Athletics

Cross Country: 2019 Championship Hosting

The fall season saw the Ursuline Cross Country program chosen to host the 2019 Great Midwest Athletic Conference Championships at Laurel School’s Butler Campus.

By Brandon Stewart

Hosting a championship requires a huge commitment from the athletics staff, the cross country coaching staff, and the college community to help ensure a positive championship experience for the nearly 300 student athletes from 11 institutions that competed in late October.

Head Coach Alaric Best and his staff designed the championship course layout that was submitted to the conference over the summer for approval from the league’s coaches’ and conference office.

The day of the meet consisted of laying out the course, reviewing the course map with the teams, coaches, and officials to ensure accuracy, providing a hospitality room for coaches, working with the timing company to provide accurate results to each institution, along with many other details to help enhance the championship experience for the student-athletes.

The Ursuline team was well represented with eight students setting personal bests in the women’s 6K race.

athletics

Softball in the Swing

Late last spring, the Ursuline softball team finished the season with upward momentum that saw them narrowly miss the conference tournament. Behind tremendous starting pitching from then-junior Brooklyn Miller, the Arrows won four of their last five games including back-to-back shutouts of Ohio Valley to close the season.

In games against Ohio Dominican and Ohio Valley in the final week, Miller took perfect games into the final inning and once to the final out. The perfect game consists of no hits, walks, or baserunners of any kind over the course of the game.

The Arrows finished with a program-best 18 wins and 13-13 overall in the G-MAC.

Visit ursulinearrows.com for the latest in Ursuline Arrows news.

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Protecting the most vulnerable Sister Anne Victory, HM, SJ ’69 caps a career of caring with a campaign against human trafficking

By Ann McGuire

Sister Anne Victory, HM, SJC ’69 had the perfect excuse for not making it to the Alumnae Awards Reception last summer to accept her Amadeus Rappe Award: she was meeting with the Pope.

Sr. Anne was in Rome with Talitha Kum International, a group of Catholic Sisters from 92 countries on five continents who are fighting human trafficking. They gathered to set priorities for the next five years and present to Pope Francis.

“Basically what he said was ‘You go, girls,’” Sister Anne recalled when she came to campus in October to accept her award belatedly. (See page 30 for more on Sister Anne’s award nomination.)

Sister Anne Victory at the Collaborative to End Human Trafficking office

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Human Trafficking Wasn’t on her Radar

Now the director of education for the Cleveland-based Collaborative to End Human Trafficking and the president of the board of U.S. Catholic Sisters Against Human Trafficking, Sister Anne says she wasn’t aware of the term “human trafficking” until 2006.

Her Saint John College degree was in nursing and she devoted 32 years of her life to the profession as a clinician, educator, nursing administrator, and vice president for mission at St. Joseph Hospital in Lorain, Ohio (now Mercy Health-Lorain). After that, she served as a member of the Leadership Team for her congregation, the Sisters of the Humility of Mary.

By 2007, Sister Anne had become aware of the term and the scope of human trafficking. She and representatives from six other religious communities formed a task force to determine what they could do to help victims.

That seven-community task force has since evolved into the Collaborative to End Human Trafficking, a coalition of nearly 60 regional entities working on the problem. Sr. Anne was ready for a new challenge when the opportunity arose to work full time as the Collaborative’s education director. Addressing the problem from multiple angles, the coalition includes groups as diverse as local police departments, the Cuyahoga County Division of Children and Family Services, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Ohio Hotel and Lodging Association, and the Ursuline College Women’s Center. Their poignant “happens here too” billboards throughout Northeast Ohio make this scourge impossible to ignore.

Human Rights Issue

So what is human trafficking? In a powerful TEDx lecture Sister Anne gave in Youngstown in 2015, she explained.

ABOVE: Sister Anne Victory and other volunteers from the collaborative distribute literature at an RTA stop. “People are being bought and sold; they are being held against their will; they are being made to do things that they do not choose to do; and they cannot leave their situations. That’s slavery. Recently we’ve been calling it by a different name, human trafficking,” she said.

Sister Anne says she now knows several people who are survivors of human trafficking. “Every story is different but it’s always tragic. Some of them are so resilient that they inspire me. They really have to work at the trauma every day.”

While the commercial sex trade is what many people associate with human trafficking, forced labor is the form of trafficking that touches all of us, she said. That’s because forced labor may be involved in production of the food we eat, the clothing we wear, the electronics we use, and the services we enjoy, notably at restaurants and nail salons. Once we recognize our own complicity, she said, we can try to reduce demand for forced labor.

Nursing Background a Plus

In a 2018 interview, journalist Tony Ganzer asked Sister Anne if her nursing background helps her to remain calm as she processes complex situations (faithfullpod.com/ 2-sisters-against-slavery). “Probably so. I haven’t lost any of that,” Sister Anne responded. “We think about what’s the right approach with this hurting person. It’s given me an opportunity to work with my colleagues in health care... We need to make sure that they really get it.”

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ABOVE LEFT: These 1969 Saint John grads have stayed in touch for a half century. Front row: Jean (Sikes) Kurtz and Joan (Vavrus) Wheeler; back row: Mary (Peoples) Sheps, Eileen (Rebic) King Puck, Kathe (Arndt) Smith, and Sister Anne Victory, HM. RIGHT: Eileen (Rebic) King Puck, Terri (Niezgoda) Dew, Kathleen (Zador) Eckard, holding Sr. Anne’s award, Jeanne (Sikes) Kurtz, and Joan (Vavrus) Wheeler.

As education director for the Collaborative to End Human Trafficking, Sister Anne wants to make sure that everyone “gets it.” She focuses on raising awareness across the community and educating health care and service professionals on protocols to identify victims and connect them to helpful resources.

“At least now when I go to give presentations, people have heard of this. When we first started, people had not a clue. So just the fact that people now know and are concerned and want to hear, that’s reward enough for me,” she told Ganzer.

50-Year Friendships

Sister Anne and her classmates attended Saint John College at a time of social and political turmoil, keenly aware of injustice. Seven friends in particular, Jean (Sikes) Kurtz ’69 SJC, Eileen (Rebic) King Puck ’69 SJC, Teri (Niezgoda) Dew ’69 SJC, Kathleen (Zador) Eckard ’69 SJC, Mary (Peoples) Sheps ’69 SJC, Kathe (Arndt) Smith ’69 SJC, and Joan (Vavrus) Wheeler ’69 SJC have stayed in touch with Sister Anne and one

“From our comfortable

another over the decades. retirement, we are in awe

“In our careers, all of us ended up of her drive to continue doing things for people who were her mission.” underserved,” said Kurtz, who nominated Sister Anne for the Amadeus Rappe Award. Inspired by their education and one another, these seven nurses worked with patients with

developmental disabilities, heroin addiction, those struggling with HIVAIDS in the early days of that epidemic, as well as patients in Third World countries.

Dew delivered a moving tribute to Sister Anne at the Alumnae Awards dinner and repeated it at a small luncheon in her honor in October. She quoted a 2017 opinion piece that Sister Anne wrote for The Plain Dealer:

“As the Bible tells us, ‘Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to act,’ (Proverbs 3:27). As a person of faith, I believe in living our shared sacred honor to protect the most vulnerable.”

Dew continued, “From our perspective, Sister Anne has practiced this belief throughout her entire adult life. She has made outstanding contributions to our religion and profession, and her home and community. From our comfortable retirement, we are in awe of her drive to continue her mission, and so very pleased that her efforts are deemed to merit this year’s Amadeus Rappe Award.”

Helpful Resources

TED Talk – A good starting point to learn more about human trafficking is Sister Anne’s TEDx talk. Search for “Sister Anne Victory” at YouTube.com

Knowthechain.org – Learn how dozens of consumer product companies rate for forced labor risks.

SlaveryFootprint.org – Sister Anne recommends the survey on this website to help answer the question: How many slaves work for you?

Hotline – The National Human Trafficking hotline, at 888.373.7888, connects victims and survivors of sex and labor trafficking with helpful resources.

Ohio Governor’s Human Trafficking Task Force – This group’s website, humantrafficking.ohio.gov, has information on human trafficking in Ohio and public awareness materials.

Polaris Project.org – a compendium of accurate, timely information on many aspects of human trafficking.

Grad’s book offers help, hope.

Art therapists can play a vital role in helping survivors of human trafficking heal, says Mary (Kohut) Kometiani ’08 MA, ATR-BC, LPCC. Her new book helps them do just that. Titled “Art Therapy Treatment with Sex Trafficking Survivors: Facilitating Empowerment, Recovery, and Hope,” the book explores art therapy interventions and outcomes through detailed case studies of sex trafficking survivors in the United States, India, and Nepal, and includes international recommendations for survivor treatment.

“For sex trafficked survivors, art therapy facilitates emotional catharsis, a personal sense of worth and empowerment through making choices; supports connection to others and the inner self; resolves trauma, grief, and shame; and provides hope for the future and recovery,” said Kometiani. Published by Routledge, the book is available on Amazon.