Emari Hardy walked into the Phelps Dining Hall with his football team this August, wearing his hat on backwards and a big smile on his face. The Hope College junior is quite comfortable around campus now. But he recalls his first days as a college freshman in 2017 when that wasn’t always the case. Instead, …
Continue reading “Emari Hardy: Focused on Academics and Athletics”
In the summer of 2019, sophomores McKenna Otto, Tracy Westra, and Sasha Poland threw down scientific knowledge with as much effort and gusto as they give their sport.
Five Hope College women’s soccer student-athletes on this season’s roster have travelled to Africa, Central America and Asia as SEED program participants. SEED stands for Sport Evangelism to Equip Disciples, and over the past three summers, 121 Hope student-athletes, along with a more than a dozen Hope coaches and staff, have brought compassion, care and …
Head baseball coach Stu Fritz is a leader in the ABCA and at Hope. As the ABCA’s second vice president in 2018, he was the one responsible for what 7,000 baseball coaches would learn, and from whom, at the convention this past January.
Every one of Hope’s five divers say that they are not really a singular entity and, surprisingly, they say they are not even a team. Instead they say, separately and unprompted, that they are family.
One of the biggest fans of Hope College women’s soccer lives in Ethiopia. And some of the biggest fans of 12-year-old Sam Shebabaw reside at Hope. Never mind that they are separated by an ocean and a continent. Never mind that they are different in gender and social class and culture. Never mind any …
There inside an eight-foot, concrete circle with a discus white-knuckle-gripped in her right hand, it was not readily apparent that Hope College’s Haley Fischman ’18 was coping with cancer. The senior student-athlete struck the pose of a skilled thrower ready to propel two pounds of wood and metal and carbon fiber ridiculously far through the …
Alexis Thompson ‘17 would not quit. It was not even a consideration. Sure, her interview process was arduous — 11 interviews in all for Stryker Corporation, a leader in medical and surgical equipment and supplies — but she was used to hard work, to tenacity, to playing until the final whistle. Those were lessons, Thompson …
Continue reading “Translative Lessons From Athletics to Career: The Alexis Thompson Story”
If it wasn’t blatantly clear to 31 Hope baseball players on board the bus prior to entering Grissom AFB, it was now: This was not a typical team trip.
A team is a family. The phrase has been used so often in the sports world lexicon that it’s prone to sounding trite or cliché. A team is a family. Is it predictable? Maybe. Overused? Possibly. But clichés are also this: they are true. To say A team is a family is to recognize that …
