2-24-2016

The Pitt News T h e in de p e n d e n t st ude nt ne w spap e r of t he University of Pittsburgh

Seats at the table: Pitt women come out to code Page 2 February 24, 2016 | Issue 112 | Volume 106

DOVE MODEL BRINGS ‘REAL BEAUTY’ Danni Zhou Staff Writer

Pitt Ballroom Club held a ballroom dance practice in the William Pitt Union Tuesday Night.

Jordan Mondell | Staff Photographer

SGB TO PROPOSE CHANGES TO CONSTITUTION Lauren Wilson Staff Writer

Students may get to make Student Government Board’s constitution gender-neutral in next week’s election, the Board announced Tuesday night in the William Pitt Union.

President Nasreen Harun announced at SGB’s weekly meeting that the Board would establish a review committee to propose changes to SGB’s constitution. Harun said the Board hopes the committee will consider changing grammatical issues, the GPA requirement for Board members and the use of gender-neutral terms.

The constitution currently includes five instances of gendered pronouns.

During SGB elections next Tuesday, the committee — which is made up of students who do not belong to SGB, including Mat-

thew Heiges, Iris Matijevic, Marcus Robinson and Harinee Suthakar — will propose the changes to the student body in a referendum vote in the election portal on my.pitt.edu.

According to election rules, at least 3 percent of Pitt’s population needs to vote on the referendum, which passes by a simple majority.

According to SGB’s constitution, the constitutional review committee, which is appointed by a simple majority of the board, must propose any changes to the constitution.

Robinson, a junior neuroscience and anthropology major and the president of Rainbow Alliance, said it is important to encourage inclusivity in organizations.

“We want to make sure the language is as inclusive of all different identities and is welcoming to people who might not be typically represented within Pitt’s student body or even

SGB,” Robinson said.

Harun said she wants the constitution to reflect a diverse student body.

“This year, what sparked [the constitutional review] was the idea of making sure we were doing what we could to be more inclusive, so we thought we should start with gender-neutral language,” Harun said.

The constitution’s language currently uses “his” and “her,” which Harun said SGB hopes the committee will propose be changed to “they” and “their.”

“Obviously, we’re becoming more progressive with changes in society,” Harun said.

Robinson said while the committee will look at gender-inclusive pronouns, he is not sure what specific changes it will suggest.

The Board also hopes the committee will review the GPA requirements for Board See SGB on page 4

Former Dove Real Beauty Campaign model Stacy Nadeau was shocked when a reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times wrote in reference to her body that “the only time I want to see thigh that big is in a bucket with bread crumbs on it.”

After he called all six Dove models “fat and ugly,” he received thousands of emails from the public in response to the article and later printed an apology revoking his comments.

But prior to the article, the campaign gained its first positive male reaction from another reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times, applauding the Dove women for embracing their natural shape.

Coinciding with National Eating Disorder Awareness Week, Pitt’s Project HEAL (Help to Eat, Accept, and Live) invited Nadeau to speak to students about the importance of women embracing their natural figure on Tuesday night in the O’Hara Student Center. SGB partnered with the Year of the Humanities to fund the event.

“An event like this rarely happens at Pitt.

We thought inviting Stacy would open an opportunity for students, especially girls, to become inspired to be comfortable with their natural self,” Cara Lyons, president of Project HEAL, said.

According to Lyons, about 30 people attended the event. Nadeau discussed her See Dove on page 4

News

HACKING AWAY STEREOTYPES Emily Brindley

Emilee Betz explains the app her team made at Steel Hacks to a judge. Emily Brindley | Staff Writer

Staff Writer

At most Pitt hackathons, hundreds of men line the desks and tables, chattering and hammering away on keyboards.

Yet the women who can design and code just as well as them are largely absent. The environment meant for collaboration is undoubtedly male — and unwelcoming.

According to Mackenzie Ball, the outreach coordinator for Pitt’s Computer Science Department, women who attend the mostly-men hackathons feel uncomfortable.

At She Innovates, the annual women-only hackathon which Ball co-organizes, Ball asks the women there each year how they feel about the mixed-gender events.

“About 95 percent of [last year’s She Innovates participants] responded and said they didn’t feel comfortable at other hackathons working with men,” Ball said. “It’s important to give women a safe space to work together.”

About 38 women attended She Innovates this year. But at its most recent hackathon, SteelHacks, only 36 of the 250 attendees were women.

Throughout the school year, Pitt hosts traditional, mixed-gender hackathons, which are weekend-long events of intense project collaboration between programmers and computer scientists. She Innovates, though, is geared specifically toward female coders and hackers who want to collaborate with other women, but who maybe don’t feel confident or comfortable enough to start out at a traditional hackathon.

According to Ball, Pitt’s Innovation Institute uses She Innovates, which comes less than a month before Pitt’s second hackathon of the year, SteelHacks, to build up women’s confidence before they branch out to other events.

Pitt’s Innovation Institute held She Innovates at Sennott Square from Jan. 29 to 31 and had 38 female participants, who collaborated for more than 40 hours to create web applications to help women and log volunteer hours..

Then, at SteelHacks, which sophomore computer science major Ritwik Gupta started in 2015, teams of two to five participants used the William Pitt Union’s Assembly Room as the main hacking space for collaboration on

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hardware or software-based projects.

One of those hackers was senior computer science major Becca Addison, who participated in both events this year.

Addison said she wished there had been more female hackers at SteelHacks, as the entire process of designing and developing web applications and programs will suffer without women in technology.

“Diversity is important in the design process because different people have different perspectives,” Addison said. “And if you leave out this entire group that has this shared perspective when you’re designing a product or designing software, then you’re not getting products that match the users’ perspectives.”

In the United States, women represent 59 percent of the work force, according to U.S. Census data, but hold only 30 percent of the jobs in the tech and computer science industry, according to profiles of top tech companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

Ball said she and co-organizer Babs Carryer, who is also the Innovation Institute’s director for education and outreach, designed She Innovates to allow first-time female programmers to participate without feeling intimidated by the traditionally male-domi-

nated tech culture.

“She Innovates lends itself to be more inclusive,” Ball said. “She Innovates caters a little more towards people who’ve never done a hackathon before, it makes them feel more welcome.”

According to a February study by California Polytechnic State University and North Carolina State University, women are more competent coders than men, but their work is not valued as highly as their male colleagues.

The study analyzed Github, an opensource platform for sharing code, submissions from 1.4 million men and women and found that when gender was hidden, women’s code was accepted 78.6 percent of the time, and men’s code only 74.6 percent of the time.

Yet when gender was apparent, women’s code was accepted less often than men’s.

Addison said she was nervous to participate in She Innovates because she wasn’t sure of her ideas and input.

But at She Innovates, Addison learned that no one at a hackathon is an expert, and that she should treat the events as learning exercises.

“We knew what [software] we were going to use, but we didn’t know how to use it,

February 24, 2016

so we were learning together as opposed to trying to learn it on our own,” Addison said. “[She Innovates] was helpful because now I feel like I can make something myself and actually understand it.”

Emilee Betz, a junior computer science major, pushed herself out of her insecurity and into the world of competitive coding at She Innovates 2015 before jumping into her first traditional hackathon at SteelHacks 2015.

Though Betz was an organizer at this year’s She Innovates, she felt like a novice hacker just last year.

“Last year around She Innovates time, I felt like I knew nothing, I felt like I was not good enough to participate in a hackathon,” Betz said. “I felt like it was an environment that I did not belong in.”

After Betz’s She Innovates team won second place last year and produced a working app over the course of the weekend, Betz said her doubts dissipated.

“We spent the weekend learning, which is so cool, and we had a functional web app at the end of it,” Betz said. “After that, I was like, ‘This is amazing, I have to do more of this.’

See Hackathon on page 5

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PITT RESEARCHERS MAP HUNTINGTON PROTEIN Alexa Bakalarski Staff Writer

Pitt researchers are closer to curing a nerve cell disease after creating a new protein model.

For the first time, a team of 10 Pitt researchers from the School of Medicine mapped the tiny fibers of the huntingtin protein, a single mutated protein on the fourth chromosome that causes Huntington’s disease, an incurable hereditary disease. The researchers found that the “huntingtin exon 1” fibers have interlocking strands of polyglutamine, another type of protein, which clump together and lead to the death of neurons.

Their findings, which were published in the Feb. 9 weekly issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, will help develop future treatments for the disease.

According to Jennifer Boatz, a graduate researcher and one of the authors of the study, the huntingtin protein structure will show researchers how the disease progresses.

“We know that huntingtin fiber formation is linked to Huntington’s disease progression, so if we can figure out how these

fibers form, we can better understand how Huntington’s disease progresses in patients,” Boatz said in an email.

Most people with Huntington’s disease develop symptoms in their 30s and 40s, though an onset of symptoms can begin e a r l i e r.

According to Medical News Today, about one in every 10,000 Americans has Huntington’s disease, and more than 200,000 people in the United States are at risk for inheriting the disease. The disease deteriorates nerve cells in the brain, causing motor and cognitive deficits.

“There is no cure for Huntington’s disease, therefore, symptoms that patients are having are targeted and treated,” Tammy Makoul, a social worker for the western Penn-

sylvania chapter of the Huntington’s Disease Society of America, said in an email.

For the study, the research team made versions of the huntingtin protein based on the faulty version that causes Huntington’s and studied how the proteins behaved. In the lab, the proteins clumped together to form fibrils, as they do in the brain of someone who has Huntington’s Disease, Patrick Van der Wel, the study’s se-

There is no cure for Huntington’s disease.

-Tammy Makoul

nior investigator, said.

The team then placed the samples of their protein into an NMR — or nuclear magnetic resonance — instrument to probe the structure of atoms inside the protein aggregates. With the sample spinning inside the NMR up to a million rotations per minute, the NMR shows researchers the proximity of different atoms within the protein aggregates, Van der Wel said.

“So you know that atom one is close to atom five but not close to atom two. Then you collect that for a bunch of different things and you start to build a picture,” Van der Wel said.

Proteins, which are sequences of organic compounds, fold into particular structures that have specific functions. A stretch of a particular amino acid called glutamine or See Study on page 5

The Pitt News SuDoku 2/24/16 courtesy of dailysudoku.com

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February 24, 2016

3

SGB, pg. 1 members and procedural changes, such as clarifications in how the Board will handle impeachments, appeals and dismissals, according to Harun.

Harun said the changes the Board hopes to see are not a result of a specific problem.

“These are just things we’ve learned from over the years that we want clarified so there’s not any questions about procedures in the future,” Harun said.

Harun said she will meet with the committee to hear its suggestions later this week.

In other news, following student requests, Board member Meghan Murphy announced that CSSD will place self-service printers for students in Chevron and Clapp/Langley Halls by the end of the semester.

“Those are places where you have labs and the problem is printing out lab reports,” Murphy, a neuroscience major, said. “Students going up to Chevron might not have other convenient printing locations for right before class.”

The Neuroscience and Chemistry departments are paying for the printers, which cost $5,000 each, not including the monthly service fee.

“There’s definitely a specific need for it, which is why we thought it was important,” Murphy said. “Some students are in there all day long.”

On Monday, tickets for the second annual TEDxPittsburgh conference, an independent-

Dove, pg. 1 stance on and involvement in the Dove campaign as a former model and current advocate through a presentation, ending the night with a Q&A session.

Unilever, a multinational company that manufactures personal care products, created the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, featuring six women, in 2004. Prior to launching the campaign, the producers told the women to prepare themselves for the public reaction they had zero control over.

“At that point, we made a pact. If we receive negative reactions from thousands of people, but we made one woman feel better about her natural shape, that would be worth all of our efforts,” Nadeau said.

While traditional media champions a size zero as the perfect woman, Nadeau proudly described her “healthy self ” as a size 12. But growing up, she was not always comfortable with her size, often making excuses to avoid shopping outings with her friends.

“To me, that meant there was something wrong with me. Sometimes my size made me hold back because I felt insecure. Today, I am a very happy size 12,” Nadeau said.

Nadeau’s insecurity woes are something

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February 24, 2016

ly run program similar to the national nonprofit TED Talks, will go on sale in the William Pitt Union. This year’s TEDxPittsburgh conference will take place on March 26.

Board member Jacky Chen announced that Raymond Gastil, Pittsburgh’s director of city planning, and Janera Solomon, publisher of 1839 magazine, will speak at the conference.

Gastil will join Kerry Tombs-Harling, a mindfulness therapist at UPMC, Dr. Michael Boninger, chair in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Pitt and the director of the UPMC Rehabilitation Institute, and John Fetterman, the current mayor of Braddock and candidate for U.S. Senate.

Allocations: The Japanese Culture Society requested $2,647.48 to attend the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C. The Board approved the request in full.

Circle K requested $1,706 for a convention at Penn State. The Board approved $602 and denied $1,104.

The Robotics and Automation Society requested $3,009.81 for a competition in Cleveland. The Board approved $2,962.23 and denied $47.58.

The Resident Student Association requested $2,923 for a mental health awareness event.

The Board approved the request in full. that plague many women. According to the National Eating Disorders Association, 20 million women in the United States suffer from a clinically significant eating disorder at some time in their life.

Samyuktha Melachuri, an undeclared first year, said she has been struggling with her body image since 2009.

“I actually didn’t know about this campaign until this event. For me, Stacy’s presentation lets me know that I am not alone and that I, too, can find traits about myself that I can be proud of instead of focusing on the parts I do not like,” Melachuri said.

Although it took a few years, the launch gained momentum after the six women appeared on Oprah. According to Nadeau, Oprah stated she would go out and buy Dove soap after the show, and millions of viewers followed. Dove soap sales significantly increased after Oprah’s announcement.

As the campaign continued to grow, the Dove women witnessed its positive impact.

At a meet-and-greet in Times Square, a crying woman told the models, “You are the reason my daughter is alive,” according to Nadeau.

Find the full story online at

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Study, pg. 3

Hackathon, pg. 2

“Q” is approximately 20 glutamine amino acids long in some proteins but is 40 or more “Q” amino acids long in Huntington’s disease patients, according to Van der Wel. The “Q” amino acids overlapped in the NMR readings, Van der Wel said, making it difficult for scientists to study the aggregate structure.

“Nature made it in some way that it’s hard to study, so we had to develop some new ways of dealing with this that work around this limitation of the system,” Van der Wel said.

Pitt researchers checked their new detailed structure of the protein aggregates against previously proposed models which Van der Wel said were based mostly on speculation.

The research team concluded that none of them fit their data. With their results, the team built an improved version of past models and plans to eventually conduct more experiments to refine their proposed model.

According to Boatz, scientists can potentially design structure-based drugs to prevent the mutated huntingtin fibers from forming if they know the exact mechanism of how the fibers form.

“The structural information that we have gathered on huntingtin exon 1 so far is just one of many first steps in the direction of treating Huntington’s disease,” Boatz said.

The expansion of the “Q” amino acid sequence appears in other neurodegenerative disorders, causing problems in motor function, such as involuntary jerking movements, impaired gait and difficulty with speech. Because of this commonality, Van der Wel hopes the research team’s work on Huntington’s disease can lead to better understanding other similar diseases.

“We want to understand how this happens in part to help understand Huntington’s disease and in part to understand in general, ‘how does this happen and why, and how do proteins do this?’” Van der Wel said.

For Makoul, the research team’s improved model offers hope for potential drugs and other treatments for a disease that was once deemed incurable. So far, the work researchers have done on Huntington’s is advancing medicine and providing families of Huntington’s patients with hope, Makoul said.

“Researchers are the ones that those with HD, and their families are looking toward to find a cure,” Makoul said. “Any research movement forward in a neurodegenerative disease will be helpful with others.”

It really helped me to gain that confidence to step out of my shell and go and participate and learn something.”

Betz said she sees this gender disparity regularly in her computer science classes, where she is often one of three or fewer women. According to Betz, a difference in how society treats young boys and young girls causes this disparity.

“You have people saying, ‘Boys just think more logically, boys are just more mathematical.’ That’s not true,” Betz said. “But if you say

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that to people enough, especially someone so young and easily influenced, they’re going to believe it.”

Betz said educators should introduce computer science to children — especially girls — when they’re young, to get them interested in programming and technology at an early age.

In part to make computer science education more accessible, Betz and her all-female SteelHacks team created an educational app to show novice programmers what different command structures look like. The app allows a learner to type in a sequence of code to make an LED board light up in different

February 24, 2016

colors.

Addison’s team created an app colored “Color Blind” that identifies a selected color within a photo, for example a shirt color, and matches it, to a pair of pants. Addison said the general concept was the app would allow individuals with color blindness to get dressed on their own.

Gupta said hackathons need more diversity to usher more viewpoints and problemsolving strategies through the doors.

“We need more minorities in tech,” Gupta said. “There’s not just diversity of skin color or gender, there’s diversity of thought.”

5

Opinions column

from the editorial board

Stop stalling, we need to close Guantanamo President Obama is finally preparing to fulfill an eight-year-old promise.

Tuesday, the President announced his administration’s plan to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The President’s hopes of bringing congressional Republicans on board with his proposal in the middle of both a campaign season and a Supreme Court battle seem dismal. But closure of Guantanamo Bay’s military prison is more appropriate now than ever. It is a waste of resources that today does little more than symbolize a United States dominated by fear.

Since the prison opened in 2002, the U.S. government has imprisoned 780 people in Guantanamo Bay, also known as Gitmo. It is currently home to 91 inmates, 35 of whom are already on track to receive transfers to foreign prisons by the summer. President Obama’s plan recommends transferring the remaining 65 to unspecified maximum-security facilities in the United States if foreign alternatives fall through.

That Guantanamo remains open at all is a greater testament to American partisanship than our care for security. Both 2008 Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and President George W. Bush — who opened the facility — have supported Gitmo’s closure.

Yesterday, though, within hours of its announcement, the plan had already received massive backlash from Republican lawmakers and presidential candidates. Following President Obama’s announcement, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) tweeted, “I’ll use every tool at my disposal to stop this illegal, reckless plan from moving forward. Period.”

The backlash ignores Guantanamo’s

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complete lack of value.

As its presence in political stump speeches has grown, so has Guantanamo Bay’s drain on the government. According to the White House, keeping the prisoners at Gitmo costs the federal government $65 to $85 million more than it would cost to detain them domestically.

Nearly 2,000 guards work at the facility, which works out to about 20 guards per prisoner — in comparison, the guard-toprisoner ratio at most federal prisons is around 4-to-1.

The current system is unsustainable. Republicans’ primary argument against closure has been that domestic processes are insufficient to handle the inmates housed at Gitmo, but that is demonstrably not true. Multiple terrorists, including the Boston Marathon bomber and the 2001 shoe bomber, have received convictions in civilian courts and serve their terms in domestic prisons.

It has been nearly 15 years since the 9/11 attacks. We will never forget what happened and the lives we lost, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t move forward. Guantanamo opened when Americans had no idea when to expect another terrorist attack. ISIS has continually grown, creating uncertainty in the Middle East not dissimilar to the effects of the initial rise of al-Qaeda.

In many ways, the climate of post9/11 America is similar to the post-Paris one we live in now. That doesn’t mean we should uphold our handling of the situation.

There is simply no defense for continuing to waste Americans’ time and money with the Guantanamo Bay prison. The sooner we board up the windows, the better.

Illustration by Terry Tan

STUDENTS DESERVE BETTER FAFSA SUPPORT Kristen Wong Columnist

Compared to how much time we spend helping people get into college, we don’t spend nearly enough teaching them how to pay for it.

Every year, students across the country must file the FAFSA form — Free Application for Federal Student Aid — in order to receive federal, state and institutional financial aid for college. Without support for accessing this financial aid, higher education might seem out of reach and overwhelming to students who are unfamiliar with the form.

Financial need is a major reason that many college-ready students end up not applying. The complexities of getting help are hurdles for those hoping to get an

February 24, 2016

education, and it is crucial for students to have support programs that guide them through it. High schools and universities should have a broad support system to provide information and assistance in this critical step toward higher education.

The process of applying for financial aid is anything but swift. It involves submitting tax information of both students and parents, recording assets, disclosing grant applications and additional verification forms to complete a financial package.

All of this can take months, and most of the directions simply state what form is needed rather than explaining how to get the information.

Preoccupied by media reports about student loans and worried about the See Wong on page 7

6

Wong, pg. 6 “sticker price” of universities, some students can’t completely break down financial aid applications.

There is a general lack of knowledge about how financial aid works — especially impacting low-income and first-generation students. Without parents who have gone through the process before or access to outside college preparation services, it is too easy to make a mistake along the way.

Research by the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators indicates that low-income students and firstgeneration college students are the least likely to complete the FAFSA, even though they are the most in need of financial aid.

Often, the students applying for school and aid are the first ones in their households to do so, leaving them with limited guidance about how the process works. The lack of guidance needed to complete the form clearly weighs most heavily on the ones who would be most likely to receive the aid.

Additionally, FAFSA operates on a firstcome, firstserved basis with different deadlines depending on the institution, so the timeliness of c ompl e t i on also impacts a student’s aid.

The NASFAA study also found that timeliness of student aid application completion was closely related to income, with wealthier students filing their FAFSA forms earlier than middle and low-income students. This, too, came down to a lack of experienced guidance in lower income households. More aid ends up going to the students who need financial support the least.

Mistakenly missing a deadline or misfiling an answer should not limit aid that students would otherwise be eligible to earn.

There are already some government efforts to monitor and increase FAFSA completion rates, but these initiatives have yet to result in a positive difference.

In 2012, the U.S. Department of Educa-

tion launched a FAFSA completion website that gathers completion statistics at high schools and tracks submissions.

Pittsburgh’s own Carrick High School has a total enrollment of 188 seniors, but only 78 students completed FAFSAs by December of 2015. That means just 41.4 percent of its students completed the form.

While it’s likely that not all of the remaining students plan to attend college, the ones who do will simply have no access to aid and fall through the cracks.

If all schools had financial aid assistance programs as a part of their high school guidance counseling or university financial aid offices, students would be far less likely to fall behind or make a mistake on their FAFSA. At Pitt, we have student support services for low-income and first-generation students who need academic support. Increased awareness and advertising of these services could be useful for many, since we rarely receive information about paying for school beyond notifications that there is a new e-bill.

But the financial aid office does not provide extra FA F S A support to the general student body. The majority of students are left to handle the stressful process on their own — an assumption that could be detrimental to some students who are uncertain about filing the details.

According to the U.S. News and World Report college rankings, 69.7 percent of Pitt students applied for need-based aid, while the average percent of aid met was 55.4 percent.

The majority of Pitt students are applying for financial aid, so making sure every student files the FAFSA every year correctly and on time is necessary. For some, it could make the difference for continuing their studies or not.

Students attending college are making the biggest investments of their lives. It’s not asking too much that someone invest in helping them plan first.

More aid ends up going to the students who need financial support the least.

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The Pitt News reserves the right to edit any and all letters. In the event of multiple replies to an issue, The Pitt News may print one letter that represents the majority of responses. Unsigned editorials are a majority opinion of the Editorial Board, listed to the left.

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7

Sports

Pittsburgh vs Louisville TRACK AND FIELD by the numbers PREPS FOR ACC FINALS Coming off of two crucial wins before the ACC Tournament, Pitt men’s basketball (19-7, 8-6 ACC) will take on the No. 11 Louisville Cardinals (216, 10-4 ACC) at home Wednesday. Here are some numbers to keep in mind before the 8 p.m. tipoff.

18.3

The average number of rebounds Pitt has over its past three opponents: Syracuse, Wake Forest and North Carolina. Pitt and Louisville take the ACC as the top two rebounding teams. Each team’s top rebounders: Louisville’s Chinanu Onuaku with 8.7 rebounds per game and Pitt’s Michael Young with seven rebounds per game, will be dueling beneath the glass Wednesday night.

The Panthers’ record this year when they score 70 or more points in a game.

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18-0

Louisville’s rank in the latest AP Poll. Pitt has yet to beat a ranked team this season. It has lost to five ranked opponents this season, four of which were ranked in the top 12 at the time.

Jamel Artis and Michael Young’s combined points the last time Pitt took on Louisville, and lost, in January. Artis and Young, Pitt’s top scorers, average a combined 31.4 points per game and were the only two to reach double digits that game. Louisville’s top scorers, Damion Lee and Trey Lewis, average a total of 28.9 points per game.

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The scoring margin when Louisville dominated Syracuse (1810, 8-7 ACC) on Wednesday, Feb. 17, 72-58. Pitt trumped Syracuse 66-52 this weekend.

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Ted Zhang

Staff Writer During the last week of February, the Pitt track and field team is just beginning a crucial period of competition.

Top athletes from the ACC, including 30 Pitt athletes, will compete in the ACC Indoor Track and Field Championship at Boston College this week, Feb. 25 to 27. Those who place in the Championship will compete nationally in Birmingham, Alabama, on March 11.

Pitt head coach Alonzo Webb said his athletes have been preparing for this week all season, laying the groundwork for a strong finish.

“They have been working hard up to this point, excited about the challenge that lies ahead of them,” Webb said.

Webb has a history of making big things happen for Pitt.

In his first two years in the ACC, he has produced five All-Americans and a successful 4x400 team that in 2012 had one of the fastest times in the world with 3:05.35.

Webb has high expectations for his athletes and said while he pushes them harder with every step in the process, as the competition looms closer, he’s letting the season’s work settle in.

“Our mantra here is to get a little bit better everyday. We take it day by day, week by week,” Webb said. “It’s going to be a low-key week as we head into the [Championship].

Basically, what I say is the hay is in the barn already and there is really no more work you can put in other than mentally.”

Webb looks to the leadership in each competing group to bolster the team’s success as a whole.

He’s found one such leader in thrower Andrew Wells, a recent graduate transfer in the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business. Finishing up his time at Pitt, Webb is

February 24, 2016

looking to Wells to make a strong impression in the upcoming meet. “[He’s a] great young man who works extremely hard and is a great example of the team,” Webb said. “More than just that, he is a great person and a team leader. He goes and works hard and the throwers group feeds off of that.”

Wells’ primary events have been the weight throw, discus and hammer throw, but since the last two events take place outdoors, Wells will only compete in the weight throw this week.

Wells is coming off of a strong showing at the SPIRE Invitationals in Ohio on Feb. 12, where he notched a personal best of 21.87 meters — bettering his previous record by 13 centimeters. Currently nationally ranked No. 7 in the weight throw, Wells doesn’t plan on halting his rise.

“I want to make it to nationals and be an All-American,” Wells said, “and if I can hit my goal of 22 meters, I think that will let me accomplish what I want.”

Sophomore sprinter and health service management major Alyssa Wise has burst onto the track scene at Pitt, making a name for herself from the beginning of the season.

A Pennsylvania native, Wise started off the season strong at the opening tournament at Penn State, where she qualified in the 60-meter dash with a time of 7.74 and finished sixth overall. “[Alyssa’s] the type to lead by example.

She’s a free spirit, works hard and is a very funny person,” Webb said. “That’s what you want around here, someone that is relaxed, but can turn it on when it’s time to turn it on.”

In her most recent showing at the SPIRE Invitational Feb. 12 and 13, Wise finished eighth overall, whittling her time down from the beginning of the season to 7.62. She finSee Track and Field on page 9

8

PITT FACES UNCERTAIN FUTURE

Michael Young will face off Wednesday against No. 11 Louisville.John Hamilton| Staff Photographer

Chris Puzia

Contributing Editor A week ago, Pitt basketball was craving a win anywhere possible.

The Panthers had lost three straight games heading into a home matchup with Wake Forest, and their NCAA Tournament hopes were dwindling.

After bringing home a double overtime win over the Demon Deacons and a statement road victory against Syracuse over the weekend, the Pitt men’s basketball team (19-7, 8-6 ACC) wants more — a statement win for its tournament resumé.

While the victory this weekend at the Carrier Dome might be one of the Panthers’ most important wins of the season, there’s still two important home games against ranked teams fastly approaching. The week ahead could be critical in determining how far Pitt can go in March.

Between the tight race in the top half of the

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ACC standings and team momentum seemingly changing course every week, Pitt has a chance to either prepare for a serious run or falter at the worst possible time.

On Wednesday, No. 11 Louisville comes to town with a surging No. 15 Duke only four days later. Pitt sits at eighth in the ACC, and the Cardinals (21-6, 10-4 ACC) are third, but only two games in the standings separate those teams.

Two wins — with help from similarly situated teams like Clemson and Notre Dame — could vault Pitt into the upper echelon of the conference, just in time for the ACC Tournament in early March.

Pitt is at 8-6 in the conference, but only 1.5 games separate Duke — fifth in the ACC — from Syracuse, which is ninth, just behind Pitt.

So even with only a handful of regular season games left, predicting an ACC Tournament bracket remains murky.

Splitting these two home games, followed by road wins over sub-.500 Virginia Tech and

Georgia Tech, should leave Pitt fans ecstatic.

That would add up to an 11-7 conference record and likely somewhere in the No. 5-7 seed range for the ACC Tournament — once you remove Louisville from the equation, after its self-imposed postseason ban in the wake of an NCAA investigation.

That’s important because in a best-case scenario, if Pitt nets a No. 5 or No. 6 seed, it would earn a single bye for the ACC Tournament.

In that range, it would play a comparable and beatable team in the quarterfinals, possibly No. 4 Duke or Notre Dame.

On the flip side, if Pitt splits its final four games of the season, it could remain around a No. 8 or 9 seed and likely face off against No. 1 North Carolina after its single bye. After the Tar Heels’ recent 21-point obliteration of the Panthers, that would not be ideal.

Find the full story online at

pittnews.com

February 24, 2016

Track and Field, pg. 9 ished fifth in the finals, adding on just one hundredth of a second for a time of 7.63.

Wise has had some minor setbacks because of injury this year, but in the last invitational, she ran a personal best in the 200-meter, clocking in at 24.44. “[This week], I want to make it to the finals in the 60-meter and the 200-meter,” Wise said, “[and] do my best to help score points for the team.”

Despite track and field’s reputation for being an individualist sport, Webb said the success of each athlete propels the whole team forward.

“What I tell [my athletes] is that we want to do three things. Number one is to qualify for the ACC Championship, the group here have done that,” Webb said. “The next two are to run hard and qualify for the final because if you do that, you score points for the team.”

Pitt has always had a strong presence in the 4x400, the concluding event of a meet.

This year’s team, Chris Tate, Joshua McDonald, Desmond Palmer and Donnell Taylor, has met several setbacks this season.

Junior sprinter Brylan Slay has been handling hamstring issues all season. Webb is looking to alternate McDonald, who’s taking Slay’s spot on the 4x400, to dominate this week.

“The three other guys knowing that Josh is gonna replace [Slay], it didn’t bother them because they knew Josh was going to give them 100 percent,” Webb said.

This week, Webb isn’t letting individual setbacks disappoint the team mentally. He said he’s focused on pushing forward.

“We have that next-man-up mentality,” Webb said. “We don’t look at whoever is replacing that person as a disadvantage but more of an opportunity for the individual to excel.”

9

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February 24, 2016

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Real estate advertising in The Pitt News is subject to the Fair Housing Act. The Pitt News will not knowingly accept advertising for real estate which violates the law. To complain of discrimination, call HUD at 1-800-6699777 or email fheo_webmanager@hud.gov. For the hearing impaired, please call TTY 1-800-927-9275.

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The Pitt news crossword 2/24/16

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February 24, 2016

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February 24, 2016

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