1

LAST CHANCE TO DANCE

fter All-Big West first team ju-nior Chris Eversley suffered a high ankle sprain in Cal Poly’s 68-53 victory over UC Davis on Feb. 9, the 6-foot-7 forward decided to sit out the next game against rival UC Santa Barbara.

While he was able to warm up pregame before the clash with the Gauchos, Eversley and the training staff decided he wouldn’t play in argu-ably the most anticipated matchup of the season inside the Mott Athletics Center. The team’s leading scorer needed extra time to get healthy — he was looking at the “big picture.”

And now with the Big West Conference Tour-nament starting Thursday, that picture is finally coming into frame for the Cal Poly men’s basket-ball team. The No. 3-seeded Mustangs (17-12, 12-6 Big West) take on No. 6 UC Davis (14-16, 9-9) in-side the Honda Center in Anaheim, Calif. Tip-off for the quarterfinal round is set for approximately 2:30 p.m. with the winner of the single-elimination tournament automatically advancing to the NCAA tournament starting next week.

“It’s been a long time coming, 368 days since (our tournament exit last year), I’ve been keeping count of it,” Eversley, who is averaging more than 16 points and seven rebounds per game, said at Monday’s press conference. “UC Davis is a great matchup for us. We match up well with them at every position, so it should be a good game for us to test the waters of the conference tournament.”

Having won five straight games and eight of their past nine, the Mustangs are one of the hottest teams in the conference headed into the postseason. With their most recent win against Cal State Fullerton, the Mustangs posted the program’s highest Big West win total in 19 Division I seasons.

12-666.042.9

38.0

9-972.347.641.0

Big West record

Points per game

Shooting percentage

3-point shooting percentage

PHOTO BY IAN BILLINGS

Turn to pages 6, 7, 9 & 10 for more coverage of the Big West Conference Tournament.

Men’s Basketball: Cal Poly vs. UC Davis — Today, 2:30 p.m.

Volume LXXVII, Number 82Thursday, March 14, 2013

STEPHAN TEODOSESCUsteodosescu@mustangdaily.net

By the numbers

see TOURNAMENT, pg. 7

MEN’S, WOMEN’S BASKETBALL START BIG WEST TOURNAMENT PLAY

A

2

MDnews 2 Thursday, March 14, 2013

Mustang Wireless secure, but difficult to accessStudents logging on to wireless Internet on campus have noticed some changes in the network. Starting in fall, Information Technology Services (ITS) be-gan implementing a more secure wireless network, but not with-out complaints from students.

ITS Director Paul Jurasin said the change is meant to provide more security to wire-less network users. The previ-ous Mustang Wireless network allowed intercepted data to be read by a third party.

“The data that was being transmitted through our wire-less network before Secure Mustang was not encrypted, so if someone, a hacker for ex-ample, happened to be out on campus and wanted to inter-cept the data that was flowing through the wireless network, because that was clear text data and not encrypted, they could gather that data and ac-tually be able to read it,” Jur-asin said.

The benefit of Secure Mustang Wireless, according to Jurasin, is that it encrypts data passed through the network. This pro-tection, Jurasin said, is impor-tant for students in situations such as using credit cards to make online purchases.

“When the data goes through the network, it becomes en-crypted so that it’s unreadable, so even if someone did capture that data they couldn’t read it,” Jurasin said. “If you were to buy something with a credit card, that credit card data that’s going through the airwaves is now unreadable.”

In addition, ITS is working to keep up with the sheer number of devices on campus by issuing higher numbers of potential in-ternet protocol (IP) addresses.

“What we’ve been doing is steadily increasing the number of IP addresses that are avail-

able through the new Secure Mustang Wireless as people are switching,” Jurasin said. “What we have to do is make sure there’s enough IP addresses for everyone walking around on campus. Pretty much every-one has two or three (devices), so we’re tracking that to make sure there’s enough.”

The process of converting campus to Secure Mustang Wireless started in Fall 2012, and has been evolving gradually since then. According to Jurasin, the former Mustang Wireless network was completely phased out in January 2013.

“It was in the fall when we started to implement Secure Mustang, and then at the end of the year we started to phase out the non-secure Mustang Wireless,” Jurasin said.

Jurasin said the process by which the new network was implemented was gradual for the sake of prudence.

“It was one building at a time,” Jurasin said. “The rea-son we wanted to do it that way is if we did run into any glitches then we could always roll it back to the old system one at a time, rather than do-ing the whole campus at one time because then if there was a problem, the whole campus would be down. We just did it in stages to make sure everything ran smoothly and if there was a problem it didn’t cause a huge cata-strophic event.”

Though Jurasin spoke to the network’s benefits, some stu-dents have had trouble logging on to the system.

“I just have had a hard time because it takes my computer a long time to connect some-times,” English senior Chrissy Berry said. “I think I did it (change the wireless settings) the first time, but it was just a pain to have to go back and forth.”

Jurasin said because the system is currently running

smoothly, the problems stu-dents may run into could in-volve their computer settings.

“It’s not even so much more complicated, it’s just that you have to set up your computer or laptop to be able to access the secure network, and there’s a few settings that have to hap-pen the first time you log in,” Jurasin said. “After you log in that first time, everything should be smooth.”

Jurasin said ITS has attempted to avoid this issue by providing step-by-step instructions for logging on to Secure Mustang

Wireless on a variety of devices.“We created that to make it

easier, and hopefully it is mak-ing it easier for some people,” Jurasin said.

Others cited a problem with connecting to the system when they have already changed their settings.

“In my four years here at Cal Poly, I’ve never had so much trouble with the Wi-Fi at Cal Poly,” business administration senior Sam Cates said. “It con-stantly goes out on my laptop, it has trouble connecting on my phone and just finding it

seems to be a problem with all my devices.”

Some students who have had trouble connecting have been able to use the Guest Mustang Wireless network that ITS set up as a fallback for those who encounter technical issues. The issue that some have with Guest Mustang Wireless, however, is that it can run slower than some are accustomed to.

“I used to use Guest Mustang Wireless to avoid going through the hassle of connecting to the network, but then it would just

run really slow,” business ad-ministration senior Melissa Schaef said. “Eventually it just wasn’t worth it and I connected to Secure Mustang Wireless.”

To Jurasin, however, the switch had more to do with the campus security than saving a few seconds.

“I don’t know that you’ll no-tice that it’s faster, but it should be slightly faster than before,” Jurasin said. “You probably would notice almost nothing, so it’s really just to keep your data safe.”

LAURA PEZZINIlpezzini@mustangdaily.net

NHA HA/ MUSTANG DAILY

Secure Mustang Wireless was fully implemented in by January of this year, but some students are having trouble accessing the new system with their laptops even after updating their settings.

CP professors: Math anxiety has roots in elementary school

Math anxiety starts early. It can be traced as far back as elementary school, mathemat-ics assistant professor Amélie Schinck-Mikel said.

In Schinck-Mikel’s MATH 227 class, Mathematics for El-ementary Teaching I, students’ first assignment is to write an autobiography of their math experience. In that assign-ment, students discover when in their lives math started to become difficult, she said.

“I can tell right away from the stories in the autobiogra-phies where there was a break in the journey,” Schinck-Mikel said. “It allows stu-dents to own up to the fact

that people associate strong feelings toward the subject.”

Ian M. Lyons and Sian L. Beilock, professors in the psychology department at the University of Chicago, researched the emotional ef-fects of math. In their study, they found math is associ-ated with tension, apprehen-sion and fear. Math itself is not painful, rather it is the anticipation of the dreaded event that causes the anxiety, the 2012 study said.

Mathematics department chair Joseph Borzellino has seen first-hand the anxiety stu-dents face when taking math courses, he said.

“It may be a manifestation of many different things — possibly, poor instruction

while in elementary school, being left behind if their questions weren’t answered and the idea that there is al-ways a right or wrong answer which really isn’t debatable,” Borzellino said.

Liberal studies junior Mer-edith Eddy plans to be a fourth grade teacher after graduation, she said. Eddy herself has faced math anxiety throughout her education, she said. Her ex-periences will help minimize math anxiety in her own stu-dents, she said.

Elementary school math came easy to Eddy. In high school, math began to make her anxious, she said. Eddy had to complete five quiz-zes each week on a program called Accelerated Math, she said. Students could not move on to the next quiz without passing the one be-fore, she said. The students began falling behind, and the teacher kept moving ahead. Eddy and other stu-dents began falling behind and not understanding the current lessons because they were trying to finish up the previous lesson.

“The tests you were taking

began to not align with what you were currently learning,” Eddy said. “It just caused anxi-ety and wasn’t helping me get better, but rather just a task that had to be done.”

An emphasis on better teach-ing college students how to teach math will decrease math anxiety, Schinck-Mikel said.

Educators must understand that a child’s mind is creative, and children will ask ques-tions. A teacher must know math inside and out to ex-plain a concept in different ways until the student under-stands, she said. If a teacher doesn’t know math com-pletely, they will not be able to answer those questions, resulting in math anxiety in the students, she said.

“Knowing that they will work with students makes college students work hard-er,” Schinck-Mikel said. “I re-mind them often they will be working with children with minds that are constantly problem solving.”

Making math more of a com-munity effort could also de-crease math anxiety, Schinck-Mikel said. There should be an acceptance among the stu-

dents and teacher that mak-ing mistakes is OK, she said. If young students feel comfort-able with making mistakes, they will try harder, she said.

For example, negative num-bers took mathematicians centuries to understand, why would teachers challenge their young students to understand it in one sitting, she said.

Eddy understands math anx-iety can arise amongst young students if it is not properly taught, she said.

With the education she re-ceives at Cal Poly, Eddy is trying to fully understand teaching mathematics.

The more comfortable she is with math, the less anxiety her students will have, she said.

“I don’t think I will place as much pressure on how you do on a certain test, but spend

more time teaching the con-cept, emphasizing on getting students to understand the concept and improving with time,” Eddy said.

Cal Poly graduates are very well trained to go into the area of education, Borzellino said. Approximately 50 percent are interested in going into edu-cation at some level. But the mathematics department does not separate math majors be-tween those who would like to teach and those who would not, he said. This allows every student to receive the full math-ematical experience, he said.

“Students would be really lucky to have one of our grad-uates teaching them math,” Borzellino said. “So in that sense, I am very proud in our program, and what we teach our math majors here.”

AMANDA MENESESSpecial to Mustang Daily

Knowing that they will work with students makes college

students work harder.

AMÉLIE SCHINCK-MIKELMATHEMATICS ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

3

MDnews 3Thursday, March 14, 2013

What are you looking forward to next quarter?

WORD ON THE STREET

“The weather. It’s finally going to be nice out.”

•Nick Reindel architectural engineering freshman

“I’m graduating in June and then I’m going to student-teach.”

•Becky Stocking liberal studies senior

“To another quarter being closer to graduation.”

•Christian DeLeon electrical engineering junior

“Getting more involved in the community.”

•Madison White wine and viticulture freshman

“Graduating next quarter.”

• Joshua Lee liberal arts and engineering senior

“Warm weather and spending more time at the beach.”

•Mackenzie Rowe psychology freshman

‘Habemus papam’HENRY CHULos Angeles Times

Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argen-tina became the first pope from the Americas and the first from outside Europe in more than a millennium in an election that recognized a shift in the Ro-man Catholic Church’s center of gravity while maintaining its conservative theology.

The cardinals who elected Bergoglio, 76, chose a man known for his striking hum-bleness. The son of Italian immigrants — a reassurance for those worried about the church abandoning its Euro-pean roots completely — he has served since 1998 as arch-bishop of Buenos Aires, where he cultivated a reputation for competent administration, a

willingness to speak out on controversial national issues and an austere lifestyle bely-ing his prestigious position.

His first act was to pick a papal name that analysts say reflects the intended focus of his reign: an emphasis on the humility and concern for the poor and the marginal-ized that was exemplified by St. Francis of Assisi. Francis was also the name of a promi-nent 16th-century Jesuit, the highly intellectual order to which Bergoglio belongs, who preached the gospel in Asia.

The new pope is also seen as an outsider who may be able to usher in the internal reform and cleanup that critics say the Vatican desperately needs after years of factionalism and scandal. But some questioned

whether his age and personal-ity would make him a transi-tional figure unlikely to leave a distinctive legacy.

Bergoglio’s self-effacing man-ner seemed evident from the moment of his unveiling, when he stepped from behind red velvet curtains onto the central balcony of imposing St. Peter’s Basilica. He waved with one hand to the crowd of tens of thousands below in St. Peter’s Square, looking almost embar-rassed as a small smile played on his bespectacled face.

“You know that the duty of the conclave was to give Rome a bishop,” he said, referring to the pontiff’s role as bishop of that city. “It seems that my brother cardinals picked him from almost the ends of the Earth. But here we are. I thank

you for the warm welcome.”He exhorted his listeners to

foster love, trust and unity.Cheers and jubilant shouts

of “Viva Papa!” rose from the crowd. Many had waited for hours in the cold and rain to watch for the white smoke bil-lowing from the Sistine Cha-pel, the signal of a conclusive vote inside, and to see who would appear on the balcony following the traditional Latin announcement of “Habemus papam” — “We have a pope.”

“To have a guide again after this strange period is wonder-ful,” said Salvatore Califano, 42, an Italian navy official. “From his speech, he felt like a normal person, and that really touched me.”

The new pope will be offi-cially installed Tuesday.

The traditional Latin phrase, which means, “We have a pope,” was announced from the balcony of the Sistine Chapel on Wednesday

MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE

4

MDarts 4

“When I was born, a pack of wolves was brought to its knees.”

He takes a deep breath.“Frosted fur, whistling in the blizzard, they

nosed at the mural painted by my mother’s blood and whimpered something beautiful ... ”

The words read like familiar friends — com-fortable, worn, steady as they roll off his tongue.

“ ... My mother claimed there is no mistaking song, but it seems the world would disagree ... ”

His hazel eyes cling to every line on the page, his body frozen like stone, except his fingers, shaking as they rub his scruffy, softly freckled face and muss his short, brown hair.

Then, Aaron Rowley looks up, blushes and laughs, breaking the still and shattering the trance-like aura around him.

He has just shared, for one of the first times, an excerpt from his novel, “Let There Be Care.”

The biomedical engineering senior, it turns out, is a poet.

“It started my freshman year,” Rowley said. “For whatever reason, I just kind of started writing this story, and I just kept writing. It was never a plan, it was just an idea I thought up in a history class and I enjoyed writing in my journal so much that I kept doing it all the way

until now. It just sort of happened. It’s going to be such a trip to hold a book.”

The first of a series, “Let There Be Care,” is set to be published in the next few weeks. The book centers around a boy who finds a journal outside his work, decides to read it and falls in love with it. But, much like the many layers of Rowley’s mind, the story oversteps face value.

“As the story progresses, he realizes that there’s this group of people that need that journal back,” Rowley said. “And they’re confronting him in really weird scenarios, pressing him for answers, asking him where he’s hiding it, and he realizes that there’s something sort of mysterious and magical about these people, and some fantasy ele-ments start coming in. The story follows how he and those people become intertwined.”

Though the story is one of fantasy and mys-tery, Rowley drew from his own changes of philosophy, observations of the world around him and personal struggles faced during his years at Cal Poly to craft the characters of “Let There Be Care.”

While no single story in the book is firmly rooted in a particular experience of Rowley’s life, he said his emotions and personal senti-ments at the time he wrote each story blended into the stories he wrote and “have for sure

manifested themselves and led the foundation in some regard in all of my stories.”

Growing up, Rowley felt he was shielded from a lot of the world, and coming to college marked a major transition for him.

Rowley called his first years in college “a big journey,” as he learned to adjust to new philosophical and religious beliefs, political standpoints and in finding his own sexual identity when he came out as bisexual during his sophomore year.

“College changed the way I saw politics, relationships, the world and the way I see my life,” said Rowley, who is also a Pride Center peer counselor and honors program student. “I never really thought of myself as someone who had changed a lot, but yeah, in a per-sonal way, I did. I had grown up pretty conserva-tive, Christian and Mormon, and had a lot of philosophical struggles with those.”

To escape all of these personal struggles, Rowley wrote. He did slam poetry; and then he wrote some more.

“It was a way to deal with myself, it was a release,” he said. “And then I started doing slam poetry, and that was less for me, and more for me wanting to put these thoughts out there that some-one else might be going through the same thing as me. I never had a figure or someone I related to closely — and finally being able to share that — I don’t know why I chose that venue, but I could express those feelings in the form of slam poems.”

And those feelings and expansions of the way Rowley saw the world continued to emulate themselves in another way — as a character in “Let There Be Care.”

Rowley identifies with the lead female character, Namelia — a strong woman who abstractly represents the time of intense self-reflection and self-questioning in Rowley’s life.

“I’m in love with this character in the book,” Rowley said. “She has this story of who she is — and it’s not her own. That to me was so fun to imagine. She’s this interesting venue to express that.”

Rowley entrusted his roommate and friend of three years, architecture senior Kathy Kao, with bringing this character to life in a drawing.

“She’s super talented,” Rowley said. “It was cool because it was the first time someone’s taken the ideas and made them tangible. One of the most exciting parts of writing that book was seeing her brought to life in that image.”

Kao said instead of giving her the book to read and infer who the character was, Rowley instead described to her who the character wasn’t.

“He wanted to differentiate from the normal, strong female leads, who are kind of

bitchy,” Kao said. “It’s a stereotype of women who are playing these lead

roles, who have a type of masculin-ity to them without a softness. He

described a female who had a balance. She didn’t have to have

male characteristics, and yet she was still strong.”

Rowley also presented Kao with a crumpled image of a

red-haired woman from a magazine shampoo ad-

vertisement — the same one that is taped to the

wall above his desk, an image he has

been carrying with him for years.“He walked into

my room one night and told me, ‘This is her,’” Kao said.

“I immediately said yes. He has a really strong vision of what he wants, and it was

definitely something I wanted to be a part of.”Kao said since she met Rowley three years

ago, she has never seen him not writing — short stories, poetry.

Over the past three years, Rowley’s stories took the top three awards in the Al Landwehr Creative Writing Contest and were con-sequently published in Cal Poly’s literary maga-zine “Byzantium” each year.

“He exudes this passion when he talks about his writing,” Kao said. “He’s always had an aura about him, a pure personality that is excited and ecstatic about everything. It wasn’t hard to see his ambition for his writ-ten work.”

His writings — and his deep connection to the stories themselves — have grown to be a part of Rowley himself.

BUT ABOVE ALL

WORDS:

ALLISON MONTROYamontroy@mustangdaily.net

PHOTOS:

MAGGIE KAISERMANmaggiekaiserman.md@gmail.com

Kathy Kao drew the above sketch based on a character from Aaron Rowley’s upcoming novel, “Let There Be Care.” A finalized version will appear in the book.

5

MDarts 5Thursday, March 14, 2013

HE IS HIMSELFSoftly burning incense wafts through his

home, past the neatly stacked note-books on his desk, past the sketches, past the magazine cut-out of the red-

haired shampoo model on his wall. He sits precariously at the table in his gray corduroy cutoffs, one arm wrapped around his bare knee, the other thumbing through a messy folder of papers — wax papers, engineering paper, math binders, even a gum wrapper — all pieces of “Let There Be Care,” a time capsule of the past four years of Rowley’s life.

“I remember I was on the 4 Bus, going somewhere, and I just had this idea that I needed to write,” Rowley said. “I didn’t have anything, so I just pulled out this gum wrap-per. In class, I’d just start writing because I needed to get it down. I didn’t take the idea of writing a book seriously until last year. It’s weird to me. It’s surreal that this is going to be one book.”

And yet, so much of his life bleeds into his passion for writing — even when it comes to engineering.

“Science has been quite inspirational to me as well,” Rowley said. “When I got here, I decided to go for engineering because I always found it really fascinating. I’ve always had a really strong sense of curiosity when it comes to science. It’s constantly forcing people to see things differently and exposing new ideas.”

Rowley takes that approach in his writing — presenting thoughts in different ways, and

“looking at literature as a medium for the way people see things, not in the story they’re tell-ing, but in the way they tell the story.”

The poetic engineer makes a conscious effort to share his love of literature with his engineer-ing peers and professors.

Graduate student Joe White has known Rowley since they were freshmen, and while he knows Rowley as more of an engineer than a writer, White said Rowley is one of the best people to sit down with and talk to about life.

“He’s one of my closest friends that I can have those types of conversations with,” White said.

He also noted Rowley, who has performed spoken word poetry at Week of Welcome as well as monthly open mic event Another Type of Groove, is a captivating public speaker.

Kao agreed.“He disarms anyone who comes across

him, and his vulnerability puts people at ease,” Kao said. “He is the type of person you would come home to, and he would have his arms wide open with a smile that says ‘welcome home.’”

Rowley sits in his home, intently reading his favorite book, “Only Revolutions,” as his fingers absent-mindedly rub at a Laura Marling quote tattooed on the inside of his forearm: “Let it always be known I was who I am,” it reads.

“It’s an attempt to be my true self,” Rowley, who shares a birthday with Marling, explained. “No matter where I am in life, no matter what, I still am me.”

Visit mustangdaily.net to hear Rowley read and exclusive excerpt from his novel.

6

MDsports 6 Thursday, March 14, 2013

The men’s basketball team outpaced the Gauchos 67-49 in a Blue-Green showdown at Mott Athletics Center on Feb. 16.

Senior guard Chris O’Brien led the Mustangs with 14 points in his final game in Mott Athletics Center. The Mustangs defeated Cal State Fullerton 62-60.

Junior guard Jonae Ervin leads the nation in assist-to-turnover ratio, dishing out 3.0 assists for every turnover.

The Mustangs put up 76 points against the Anteaters on March 7 and Cal Poly held UC Irvine to just 36 points.

THE SEASON IN SNAPSHOTS

Forward Chris Eversley led the team in scoring, averaging 16.2 points per game.

Senior Brittany Woodard tore her ACL on Jan. 12 against Pacific, ending her collegiate career.

PHOTOS BY IAN BILLINGS/MUSTANG DAILY

77777

MD op/ed 7Thursday, March 14, 2013

Zachary Antoyan is a political science junior and Mustang Daily liberal col-umnist.

It’s almost finals week, and as the stress increases, so does the need for some escapism. So let’s talk about Batman. Pointy mask things, effective utility belt and an unnecessarily deep voice, Bat-man has been an icon for DC Comics since his inception in 1939.

“Hey you liberal columnist, Batman doesn’t have anything to do with politics or ideologies, all he does is beat up people dressed like penguins and jesters.”

How observant, but alas, wrong. Characters throughout the Batman universe routinely exemplify political themes and often, actions of the char-acters mirror the political landscape in the real world. Good thing we have Bat-man’s fists of justice to protect us. See that, political already. Oh and spoilers, so be ready.

In the most recent movie, “The Dark Knight Rises,” direct parallels can be drawn between the anarchical state that the villain, Bane, introduces and the class struggles of today. Many crit-ics (like all of them) have observed that the Gotham City Bane creates after he buries the police force and destroys all but one bridge out of the city harkens to a radical leftist state, one where “We take Gotham from the corrupt! The rich! The oppressors of generations who have kept you down with myths of opportunity, and we give it back to you ... the people. Gotham is yours.”

I guess it doesn’t matter that he is go-

ing to blow the city up after a few months. Hey Bane, if the city is ours, can we not die in a nuclear fusion explosion?

That Bane holds tribunals for the rich, gives the city to the people and effec-tively destroys all methods of gover-nance is radical. But the roots of these actions can be seen in multiple aspects of other movements. The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement was one such event, and both it and Bane attempt to highlight the blatantly obvious socio-economic gap within our own society, though OWS wasn’t led by a man with a crab on his face secretly planning to kill everyone.

The OWS movement was something of an anomaly, in that the character-ization of the movement by media outlets was patchy at best. Conserva-tives and liberals alike not only had no idea where the movement was go-ing, but also denied any claim to it. It is exactly because of this ambigu-ity that some believe the movie to be “a graphic depiction of the tyranny and violence inherent in every radi-cal leftist movement from the French Revolution to Occupy Wall Street.” This notion is a mischaracterization of not only the movie itself, but Bane and Batman as characters as well as the OWS movement.

The basis for Bane’s actions lie in his desire to destroy Gotham, and that he uses class struggle and the gaps in eco-nomic status as the justification for such destruction does not mean that the rec-ognition of such a divide is a necessarily violent thing. Americans pride them-

selves on the semblance of equality for all (except for gay rights and marriage, immigrants and gender) but when con-fronted with the idea of economic equal-ity, we balk. Bane plays on our inability to face the issue, and uses it against Go-tham and Batman.

Additionally, Batman’s own values can be seen not only as moral codes but codes that can be applied to politi-cal processes — less in the dress-up-in-a-leather-bat-costume way and more in the way of dealing with criminals. There have been so many instances where he could take the life of the vil-lain, and chooses not to in favor of the belief in rehabilitation. Despite his ar-dent adherence to not killing, he often must come to terms with the fact that the villains keep escaping and keep causing chaos.

Whether that is a reflection of the Gotham prison system or not, it can

be paralleled to our own debates over the death penalty. Maryland is about to become the 18th state to outlaw the death penalty, and in doing so the state shows a shift toward a rehabilitative system of punishment, as compared to one that seeks out retribution.

Throughout history, literature and art have been ways of examining events that happen in our own world. They provide the opportunity to com-ment on society and culture. Batman, despite being a super hero, despite be-ing fictitious, despite being a man who goes out at night, dressed like a bat, to fight crime, is simply another way for us to look at ourselves. Politics, Bat-man, same thing.

This is Zachary Antoyan, wishing the days when it was this nice outside were California Appreciation Days, in which school is cancelled. Have a great week, and kick some finals ass for me.

Batman, Bane and ... Barack Obama?How themes and villains in ‘Batman’ might not be so far off from today’s political landscape

Eversley, a returning member from last year’s team that fin-ished the season with a loss to UC Santa Barbara in the second round of the conference tourna-ment, said those returning will be playing with a deep tourney run in mind.

“It hurt in the locker room afterward,” Eversley said of the loss to the Gauchos. “I didn’t just lose six teammates, I lost six close friends (to graduation). That stuck with me over the past year and the rest of the guys are gonna use that as motivation as well.”

That team finished the season with an 18-15 overall record and earned a win in the opening round of the tournament over UC Riverside.

But Cal Poly’s lineup at the Honda Center will be drasti-cally different this year. Senior

guard Dylan Royer will be the only player from last sea-son’s finale to start consecutive tournament games.

But for head coach Joe Calle-ro, the amount of playing time his young team has amassed during the course of the sea-son negates any questions of postseason inexperience.

“We really don’t feel like people are freshmen,” Callero said. “We feel that you move on after about 20 games under your belt.”

In fact, the Mustangs will likely have true freshman Brian Bennett, who is one of two players who have started in every game this season, among the starters Thursday.

“It’s still just basketball at the end of the day,” Bennett said. “Before that first game, I’m prob-ably (going to) get really ner-vous. But that nervousness tells you that it’s important to you and you really care about what you’re doing.”

As for the veterans, Royer

will be playing in his fourth Big West tournament while Ever-sley and senior guard Chris O’Brien will be playing in their second postseason. Guards Kyle Odister and Drake U’u will also play in their second tournament after sitting out last year with injuries.

Besides that, youth will per-meate the lineup off the bench, with as many as four freshmen set to play against the Aggies.

No worries for the Mus-tangs, though, as they’re used to inexperience anchor-ing the front court.

“We like to look at the inexpe-rience that people think that we have, by this point in the sea-son we’ve played 29 games, and throw that whole thing out the window,” Eversley said.

The Mustangs split the sea-son series this year with the Aggies, as they won the home leg on Feb. 9 and dropped a Jan. 10 heartbreaker on the road when sophomore guard

Corey Hawkins nailed a jumper at the buzzer to sink the team.

They’ll need to find a way to stop Hawkins, the con-ference’s leading scorer av-eraging 20.9 per game, and junior guard Ryan Sypkens, who ranks 15th nationally in 3-point field goal shooting percentage at 47.1 percent.

“A way to get better is to look back and address your shortcomings from the previ-ous games,” Callero said. “To prepare best for UC Davis, you need to tighten up your shortcomings against Fuller-

ton ... We’re always looking to get better, and the best way is to look back and pull yourself forward from that point on.”

Three more wins for the Mus-tangs would grant them their first NCAA tournament berth in school history and would have them looking at the biggest picture of all — a frame of them dancing in March.

“I want to make history,” Ben-nett said. “All of us are on board with that, we want to make his-tory. We all want to reach that goal of ours … make it to the NCAA tournament.”

We want to make history. We all want to reach that

goal of ours ... make it to the NCAA tournament.

BRIAN BENNETTFRESHMAN FORWARD

TOURNAMENTcontinued from page 1

Freshman forward Brian Bennett will likely make his first start in collegiate postseason play on Thursday against UC Davis. Tipoff is set for 2:30 p.m.

IAN BILLINGS/MUSTANG DAILY

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MDsports 9Thursday, March 14, 2013

Jordan Lewis had cancer as a baby.More specifically, he had neuroblastoma, the most

common cancer found in infants and children younger than two years of age. According to the Mayo Clinic, this type of tumor can develop from immature nerve cells found throughout the body and primarily affects the sympathetic nervous sys-tem, a portion of the body’s natural control system.

Because of it, Lewis, a former forward on the Cal Poly men’s basketball team, is diagnosed today with Horner’s syndrome, a rare disorder that is precipi-tated by damaged nerves connecting the eyes and face. He can’t sweat on a portion of the left side of his body. His left eye is a lighter color than his right and his left pupil is a little smaller than it should be.

But that hasn’t stopped Lewis from being around the sport he loves — basketball.

“It’s been something that I’ve really enjoyed,” Lewis said. “Growing up with my friends, we al-ways played basketball together. Since then, I’ve been doing my thing and I’ve loved it.”

The San Rafael, Calif. native had the tumor re-moved from the upper left part of his chest when he was just three months old and says it hasn’t affected his ability to play since he started in kindergarten. He grew up just a regular kid hooping at the YMCA ranks all the way through AAU and even the NCAA.

Now the 24-year-old Cal Poly alumnus is several months removed from academic life on campus, but still finds himself involved with the men’s basket-ball program. Lewis earned his bachelor’s degree in biological sciences last quarter and was named the team’s student-assistant coach throughout the fall. Now that he’s graduated, Lewis is involved in a lesser capacity, but still helps the team practice on an oc-casional basis and supports the Mustangs at home and on the road.

According to junior forward and roommate Chris Eversley, Lewis primarily helps the younger post players on the team by giving them basket-ball advice and helps them mesh into head coach Joe Callero’s system.

“He’s able to give a lot of the younger guys a lot of insight on defensive reads and what they should do offensively in the post,” Evers-ley said. “He’s like an all-encompassing big brother for all the younger guys.”

Callero said he didn’t hesitate bring-ing Lewis on to the staff this year.

“There’s always something very special about having a former player assisting your program,” Callero said. “(Assistant coach) Sam Kirby played for me at Seattle University. He always brings an insight that I can look back to.”

But playing — let alone coaching — college ball wasn’t always on Lewis’ radar. And Lewis wasn’t al-

ways on college teams’ viewfinder either.According to him, Lewis wasn’t heavily recruited out

of Terra Linda High School and didn’t have a serious opportunity to play collegiately until he had already ar-rived at Cal Poly.

Originally a walk-on with the Mustangs when for-mer coach Kevin Bromley was at the helm, Lewis im-pressed the coaching staff during open gym his fresh-man year. Soon afterward, he was told there would be a jersey waiting with his name on it.

“(The coaching staff) said, ‘Hey we’d love to have you come walk-on the team,’” Lewis said. “‘There’s a spot for you and we’d love to have you.’”

Not on scholarship, Lewis redshirted his freshman season and only got limited playing time in his second year on campus before Bromley was dismissed as the head coach.

But, Callero, the then-newly acquired head coach, came into the program offering the seldom-used for-ward an opportunity to shine on a NCAA court.

“It was a chance for me to really to prove myself to coach Callero coming in and show him the skills I had, my strength, athleticism and work ethic,” Lewis said. “I redshirted my first year, didn’t play a lot before that and coach Callero came in and I had my opportunity. Af-ter the first game of my (sophomore) season, I started the majority of the games that season. I went from no minutes to a starting position. It was nice because it felt like my hard work had paid off.”

“Hard work” being the key phrase.Lewis averaged a career-high 24 minutes per

game that season and scored more than six points in each contest — the highest total of his career with the Mustangs.

It was the intangibles, things such as his “bas-ketball I.Q.” and leadership, that impressed Cal-lero the most, though. Lewis’ 220-pound frame embodies them, he said.

“You want to know his work ethic, take a look at his body,” Callero said. “It gives a pretty good idea of what kind of work ethic he still has in the weight room.”

Callero dug Lewis’ diligence on the court so much that he offered him a scholarship before his senior year. It came as a complete surprise, Lewis admitted.

“You can’t just give scholarships to anyone who makes the team, they have to further the program and help it be successful,” Callero said. “With Jordan, he was a contributing member on a successful program. Now, we say that he earned that scholarship.”

That drive to continually succeed will be highlighted in Lewis’ next ambitions. Of Jewish heritage, he soon hopes to play professional basketball in Israel before using his degree to matriculate into dental school and one day become a dentist.

Like Sean Bullard, an Oakland-based dentist, ad-vised, Lewis wants to join the professional ranks in athletics before pursuing his academic passion.

“(Bullard) is kind of a mentor to me for the dental profession,” Lewis said. “He said dental school will al-ways be there. Go play while you still can.”

And why not? After all, poor recruitment out of high school didn’t stop him from playing collegiate basket-ball. Neither did cancer.

Former Cal Poly forward Jordan Lewis came to San Luis Obispo as a walk-on, but earned a scholarship before his senior season. He averaged 6.5 points per game in 2009-10.

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY NHA HA

STEPHAN TEODOSESCUsteodosescu@mustangdaily.net

In 2008, Dylan Royer walked onto the Cal Poly men’s basketball team. He will soon

walk off as a scholar-ship player.Royer was recruited

by a few Division II col-leges out of nearby Morro

Bay High School, including Concordia University and

UC San Diego. Some even of-fered him scholarships, but Cal

Poly offered opportunity.Former head coach Kevin Bromley met with Royer near the end of his time in

high school and promised the budding star a long-term roster spot after a

redshirt season.“(I was offered) a guaranteed four

years on the team, I just wouldn’t have a scholarship,” Royer said. “I talked about it with my parents and thought about it for a while, and decided I wanted to give it a

shot at Division I.”Other walk-ons had been offered the

same deal during Bromley’s tenure, which gave the coach added credibility, Royer said.

Bromley also extended roster spots to former play-ers Jordan Lewis and Matt Titchenal.

But by the time Royer got to campus in the fall, Bromley had been ousted following a 7-21 season and Royer’s four-year roster spot was in jeopardy.

The poor season made fans think the new head coach, Joe Callero, would start anew and rid himself of some parts of the previous regime, includ-

ing the three walk-ons.“The whole team, but really us three I think, were worried he might come in and

clear house, tell people they weren’t on the team anymore,” Royer said. “We had to prove ourselves, and it ended up working out in our favor.”

Scholarship players and walk-ons both had to earn their spots on the team. While everyone made the cut, the try-outs sparked something within Royer, Callero said.

“What it did for Dylan, it made him equal to everybody,” Callero said. “He didn’t look at it like, ‘I’m a walk-on’ any-more, and he started working with the notion that it’s a free-enterprise system.”

Players of all economic standings were treated the same, Royer said. Callero gave everyone on the roster the oppor-tunity to earn a starting spot.

“I’ve heard about some schools where walk-ons are treated differently, but here I’ve never found any difference,” Royer said. “At the end of the day, you’re just one of the guys.”

Redshirting meant Royer practiced with the team, but he was ineligible to play throughout his freshman year.

Royer’s playing time was pretty much the same after his redshirt season. He saw the court for just 3.3 minutes per game during 15 contests in his first season of eligibility.

In his sophomore year, Royer actually played two fewer games, and his minutes went up only marginally. Near the season’s closing, he saw a little more court time.

“I started playing more at the end of the year,” Royer said. “In the last few games, I had some double-digit minutes.”

Those extra minutes and additional time playing Division I basketball carried over to a productive 2011-12 campaign in his junior year, when he posted 7.5 points per game while playing in every contest.

It was physical and mental growth that earned Royer a full scholarship for the fol-lowing year, Callero said.

“He improved his body,” Callero said. “He became stronger, became quicker and more aggressive. He’s a leader in the classroom, a leader in the community, a leader in the locker room.”

Royer never focused on playing for a scholarship, even when Lewis earned his. He remained hopeful, but understood the situation Callero was in.

“It’s really hard to give someone a scholarship in the middle of their career,” Royer said. “To recruit for the future, you need to be able to give scholarships to incoming freshmen.”

Now, the move is paying dividends for Callero’s Mustangs, who are the No. 3 seed in the upcoming Big West Conference Tournament that starts Thursday. Royer has responded with the best season of his career, averaging 9.9 points per game, 2.3 re-bounds per game, 1.1 assists per game and 0.8 steals per game.

The guard also set his then-career high with 20 points against UC Davis, Cal Poly’s tournament-opening opponent, on Feb. 9. The sharp-shooting Royer later dropped 23 points against UC Santa Barbara and Cal State Northridge.

After this past Saturday’s game, a 62-60 win over Cal State Fullerton, fellow seniors Chris O’Brien and Drake U’u joined Royer in thanking the fans. It was the last game any of them would play at Mott Athletics Center.

O’Brien knows Royer well from living with him, as well as Lewis and junior forward Chris Eversley.

“Dylan is one of a kind,” O’Brien said. “He’s always positive, he’s great to room with — my roommate — and a heck of a player, but an even better friend and person. It’s been an honor to play and grow with him the last four years.”

BENJY EGELbenjyegel.md@gmail.com

Royer and Lewis find their home

I’ve heard about some schools where walk-ons are treated

differently, but here I’ve never found any difference.

DYLAN ROYERSENIOR GUARD

WALK (ON) THIS WAY

SUDOKU ANSWERS

PHOTO BY IAN BILLINGS

10

MDsports 10 Thursday, March 14, 2013

THE REDEEM TEAM

Sometimes competing is all about memory loss.

All athletes train themselves to have a short memory. The wins may keep coming, but losses are inevitable. Races aren’t always won, goals aren’t always made and disappointments become probable.

For the Cal Poly women’s basketball team (19-10, 13-5 Big West Conference), there has been one memory that has haunted them since the very end of last season; the way in which the year concluded, a stunning upset at the hands of Long Beach State in the semifinals of the Big West Conference Tournament.

Now the team heads to Ana-heim this weekend as the No. 2 seed in the tournament, the players are looking to use those emotions to help them do what no other team has done in pro-gram history — win it all and move on to the big dance.

That wasn’t the case this time last season. Moments into the team’s tournament matchup against the 49ers, the then-sophomore point guard Jonae Ervin hit the hardwood floor, her face contorted by pain. Before she could make an im-pact when the team needed it, Ervin — who held the nation’s leading assist-to-turnovers ra-tio — tore her anterior cruci-ate ligament (ACL).

“Jonae getting hurt was a re-ally crucial moment for us in the game,” sophomore guard Ariana Elegado said. “After that mo-ment when (Ervin) went down, everybody just looked at each other and said, ‘So, who is going to step up?’ We didn’t have the energy or the momentum we had all year last year. Everybody was just looking around for someone to step up.”

The Mustangs went into halftime with a comfortable lead, but Long Beach State rallied as Cal Poly’s shots clanked off the rim. The 49ers upset the Mustangs and sent Cal Poly’s all-time lead-ing scorer Kristina Santiago home without ever winning a tournament title.

“It was shocking,” head coach Faith Mimnaugh said. “They got on fire, and one of their shooters just went off on us. There was an emotional toll that game took on us with the loss of Jonae. We fell short in that game, but heading into playoffs, any team can win it.”

This year, that proved evi-dent in Cal Poly’s final game of the regular season, when the Mustangs fell once again to Long Beach State, 71-58, to drop them from Big West regular season champion to second place and a No. 2 seed in the tournament.

“This last game would have meant a lot if we won,” El-egado said. “These five seniors

worked so hard. I keep telling them we’re still not done.”

They never were, even with the few obstacles they’ve had to face this year.

Going into the 2012-13 season, both the coaches and media polls predicted a fourth-place finish for the Mustangs in the Big West regular season standings.

“In the beginning of the sea-son, everybody thought we couldn’t make it,” Elegado said. “Without Santiago, Cal Poly wasn’t going to go anywhere. Everyone doubted us. So hav-ing that faith and believing in each other is what really push-es us to be a contender.”

The team also lost senior Brittany Woodard to an injury during the start of conference play. But like the rest of her team, there has always been fight in the 6-foot forward — on crutches or on the court.

“It’s very tough not being able to be out there and show them by example, but I think just being here and showing up to practices and shoot-arounds is very important,” Woodard said. “It’s just so they know that I’m here for them to cheer them on whenever they need it.”

Mimnaugh has been the Mustangs’ head coach for 15 seasons, and she’s seen many teams compete and many play-ers graduate. But this team, she said, has something special.

“A couple of years ago, we had team members who were right at the line of the cham-pionship,” Mimnaugh said. “But they were not sure about themselves; they lacked the confidence they needed to get over that line. This team be-lieves in themselves. This team has expectations of themselves that nobody else does.”

One thing is sure this week-

end. The team will have a bye into the semifinal round of the tournament and will take the court on Friday against the sec-ond lowest seed remaining from the first two rounds of play.

It will be a long time before Ervin will forget the pain in her knee and the team will for-get the bitter loss in Cal Poly’s last playoff game, but the ju-nior point guard knows better

than to dwell in the past.“It was the worst timing, but

I’m glad I can be back and be healthy for this season,” Ervin said. “I’m just trying to take care of my body and appreci-ate every opportunity I have right now. This is tournament time. If we lose, we go home, so we’ve got to give it our all. We’ve had a great year, but we want to end it off right.”

JEFFERSON P. NOLANjnolan@mustangdaily.net

IAN BILLINGS/MUSTANG DAILY

Redshirt sophomore Ariana Elegado is the second-leading scorer on the Cal Poly women’s basketball team, averaging 12.1 points per game.

IAN BILLINGS/MUSTANG DAILY

Overall StatsOverall record: 19-10Big West record: 13-5

Points per game: 68.5Field goal percentage: 42.1%3-point field goal percentage: 34.9%

Leading scorer: Molly Schlemer (12.7 points/game) Leading rebounder: Molly Schlemer (6.8 rebounds/game)

Team Stats

Player Stats

By the numbers

Mustangs want one thing: a bid to the big dance