September 5, 2006

GREENSHEET HEADLINES • Power outage affects campus • Date changed for Night at the Speedway • Danyell Weaver joins faculty as economics instructor • Annual raft race held after rain delay • Lyon students give added depth to area businesses • Lyon professor says designation of Pluto “consistent with new discoveries” • Dr. Winfrey chosen to participate in Delta initiative • Sports •  ‘An exciting time for Lyon College tennis’ is here     Power outage affects campus A power outage Thursday night affected parts of the Lyon College campus, but power was restored campus wide early Friday morning. The outage was first reported at 7:39 p.m. Thursday and the college staff responded within minutes to assess the problem. Entergy was notified and it was determined that the problem started with a transformer blowing at 22nd Street and Highland Road. A second power lead was damaged and lost power at about 9:30 p.m. Entergy brought a replacement transformer from Little Rock and it was installed at approximately 5 a.m. Friday. Power was restored at that time and the maintenance staff began to check for any equipment damaged by the outage. Some of the chiller units were affected, but all functions were restored by mid-morning. The College staff is working with Entergy to prevent further problems and no additional electrical outages are anticipated.

President’s Convocation wraps up Red Carpet Days No college is able to teach its students everything about life, but Lyon College will definitely teach them how to handle what life throws at them, the president of the College’s Student Government Association told new students Tuesday. The annual President’s Convocation, held at Lyon College’s Brown Chapel at Tuesday, Aug. 29, was the final event in the College’s Red Carpet Days, which ushered students back to classes for the new term. President Walter Roettger welcomed the students and the College’s Regional Advisory Board before turning the podium over to Student Government Association President Emily Wilson. She announced the selection of John Boling and Mary-Margaret Nester as Mr. and Ms. Lyon College for the 2006-07 academic year. Both Mr. and Ms. Lyon are biology majors from Jonesboro. Wilson said the Mr. and Ms. Lyon College honor is awarded to seniors who embody the ideal characteristics of a Lyon student. The selection process requires that nominees must have at least a 3.0 grade point average. Students are nominated by faculty and staff and then are chosen by popular vote of the sophomores, juniors and seniors. President Walter Roettger spoke at the event and presented several awards to students and faculty. His speech, “Something of Value,” offered thoughts on liberal education and the Lyon College community. “At its best, Lyon is a purposeful, open and disciplined teaching and learning community. Our openness takes many forms,” he said. “…Here, our openness compliments our purpose of preparing emerging citizens for lives of professional success and personal growth, and for lives of leadership and service.” The Lyon College community recognizes the legitimacy of differences and celebrates the pluralism of the modern world, Dr. Roettger said. “Pluralism acknowledges the fault lines of a free society made of fallible human beings and anticipates the perennial give-and-take of the new and the old, the public and he private, the intellect and the heart,” he said. “Pluralism, in short, values competition, compromise and consensus, and is skeptical of claims to certitude and of dogma.” Each of us has a part to play in this give-and-take, and we’re all in it together, Dr. Roettger said. “Please take care of yourselves; please take care of one another,” he said. “In doing so, you will take care of us all.” Dr. Roettger then presented Dr. Frank Winfrey, the Clark N. and Mary Perkins Barton Professor of Management, with the Lamar Williamson Prize trophy. His selection as the Williamson Prize winner was announced at commencement last May. The prize is awarded each year to a Lyon faculty member deemed most outstanding in professional competence, scholarly ability, the exemplification of humane and Christian values and contributions to the community. Dr. Roettger also presented the President’s Cup, which is awarded each year to a fraternity or sorority judged by a special committee to have demonstrated the greatest achievement in academics, service to others, athletics, the arts and campus life in the previous academic year. This year, Alpha Xi Delta took the honor and a somewhat emotional Jennifer Ann Cross accepted the award on behalf of the sorority. Dr. Joel Plaag, assistant professor of music at Lyon, announced plans for Service Day, which is scheduled for Sept. 27. He’s asking for 401 volunteers to participate this year. Emily Wilson said the best thing students at Lyon learn is that their lives will never be the same. “You’ll make the best friendships ever, you’ll be involved and you’ll get an education from a school recognized by U.S. News & World Report and the Princeton Review,” she said. “You won’t learn everything about life, but you will learn how to handle where life takes you.”                                                      Photos by Jason Marzewski Jennifer Cross accepts the President's Cup from President Roettger on behalf of Alpha Xi Delta sorority. President Roettger presents the Lamar Williamson Prize trophy, a symbol of teaching excellence, to Dr. Frank Winfrey. Mr. Lyon, John Boling (left) with SGA President Emily Wilson (center) and Ms. Lyon, Mary-Margaret Nester, at the event.   Lyon Night at the Speedway date changed The date of this year's Lyon Night at the Speedway has been changed to Saturday, Sept. 23, because of a schedule change at the Batesville Speedway. The Batesville Area Chapter of Alumni, Parents, and Friends invites you and your guests to the event at the Speedway, located on Highway 25 at Locust Grove. Races start at 7:30 p.m. This will be the final night of racing for the 2006 season. Admission is free. To get your tickets, call Kay Rush at (870) 698-4240 or e-mail krush@lyon.edu.

Danyell Weaver joins Lyon faculty as economics instructor

Lyon College’s newest instructor will have her doctorate by the time she’s 35, but she’s already hoping to spend the rest of her career right here.

Danyell Weaver, Lyon’s new economics instructor, is a native of Saffell, Ark., who “caught the bug” while teaching business classes part-time at UCAAB. She continues to teach there part-time in addition to her full-time position at Lyon.

She joined the Lyon faculty in February and finished out that semester, and this term marks her first full semester in the position.

A graduate of Strawberry High School, she earned as associate’s degree in business from UACCB before going on to get a bachelor’s degree in business administration from American InterContinental University. She followed that degree up with a pair of MBAs from AIU, one with a concentration on accounting and one focusing on management.

“I’m working on my doctorate through Walden University right now,” she said. “It’ll focus on finance.”

Her doctoral thesis will be on the reasons for unemployment and ways to combat it.

Though she readily admits that she could earn a significant income in the business sector once she gets her doctorate, she plans to put it to work another way.

“I want to be a professor at Lyon,” Weaver said. “I’ll retire from here if they let me. I could make more money in the business world, but Lyon is where I want to be.”

She’s been married for more than 11 years to Jeff Weaver, a sales route driver for Airgas, and the couple has one son, Ethan, 9, and one daughter, Beth, 4.

Before getting the teaching “bug,” Danyell spent two years as a branch manager for Staffmark in Batesville.

Pursuing a doctorate while working and raising a family is an often daunting task, but Danyell said her family makes the job easier on her.

“My husband had to step up and take over the household duties,” she said. “The whole family supported me when I decided to get my degrees, and I couldn’t have done it without them.”

Annual raft race held on Bryan Lake last Tuesday.

Group 10 paddles hard as they win the second heat. Heavy rain forced cancellation of the raft race on Aug. 28. It was rescheduled the following day.

Group 1 drags their raft from Bryan Lake during the last heat, resulting in their victory.

Photos by Eric Stewart Group 1 holds part of their obliterated raft after their victory at the 2006 Lyon College Raft Race.

Lyon students give added depth to area businesses

Lyon College students have a lot to offer area businesses, and matching those students with jobs, internships and shadowing opportunities is a high priority for Greg Maloney.

Maloney, Lyon’s director of career development, said he wants students and area businesses alike to be aware of the resources available to them.

“Many companies prefer to hire employees who have the kind of liberal arts education they get at Lyon College,” Maloney said. “It gives them a broad educational background that impresses many companies.”

Sometimes employers are hesitant to hire applicants with MBAs because those degrees typically have such a narrow set of specialized skills geared to the particular discipline they studied, Maloney said. That’s not an issue with an employee with a liberal arts educational background, and companies often find it more profitable in the long term to train these types of employees with the specialized skill sets they need on the job, he added.

Maloney is responsible for duties such as meeting with students on campus, organizing events, and visiting with employers throughout Arkansas to help introduce them to Lyon students and what they can offer the workforce.

He also focuses on working with private and public agencies to expand the range of training opportunities available for Lyon’s students.

Internships are an ideal way to match a broad-based liberal arts education with the pragmatics of the business world, Maloney said.

“More and more, research shows that experiential education plays a crucial part in students successfully securing employment or being accepted into graduate school admissions,” he said.

Maloney and the Career Development staff assist students with things such as choosing a major, discovering career interests, locating internships, creating resumes and much more. But he stresses that those services are offered as a “partnership” with the students.

“We’ll do it with them,” Maloney said. “We don’t do it for them.”

What the Career Development office does provide is individual consultation, access to professionals in the student’s field of interest, extensive career resources and ongoing career workshops.

For more information on internship opportunities, contact Maloney at 870 698-4207.

Lyon professor says designation of Pluto as a dwarf planet
gives a definition 'consistent with new discoveries'

Dr. Dave Thomas, Lyon College’s associate professor of microbiology, said Pluto’s recent demotion from planet to dwarf planet may have shrunk our solar system from nine to eight planets, but it expanded our definitions of what a planet is.

“In the planetary community, we’ve always seen Pluto was different,” Dr. Thomas said. “It’s chemical composition is more like a comet than a planet.”

The traditional definition of planet is an object orbiting a star that is not a brown dwarf, but bigger than an asteroid.

Dwarf planets, the newly defined classification, are objects that orbit the sun and are bound by self-gravity, yet have not cleared the neighborhood around their orbits. Since that definition includes Pluto, the official number of “classical” planets has fallen from the traditional nine to eight.

Asteroids are naturally formed solid bodies that orbit the sun, have no atmosphere and no signs of gas or dust coming from them. Most are found in orbit between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and are made of rocky, iron-nickel material.

Comets are small bodies of rock, iron and frozen water and gases that orbit the sun in elliptical orbits. As they get close to the sun the gas vaporizes leaving a tail of dust and debris.

Meteors are rock, iron and/or icy bodies entering Earth’s atmosphere, and a meteorite is any meteor that hits the ground.

“This has forced the planetary community into defining what a planet is,” Dr. Thomas said. “If we kept Pluto as a planet, we’d have a lot of other planets out there, because a lot of other (celestial bodies) qualify as planets.”

Planets have been demoted before, although not within living memory. Astronomers discovered the asteroid Ceres in 1801. Uranus had been discovered about 20 years earlier, so scientists designated Ceres as the eighth planet. They had no reason to suspect that they had discovered a new class of celestial object.

More asteroids were soon discovered and these, too were summarily designated as newly found planets. But when astronomers continued finding numerous other asteroids in the region, the astronomical community demoted Ceres and the others in the early 1850s and coined the new term “minor planet.”

Xena was discovered on January 8, 2005, at Palomar Observatory with the NASA-funded 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope. It’s a Kuiper-belt object like Pluto, but slightly less reddish-yellow in color, and is currently visible in the constellation Cetus.

California Institute of Technology planetary scientist Mike Brown and his colleagues in late September 2005 announced that Xena has at least one moon. This body has been nicknamed Gabrielle, after Xena’s blond sidekick on the television series.

Gabrielle is about 250 kilometers in diameter and reflects only about 1 percent of the sunlight that its parent reflects. Because of its small size, Gabrielle could be oddly shaped.

The designation of Pluto as a dwarf planet clears the way for proper identification and classification of other celestial objects in the future, Dr. Thomas said.

“This gives us a definition that will be consistent with new discoveries,” he said.

Dr. Winfrey selected to participate in Delta initiative

Dr. Frank L. Winfrey, the Clark N. and Mary Perkins Barton Professor of Management at Lyon College, has been selected by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to participate as a member of its Arkansas Leadership Design Work Group for the Mid South Delta Initiative (MSDI) “Lifting up the Delta.”
 

This phase of the MSDI consists of a collaborative 18-month design process involving residents of the 55 counties and parishes of the Arkansas-Mississippi-Tennessee Delta region as well as nonprofits and agencies that work in the region.

The objectives of “Lifting up the Delta” are to promote activities that have a regional focus and expand the positive momentum for change across the region, to support the values and culture of the region so that new programs and their activities reflect the region’s commitment to family, faith, and community, to engage people and groups in community change efforts, and to support new approaches that challenge thinking and habits regarding what is truly possible in the Delta.

The Arkansas Leadership Design Work Group will survey the current situation regarding leadership, obtain input and ideas from people and specialists, and develop a set of specific recommendations.

The recommendations will be used by a designated regional work group to determine ways in which W.K. Kellogg Foundation Flexible Fund mini-grants might be used across the region to initiate community change to enhance regional economic opportunities.

Additional information about the Mid South Delta Initiative can be found online at www.msdi.org.
 

Sports

 ‘An exciting time for Lyon College tennis’ is here

For Kel Lange, Lyon College has become part of his extended family.

Lange, owner of the Batesville Athletic Club, has joined the Lyon family to assist with the tennis program this coming year. His wife, Tracy Stewart-Lange, is the women’s head basketball coach. And his top trainer and assistant manager, Paul Allen, is the husband of Institutional Advancement’s administrative assistant, Brandi Allen.

Peggy Roettger is a club member and one of Paul’s clients and several Lyon faculty and staff members work out there too.

Born in Lexington, Ky., Lange graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1992 with a bachelor’s degree in exercise science, but long before he earned his degree, he became an assistant coach to UK’s women’s tennis teams. He served in that capacity from 1988 until he graduated.

That led to a four-year stint as head women’s tennis coach at Mississippi State University. During this time he married Tracy Stewart, and the new couple moved to College Station, Texas, where Lange became the assistant men’s tennis coach for Texas A&M.

Tracy was born and raised in the Batesville area and the couple began looking for a way to move back here, which led to Lange taking a job as director of tennis for the Racket Club of Knoxville, Tenn., and later the Little Rock Racket Club.

But when Lyon College Athletic Director Terry Garner offered them the perfect gift on the Wednesday before Christmas 2005, they found a way to make Batesville their home.

“Coach Garner offered Tracy the head women’s basketball coaching job, and she jumped on it,” Lange said.

With the dream of living in Batesville now a reality, Lange made another dream come true when he bought the fitness center that he renamed the Batesville Athletic Club.

“We had been wanting to buy this place for five years,” he said. “When we came back here to stay, we did it. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do.”

When he took over as owner of the facility, the only staff member he retained was Paul Allen.

“He’s the only person I kept because he’s such a great trainer and he handles the staff so well,” Lange said. “He handles all the club’s day-to-day operations and I know I can count on him. He’s got a bright future in this industry.”

Lyon’s head tennis coach John Bennett will continue to oversee all practices and matches, but Lange will handle player development.

“I’m excited about getting back into it,” he said. “There’s no reason why Lyon College shouldn’t have a highly competitive team. We have that opportunity. Coach Bennett has recruited some really good players.”

In addition to experience and love for the game, Lange also offers students an easy way to join a state-of-the-art health club without straining their resources too much.

“Students get a special rate of $32,12 per month with no contracts,” he said. “It’s just month to month, so if they’re short on money, they can skip a month then come right back.”

About 40 Lyon students are current members of the Batesville Athletic Club. The facility offers classes such as kickboxing; a one-hour high intensity boot camp; a one-hour body blast for overall strength conditioning; a cardio theater with treadmills, elliptical machines and bikes, and the main gym room features a rubberized walking track, resistance machines and a full array of free weights.

The club also offers protein and energy drinks, supplements and T-shirts for sale. And parents with young children have childcare services at their disposal every Monday through Friday from 8 – 11 a.m., and from 5 – 8 p.m.

Club members can also request a customized exercise program, which the staff will formulate and lead the client through.

“That’s good for everyone,” Lange said. “We get to know them and introduce them to others in the club. And they get quality training that’s safe and effective.”

The BAC also features a “Ladies Only” gym with the same types of equipment that the main gym offers.

Lange said he looks forward to putting his NCAA Division I coaching experience to work in the NAIA’s TranSouth Conference for Lyon College, and he expects good things for the teams he’ll help to coach.

“It’ll be an exciting time for Lyon College tennis,” he said.

Volleyball

Pipers move to 5-0, win Belhaven Tournament

JACKSON, Miss. -- The trip back to Batesville from Jackson, Miss., for the Lyon College Pipers' volleyball team should have been a short one despite the nearly six-hour ride.

The Pipers finished a perfect 4-0 in the Belhaven Tournament, rolling past Rhodes College and Loyola University (La.) to improve to 5-0 on the season.

"We came down here to Jackson and faced some pretty stiff competition," said Pipers' head coach Justin Dee, "and the girls played really well. To come down here and win all four games is a really positive thing for our team. I'm really proud of them."

Lyon dropped the opening game of its first contest of the day against Rhodes, but came back to steamroll the opposition to notch a 3-1 victory.

Daria Paunovic had 12 kills and two aces in the win while teammate Alyson Boone knocked down nine kills and picked up four blocks. Junior setter Jessica Sylvester added 25 assists and freshman Lauren Castleberry earned seven kills, two blocks and 27 digs.

In Saturday's game two against Loyola, the match was over in three straight. Loyola never stood a chance, falling 30-16, 30-22, 30-23.

Katie Beineke had 12 kills, Paunovic slammed 11 kills and collected 11 digs while teammate Ann Sullivan picked up 21 digs.

The Pipers are back in action again on Tuesday for their home opener against Arkansas Tech. Game time is 7 p.m.
 

Soccer

Pipers defeat NW Okla. St.

Kristen Grant booted one goal and Angelique Armenta added another to send the Lyon College Lady Pipers to their second consecutive victory, a 2-1 decision over the Northwest Oklahoma State Lady Rangers, Sunday at Lyon College Soccer Field.

The game was a physical war of attrition, containing a total of 32 fouls -- 17 for the Pipers and 15 for the Lady Rangers.

Grant opened up the scoring with her goal in the 6th minute of the contest, putting back a rebound into the left side of the net.

Armenta followed with her second goal of the season in the 14th minute on an assist from Sarah Ruegger. The score gave the Pipers a commanding 2-0 lead, an advantage which they took into the half.

Northwest Oklahoma State bounced back to score when a shot from Sarah Bryant bounced off a Lyon College player for an own goal in the 54th minute.

The Lady Rangers, however, wouldn't scored again as the Pipers' defense fought off the charge.

Lyon improves to 2-0-0 on the season and plays again on Sept. 9, at LeTourneau University in Longview, Tex.
 

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