Dig Pink

On Friday, October 17, the Pioneer volleyball team sponsored Dig Pink night, a breast cancer awareness event and fundraiser. Pioneer fans were given the opportunity to donate spare change for Breast Cancer research and program development. The most obvious, and most fun, part of the night was that BOTH teams donned pink jerseys. Whitman wore a light pink, with the Pioneers in a dark pink. The Pioneer coaching staff draped themselves in pink feather boas, which led to a fantastic moment when Head Coach Lori Jepsen was “pointing out” to the down official something that the other team was doing wrong at the net where he should have been calling a foul. Her adamant and demonstrative explanation of what he might have missed while calling the match was very surreal when she was doing so while still wearing the feather boa.

Both the Whitman Missionaries and the Pioneers were Digging Pink

The Pioneer volleyball team is currently tied for first place in the NWC. This was their fifth match victory in a row (they went on to win #6 on Saturday when they swept the Whitowrth Pirates). I love that a team that is having their best season in 17 years can still be loose enough to don pink and pink feather boas, have some fun, and help raise breast cancer awareness. It was a great night!

Congratulations Chris Fantz!!!!!

CONGRATULATIONS!!!

Head swim coach Chris Fantz quietly showed the world today that he is hardly a former athlete. Fantz powered through wet and nasty conditions to run the 37th Annual Portland Marathon alongside his wife, Heather. The two have been training for months for the event and finished just shy of five hours: 4:56:59.

I am so excited for him and proud of this accomplishment. It takes amazing dedication to train for this, tremendous focus and commitment, and the mental strength required to make it those last few miles. Enough cannot be said of what he did today! And, as a coach, a mentor, and an instructor of physical education to the students of Lewis & Clark, he is really leading by example. And now he and his wife are the proud owners of shiny new medals!

CONGRATULATIONS CHRIS!!!!!!

Oregon Food Bank

The Oregon Food Bank can always use donations of canned or any non-perishible foods.

I embraced an open moment in the lightest week of the season (just two soccer games, a tennis tournament, and two volleyball matches this weekend for the Pioneers) to get caught up on something that is really important to me: community service. I LOVE volunteering, helping out charities here in the Portland area. One of the things that I am proudest of on my resume is the amount of time that I spend volunteering my time. My three favorite local charities are Easter Seals of Oregon (volunteer coordinator Deb Coakes-Wright is truly one of the nicest people on the planet and I would do anything to help her and Easter Seals- a phenomenal organization that works people with disabilities and special needs), Trillium Family Services (I have some personal ties to this charity that assists children with behavioral and mental health problems), and the Oregon Food Bank.

Working Oregon Food Bank projects is probably the most satisfying of the volunteering that I do because you always walk away with a true sense of making a difference. Most of the time, I’ll do a shift at the Volunteer Action Center, helping to sort through donated food or helping to process and repackage donations into useable meal-sized items. When you leave, you can see all of the palletts and palletts of meals that will be delivered to people who need to feed their children.

Yesterday, however, I worked a shift at the annual Cans Food Festival where three cans of donated food got the donor a free ticket for a movie at Regal Cinemas. My job was to accept the cans, give out tickets, and then box up the donations. It was a four-hour shift of tedious manual labor and occasional flurries of canned food madness, but when I tiredly left the Oregon City Hilltop 9 last night, we had one whole pallett of donations that was taller than me and an entire wooden pallett across and we had started a second pallett. Granted, I’m not very tall, but still, stacks and stacks of boxes over 5-2 is a lot of boxes and a lot of food for people in crisis.