10

Womens basketball headed to championship

LC V. WHITWORTH 52-53 LC V. WHITMAN 61-52
defeat the Bruins twice in conference play. With this in mind, the Pioneers were still not ready to give up as they played two conference games this past weekend. The women traveled to Washington to face teams from Whitman and Whitworth. Saturdays match against the Whitworth Pirates ended in a 53-52 loss for the Pioneers, with a heartbreaking defeat at the buzzer. Sunday came with the looming presence of a game against Whitman, to whom the Pioneers had lost earlier in the season. However, the Pios put up a huge fight against their opponents and outscored them 61-52. This win has fueled the Lewis & Clark women to make their mark on their upcoming tournament opponents. Sophomore Casey Zinn (15) talks about this season with great enthusiasm and promise. Coming in, we knew it would be difficult, but we are a lot faster this year, and teams just cant keep up, she said. The advantage to which Zinn refers is evident in the games the team has played; tiring out their opponents is key and seems to be a very consistent strategy for the Pioneers. We need to keep playing strong in order to beat everyone else, Zinn explained. With four more games under their belt, the women are confident in their ability to come back with wins. Except for one game on Feb. 9, the rest of the conference games are away, which could pose a challenge for the Pioneers. The Northwest Conference is a close one, and everyone is fighting for a spot in the national tournament, but LC has worked hard enough to secure a place in the conference championship. This Friday, the Pioneers face Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash. and come home to play their last game on the Hill against Willamette on Saturday.

THE PIONEER LOG SPORTS

FEBRUARY 8, 2013

BY ROCKY MCNEFF
SPORTS EDITOR The Pioneers played only conference games during the winter break; since then, they have won 10 games and lost two. The team is currently leading the Northwest Conference and are 19-2 for the season. The Pios victory against Linfield officially secured the team a spot in the Northwest Conference Tournament, which will take place on Feb. 21. The Pioneers have worked very hard to get where they are right now and were ranked as high as fifth in the nation this season. Since their loss against Whitman, the women have dropped to sixth but have high hopes of regaining another stellar ranking. Along with the Pioneers, the George Fox Bruins have made the list, taking 18th place thus far. The Bruins are by far the Pioneers largest opponent and biggest rival; however, the Pios were able to

NWC Standings
Record
PHOTO BY HANNA GRANNIS

Win % 0.833% 0.833% 0.769% 0.692%

PF 832 751 846 840

PA 664 614 688 800

Tayler Wang (14) looks for an open teammate in a recent home game. Wang is currently fifth in scoring in the NorthWest Conference, averaging 12.5 points per contest.

Lewis & Clark George Fox Whitman Whitworth

10-2 10-2 10-3 9-4

Prioritize this! tabloid headlines dominate sports

BY PETER MELLING
STAFF WRITER The sports media has a funny idea of what makes good news and reporting. Most of the time, the stories are worthwhile and have a genuine significance to sports and society. However, there are times when these morals break down, and instead of disseminating quality stories, drivel gets reported. In roughly one month of 2013, two such pieces of drivel got hammered into the heads of the public: Lance Armstrongs use of PEDs and Manti Teos fake girlfriend. The fervor over Lance Armstrong and his lies about his use of performance-enhancing drugs is the result of the media putting their priorities in the wrong order. Why should Armstrong be pressured to admit that he lied in his interview with Oprah instead of a press release where he avoids the problem inherent with an interview (i.e. telling more lies and digging himself deeper)? Also, thanks to the pressure that the media has created, he is now being sued by several entities (such as the US Postal Service) for falsifying information in contracts. Why should money go to the further pursuit of a man who has already admitted to lying and received a ban from cycling? Why should people care about this beyond a simple confession from Armstrong? The media believes that many stories can be created from the non-issue of one player admitting to the use of steroids, so Armstrong receives topbilling on Sports Center and CNN over more pressing and complex issues, such as the thencurrent NHL lockout and player safety in the NFL (especially after several more cases of CTE have been reported amongst former players). This is sickening, but not as sickening as another example of the medias skewed ideas of what constitutes a story. Manti Teo and the saga of his fake girlfriend is a more egregious example of this practice. This scandal is so ridiculous that the whole thing can be summed up in two sentences. Notre Dames Teo played through the season in memory of his grandmother and his girlfriend. The girlfriend, it turned out, only amounted to fake Facebook and Twitter pages. The media should have not been able to find any meat to make a story out of it, but they did. Questions ranged from how much Notre Dame knew about the girlfriend to the sexuality of Teo and the creator of the fake girlfriend. Meanwhile, a far more real scandal took place recently within the football program of Notre Dame. A young woman from St. Marys College, Lizzy Seeberg, alleged she was raped by a Notre Dame football player. After telling the police, players sent her threatening texts, and she committed suicide. Notre Dame responded by telling the police that they would perform an internal investigation, which consisted of a simple interview of the accused and digging up dirt on Seeberg. While this story did receive national attention when it first surfaced six months ago, it barely got a fraction of the attention that Teos fake girlfriend received. It is understandable that large college football programs want to avoid stories like these after what happened at Penn State, but it is ridiculous that a fake girlfriend should receive more press than an alleged rape victim. There are many more questions that could be asked of the program in regards to the rape, and it could create many more questions about how far football programs will go to protect their players (read: assets) from the media and the law. Instead, we have trivial stories about how a player was pranked. Pulitzer-winning stuff! Ultimately, these stories should not matter to the level that the media thinks they should. These are tabloid excursions at best, not symbols of widespread scandal in their respective sports.

ILLUSTRATION BY CAMILLE SHUMANN

Im a flawed character...I viewed this situation as one big lie that I repeated a lot of times. -Lance Armstrong What I went through was real. You know the feelings, the pain, the sorrow, that was all real and thats something that I cant fake.-Manti Teo