Catalina Torres, a 2009 Penn Manor graduate, currently serves in the US Marine Corps. She will finish her contract in June.
By Michelle Zercher
Women in the military is not a new idea, but it has become an increasingly more accepted one, especially as the military officially opens combat roles to women.
In January, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel remarked at his confirmation hearing that “I will work with the service chiefs as we officially open combat positions to women, a decision I strongly support.” This comment has led to increased discussion of the role of women in the military.
There is also renewed debate about making women ages 18-25 enlist in a mandatory draft. Diane Mazur, a law professor at the University of Florida and a former Air Force Officer, told an Associated Press reporter, “Now that front-line infantry, armor, artillery and special operations jobs are open to female volunteers who can meet the physical requirements, it will be difficult for anyone to make a persuasive argument that women should continue to be exempt from registration.”
Greg Jacob, a former Marine Corps officer and policy director for the Service Women’s Action Network, was quoted in the Associated Press as saying women should have the same civic obligations as men.
“The idea that I could get drafted scares me,” says senior Danielle Johnson.
Amber Casey, a senior at Penn Manor High School, has already enlisted in the National Guard and will start basic training in October and plans to make a career out of the military.
“I think that women should have to enter a draft because now girls feel like they can defend themselves and if they can, then they should be able to put their big girl pants on and fight for the country that gave them the right to even have the ability to defend themselves,” said Casey.
Catalina Torres, Penn Manor class of 2009, is currently serving in the Marine Corps and will finish her contract in June. Torres has a different opinion of women in the draft.
“I don’t believe women should have a draft. The military is a cut throat world and if you don’t want to be there then life will be even more impossible,” said Torres. “Women have and will be looked down upon by men in the military especially in the Marines.”
According to Rachelhartmanbooks.com, Seraphina is the winner of the 2013 YALSA Morris Award for Best Young Adult Debut Novel and a New York Times bestselling children’s chapter book. These awards are well deserved because the book absorbs the reader into its pages.
Seraphina tells the story of a teenage girl in a mythical world where dragons and humans live together in an awkward type of peace, the dragons taking form of humans. This awkward peace is at its breaking point, however, when the treaty that keeps the citizens of Goredd in line needs to be renewed. Seraphina takes on not only her position as court music composer’s assistant, but also an investigator of the death of Prince Rufus, along with Prince Lucian Kiggs. Along her way, Seraphina must face the problems of her identity and parentage, along with the lies that they have brought her to tell.
The book’s incredible length might push some readers away, but every page adds to the suspense that makes the reader forge ahead in the book. The beginning is confusing and a bit boring, but as the novel continues, the reader will realize that the slow beginning is worth the wait.
The development of the characters is a strong aspect of the story because you will find yourself wrapped up in the character’s relationships with one another. The characters, mostly Seraphina, are easy to relate to, which makes the story seem much more real.
The fictional world is also well developed for a fantasy novel, because of the details related to the dragons vs. humans feature of the story. All in all, the book was exciting and will make you want to continue turning the pages.
The Penn Manor track and field team practices on March 26. (Photo by Alexis Cunningham)
By Alexis Cunningham
A new season is a new start to this spring’s school sports. Penn Manor’s track team hopes to have a decent season and send multiple events to the state championship.
Head coach Art Morris leads a team of coaches including throwing coaches Joe Herman and Allie Girvin, long distance running coach Lauren Finn and sprint/ jumping coaches Dan Massey, Jana Richards and Tom Simpson.
Penn Manor’s Athletic Director Jeff Roth comments that this season’s potential depends a lot on the field events. He is confident that the runners will have a good season.
According to Roth, Penn Manor has had a strong track and field team in previous seasons. “Sprinters and distance runners will be strong this year,” he said.
Long distance runner Greta Lindsley, a junior, prepared for the upcoming spring season by participating in winter track. Lindsley runs 45-50 miles per week. This season she is running the 3200, 800 and 1600 meter races.
Lindsley commented on her goals for this season, “I like to run the 1600 (meters) so I can break my personal goal of 4:50.” Lindsley’s record mile time is currently 4:57.
Head Coach Art Morris, who ran middle distance events in both high school and college and has been coaching track and field for 15 years, is confident in the middle distance running events.
“On the boys side we should be strong in the middle distance with seniors Harrison Schettler, Jonathon Bitner, Travis Wells and Shadrack Kiprop leading the way,” Coach Coach Morris said. “The boys also have strength in the sprints and jumps with LeVonta Jones and Adrian Viruet. Javelin throwers Nate Binkley and Luis Marcelino will be factors.”
“On the girls side, Greta Lindsley and Meghan Maisano are experienced returnees who will be key factors in the middle distance,” said Morris. “Katie Stringer is a strong thrower in both shot and discus.”
Coach Morris said that the season is hard to predict due to the fact that the majority of the team is on the younger side.
“We have pretty young teams (only one senior on the girls team) so I expect many of our athletes to experience nice improvements as the season progresses,” Coach Morris said.
Penn Manor girls team defeated McCaskey 79-69 and the boys team lost 57-93 their first meet on March 22. On March 27, both teams lost to Hempfield.
Senior Zach Plank spelled out a message in candles to ask senior Sarah Giuffrida to prom.
Being asked to prom may be the best thing that could happen to a high school student. People ask their dates in many different ways, some very creatively such as at a school event with lots of people and some in the simplest forms through text. Either way, high schoolers look forward to prom and plan early.
“Prom is the best thing high school has to offer and being asked in a simple way just shows that to some people it’s just a dance,” said senior Amber Casey. “To me, it’s more than just a dance. It’s a great time to spend with a special person and friends and some people only do it once.”
Many Penn Manor students have been asked to prom in creative ways.
Senior Sarah Giuffrida was asked to prom by her boyfriend, senior Zach Plank, on March 19. Plank used lit candles to spell out a message to Giuffrida.
Senior Natalie Pavlovec used this art board to ask her boyfriend to prom.
“I wasn’t expecting him to ask me this day. I was sitting outside with my friend senior Alex Kresh waiting for Zach to come over,” said Giuffrida. “Zach kept telling me he needed me to go inside because he forgot something in my room. It started to annoy me so then I finally went in, walked up to my room and my floor spelled out (Prom).”
Senior Natalie Pavlovec recently asked her boyfriend Donald Bender, a junior at Lancaster Mennonite, to prom using an art board disguised as homework.
“I pretended to go to the bathroom but went to his room and put the board on his bed,” said Pavlovec. “He looked at the board and thought it was amazing.” Pavlovec added a piece to the back of the board that said lift. When Bender followed the directions, there was a message asking him to prom.
Senior Andrew Glick has used sticky notes to tease senior Emily Adams about parking incorrectly before. The same method was ideal to ask Adams to prom.
Pavlovec said she was nervous he was not going to say yes. “I was wrong” she said. “He looked at me and smiled saying yes”.
Senior Andrew Glick’s method of asking his friend, senior Emily Adams, to prom ensured she would say has.
“I was on my way out to my car to leave school and saw all these sticky notes on my car. Every single note said (Prom?)” said Adams.
Emily was not expecting this to happen but said she wanted to be asked in a different way besides a text or asking verbally.
“He asked in this way because when I didn’t park correctly he would leave a sticky note on my car telling me about it” said Adams.
Sony announced the Playstation 4 at a recent press conference, but did not release any photos of the new system.
By Gabrielle Bauman
When Andrew House, president and group chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. came on the stage, it was no secret what he was there for.
House was unveiling the Playstation 4, the latest in the line of PS gaming systems. But the press conference itself is leaving many with more questions than answers.
“I’m glad they’re building a new console after eight years. The hardware’s starting to look pretty old,” said Penn Manor senior Caleb Bolinger.
The game will be available by Christmas 2013, but no concrete release date has been announced yet. The press conference also failed to include pictures of the PS4, though the changes to the standard Playstation controller were highlighted.
These include a touchscreen, a blue LED light which is advertised to match your onscreen character, and a share button. The “Start” and “Select” buttons typically found in the center of the controller have been combined into a single “Options” button. However, the old Dualshock controllers used by the PS3 will not be compatible by the PS4.
The share button goes along with Sony’s plan to make gaming a more social experience. Video capture will be made easier with the PS4, and live streaming will attempt to make videogames similar to a spectator sport.
“I think the share button’s pretty gimmicky,” said Bolinger.
Sony also gave short presentations on some of the games that will be available with the PS4 launch, which included Killzone: Shadow Fall, Destiny (from the creators of Halo), and Driveclub.
The Playstation 4 will be a PC gaming console. According to the PC Magazine, “The system will run an x86-64 AMD Jaguar CPU with eight cores. It will also come with a 1.84 teraflop Radeon graphics processor and 8GB of RAM. Despite the increased focus on downloadable content, the 6xCAV Blu-ray drive stays. The system will also come with USB 3.0, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, as well as the predictable HDMI, Analog AV out, and Digital Output.”
This is behind the current top gaming computers, but the difference is that while gaming computers become outdated quickly, consoles last for years. The Playstation 3 was put on shelves in November 2006, almost 8 years ago, and top titles are still being released on a regular basis like Beyond Two Souls, a motion capture game starring actress Ellen Paige.
When the PS3 was unveiled in 2006, SCE America head Kaz Hirai said, “The PlayStation 3 is going to be a console that’s going to be with you again for 10 years.” This will not be far from the truth by the time PS4 is released later this year.
Another highlight of the Sony press conference is the application of the cloud. Last year Sony paid $380 million for cloud based distribution company Gaikai. Gaikai CEO David Perry stated at the press conference that Sony was working on cloud based distribution for all their upcoming titles. The user will download the game from the cloud, and then play the full game as the rest is still downloading.
No wait times, no demos.
This may play into the market currently held by the cloud based distributor Stream, a realm over which it currently reigns supreme. EA attempted to topple it with Origin to no avail, but now Sony seems to want to get into the cloud action.
“Try for free and buy only the games you really love,” said Perry.
Bolinger commented on the success of Nintendo’s latest console, “It sucks for the Wii U that just came out…it’s got the specs of current generation consoles and now there’s a new one.”
The PS4 will be here by this holiday season, but there is no word on pricing or of what the actual console will look like.
Don’t worry — If it’s anything like its predecessors, it’ll just be a black box.
Jill Witmer, right, poses with Team USA teammate. (Photo provided by Jill Witmer)
By Nick Tulli
Jill Witmer’s field hockey career began in eighth grade, although reluctantly.
“We had a gym built on our farm for my dad’s boss’s daughters to play field hockey in,” said Witmer. “My parents knew I had an athletic ability and they thought I would love to play field hockey and thought I should give it a try,”
Initially, Jill refused.
“My parents knew my personality and knew that I didn’t want to play because I was afraid to try something new,” she said.
Her parents kept after her, and she finally agreed to try out for the eighth grade team.
“That fall season I hated the sport, and I honestly did not understand the rules. My parents still did not give up and told me to try it one more year because there was a new high school coach [Soto].” Jill agreed, made the varsity team in her freshman year, and has loved the sport ever since.
All of her hard work paid off in late February when the 2010 Penn Manor graduate was named to the the roster of the United States National Field Hockey Team. Witmer, 21, is one of 18 girls to be named to the team, and is one of the only college underclassmen to ever become part of the team.
Witmer made her debut during the teams’ March 4 6-0 win over Brazil in the first round of the International Hockey Federation’s World League tournament. In round two on March 10, Witmer scored her first goal since joining the national team and helped the team to a 6-0 victory over Trinidad and Tobago.
This win advances the team to World League Round Three, to be held this summer in London; playing in Round Three will give the team the opportunity to qualify for the 2014 World Cup.
USA Field Hockey announced in January that the national team will be based in Lancaster through a partnership with Spooky Nook Sports. The team will be located at Nook Sports, a new complex on Spooky Nook Road.
While at Penn Manor, Witmer was named to the all Lancaster Lebanon-League Team in 2008, 2009 and 2010. She led her team to league, district and state titles in 2010, won gold medals at the 2009 Indoor Keystone Games and the 2009 National Field Hockey Festival and became Penn Manor’s all-time leading scorer with 112 goals. Witmer also played on the United States Under-19 and Under-21 teams that toured Argentina. In 2009, she was the featured athlete on ESPN’s The Rise magazine, targeting talented students at the high school level.
Penn Manor senior and Boston College recruit Eryn McCoy cites Witmer’s play on the United States Under-19 and Under-21 teams as a motivating factor.
“I always thought that it was really cool how she got to go to Argentina and play with the U-19 National Team, and I wanted to have an opportunity to do something like that too. It seemed like a really cool experience,” said McCoy.
When asked to explain Jill’s ability, Penn Manor Field Hockey coach Matt Soto said, “I have never seen a girl that fast. I’ve been involved on national field hockey teams as an assistant coach before, but I have never, ever seen a girl that fast.”
Witmer says that she would be nowhere near where she is now without the coach she received in high school.
“Coach Soto has been a great coach at Penn Manor and really helped me fall in love with the sport from the beginning. He has taught me what I needed to make it at the Collegiate level.”
In three years at the collegiate level, Witmer’s resume speaks for itself.
As a midfielder at the University of Maryland, Witmer is a two-time National Champion (2010, 2011) and a one-time ACC Champion (2010), where she scored the game-winning goal over #2-ranked North Carolina.
She started all 24 games as a freshman and was named the ACC freshman of the year. As a sophomore in 2011, she scored the game winning goal to beat North Carolina in the ACC championship for the second year in a row. She was named to the ACC all tournament team as a sophomore as well, and this past year, as a junior, she was named a National Field Hockey Coaches Association first-team member and was named to the All-ACC team for the third consecutive year.
“Since even last year, Jill’s knowledge of the game has increased so much. Most people understand the idea that you can be athletic alone, but if you don’t have any knowledge of the game, you aren’t going to excel,” said Coach Soto. “If you put both things together, you become so much better than the competition, and that’s exactly what Jill has become.”
Witmer agrees.
“In high school I definitely used my speed as an advantage but on the college level you have to know the technical and tactical parts of the game,” she said.
“When I first watched her and saw her play, I knew she had the potential to be great. She was among the best players in the whole country at the high school level,” Soto said,. “As a coach, we can’t ‘expect’ her to achieve this kind of an honor, but put simply, I’m not surprised. She’s just too good not to achieve success.”
Students in the Activities Club enjoyed a “Minute to Win It” game at a recent meeting.
By the Life Skills and School to Work classes
The Activities Club was started by the Life Skills and School to Work classes in the 2008-2009 school year. Club members have a great time meeting new people and socializing during club time and after school activities.
Every year the Activities Club plans many fun events. During the club period, the members meet and plan a monthly activity to participate in after school hours.
The first big event of the current school year was tailgating. The club makes Penn Manor merchandise and snacks to sell. They then go to the football game and enjoy watching the game together. This year, Activities Club members even got to sit on the field to watch the game.
The club also celebrates the holidays by holding a party during club period at school, which includes a Secret Santa gift exchange. The club also recently held a game night where the students played video games, board games and enjoyed snacks together.
“The club is wonderful. I like hanging out with my friends,” said club member Alex Ditmer.
Students in the Activities Club enjoyed a “Minute to Win It” game at a recent meeting.
On Thursdays during club period, the students are challenged with “Minute to Win It” and team building activities.
“My favorite game was ‘Junk in the Trunk’ because we had so much fun,” said club member Cristian Phibbs.
The club ends the school year with a picnic at the Millersville Park to celebrate another fun and successful year with games and a cookout.
Some future activities the club might participate in include bowling, miniature golf and watching movies together.
To be part of this club, students must see Mrs. Melissa McMichael in room 239 or Mrs. Rachel Taylor in room 235 to fill out an application at the beginning of the school year during club sign ups. The Activities Club can accept up to 35 applications.
The Eckman Road bridge is closed for repairs. (Photo from bridgehunter.com)
By Coral Consylman
The Eckman Road bridge in West Lampeter Township closed in early February due to rusting and deterioration of the steel beams. The bridge was built in 1935 and spans Millcreek at a total weight of four tons.
The rusting of the bridge was said to be worse due to the flood from Hurricane Irene two years ago.
Local residents reactions to the bridge shutdown vary.
“It’s about time the bridge is being redone,” said local resident Crystal Consylman. “It is a hazard and although it’s an inconvenience, it’s better than someone dying.”
Rachel Brenneman uses the bridge regularly and expressed frustration with the early closing of the bridge.
“I understand that the bridge needs to be shut down for repairs, and can respect that, but I think its foolishness to shut it down so far ahead of the Township gaining the appropriate permits to begin construction,” said Brenneman. “Construction time will be lengthy enough, without these additional weeks and/or months prior to the replacement. In the meantime people detour unnecessarily.”
The township shut down the bridge due to too many complaints from residents.
The bridge was identified as one of the top replacement candidates for the Lancaster County Bridge Capital improvement plan. The Capital plan estimated the cost to replace this structure will be 1.4 million dollars.
Estimated time for the bridge to be completed will be about a year.
Many students, teachers and staff have needed items like these as the flu has affected many this season.
By Lauren Hillegas
H3N2 hit the East Coast with a vengeance this winter, and young people are the most susceptible to this strain of flu.
Penn Manor High School was just one of many schools that was hit hard by the flu epidemic this winter. Numerous students and faculty members were victims of the 2013 H3N2 strain.
“I’ve seen at least 30-40 students with flu-like symptoms within a time period of three weeks,” said Mrs. Ann Butterfield, nurse at Penn Manor.
Junior Alexis Cunningham said that she missed one week of school and had the flu for a total of 12 days.
“It was the week before finals, so I had to cram all the work I missed and studying together,” said Cunningham.
Commonly reported symptoms of the flu include fever, chills, sore throat, dry cough and body aches. And this latest flu epidemic had many students missing school at a vital time of the year — Keystone testing, final exams and the beginning of a new semester.
According to Mrs. Butterfield, preventing sickness and staying well is imperative.
“A flu vaccine, coughing into your elbow, not touching your face and frequent hand washing are excellent prevention steps that anyone can take to stay well.”
However, for those students who fall victim to the H3N2, Mrs. Butterfield has advice that will hopefully aid in the recovery from their ailments.
“Drink plenty of fluids, get a lot of rest and tell a doctor.”
She adds that it can take up to two weeks for one to recover from the illness, but they will continue to experience phases of tiredness.
As the height of the reported H3N2 cases start to dwindle here on the East Coast, as well as in Lancaster County and throughout the Penn Manor community, the flu still continues to be prevalent.
Penn Manor wrestlers finished at 12-8, beating their goal by two wins.
By Alexis Cunningham
The Penn Manor High School wrestling team met and exceeded its goal this winter. With a new head coach and the loss of many seniors from previous years, the team was expecting a difficult start.
“The goal of this season was to be 10-10,” said Michael Fowler, head coach.
The wrestling team met that goal and finished with a record of 12-8.
The team’s season was officially over in the Lancaster-Lebanon League.
However, for a few Penn Manor varsity wrestlers, Sectionals on February 16 was just the beginning of their post-season. Junior Matt Schnieder wrestled at 126 and placed third. Sophomore Ashton Leschke wrestled at 160 and placed second. Senior Mac Evarts took first place in his weight class of 170. Freshman Jesse Kann took third at 182.
Those wrestlers who moved on to Districts on February 22-23 bringing this season to its final close. Evarts placed 5th at Districts.
Note: A previous version of this story stated that no Penn Manor wrestlers placed at Districts. Senior Mac Evarts finished 5th.
