es from left-hander Jimmy Reed and right-hander Jake Stinnett, the Terps took two of three games on the road against Duke in Durham, N.C., with a 1-0 win Friday and a 4-1 decision yesterday. The team’s only loss of the weekend came in Saturday’s 11-9 defeat.
“It feels good,” Reed said. “It’s always good to get that first one. We’ve been working at it for a long time, and we were finally able to put a couple good starts [together] on the weekend.”
For the second time in his past three starts, Reed threw nine score-less innings, surrendering just five hits and two walks while striking out four in Friday’s series opener. The Terps’ o�ense again failed to give the senior substantial support — they did not score a run in Reed’s nine-inning performance against Miami on April 12 — but the group notched the game’s winning run in the eighth inning.
After center fielder Charlie White fouled out to lead off, right fielder Jordan Hagel doubled to right-center. First baseman LaMonte Wade ground-ed out to shortstop to advance Hagel to third, and he scored on a Trent Swart wild pitch. Despite allowing two base runners in the ninth, Reed was able to close out the win.
“I was in more of an attack men-tality this weekend,” said Reed, who threw only 98 pitches — 69 of them
mid�elder katie schwarzmann (left) and defender Melissa Diepold (center) helped sti�e North Carolina star mid�elder Kara Cannizzaro (right) in the Terps’ 12-8 win yesterday. photo courtesy of kaki pope/the daily tar heel
See heels, Page 7 See devils, Page 7
SOFTBALL
Terps keep pace in ACC race with strong pitching SaturdayTeam takes two of three from Tar Heels behind Day 1 doubleheader sweep, falls in blowout defeat yesterday
See carolina, Page 7
Undefeated squad captures �fth straight ACC Championship in waterlogged victory over North Carolina
