Baseball Cats Hope to go Back-to-Back
By Bobby Gerome ‘21
After having last season canceled due to COVID, the Baseball Cats still have high hopes going into a season where they have to defend their state championship.
The team this season will have a lot of new stars that many Wildcat fans have not seen play on the varsity level. To start, captains Matt Giberti, Gip Conroy, and Johnny Panstares are all players who can make a big impact on the field. Giberti is a fast outfielder, and is the only captain with varsity experience. The Harvard commit was a pinch runner for the Wildcats during the 2019 state title run. Panstares is another speedster who will be an outfielder no opposing batter wants to hit towards. Williams College commit Gip Conroy will play second base this season. Conroy’s work ethic has helped him become flawless in the middle of the infield, and he is always willing to do whatever it takes to help the team win games. The final player to look out for this season is Gabe Nard. The former freshman phenom won the state championship for the Wildcats in 2019 in his first ever varsity start. Later that year, Nard committed to Duke. Currently a junior, Nard will be the Wildcats’ ace this season.
Coach Ganor spoke very highly of the captains, and had comments on how good it is to be back playing baseball. “The captains have done a great job galvanizing the rest of the group. I think across the board the seniors truly missed last year, and they have a true realization now of how special it is to be together, and be a team.” Ganor says. “We’re seeing that now guys are staying after practice wanting to hang out, and wanting to see each other. In the past, maybe people take those things for granted, and they rush off to do whatever they were doing, but we’re still seeing it more and more where guys are really enjoying being around each other.”
Truly, there is a strong bond with this team. While many players are getting their first opportunity to play with one another, the team as a whole is taking the extra time to grow. When it comes to the steps the team has taken in the past, Gip Conroy said: “This is a new team with a new mindset this season. A lot of us teammates have not played together before, and we were not able to do a lot that we normally do over the offseason. With that being said, it does feel great to be back together. The team’s chemistry is very high this season because of the time spent away from the game, and how we finally get to be back.”
Believe it or not, this is also the first season the baseball team has been able to use the Carfagna Family Magis Athletic Center. While construction on the MAC was completed in 2019, the baseball team was only able to use it in the winter last year before the middle of March. Coach Ganor added, “We were just getting our feat last year, just kind of figuring it out, breaking it in, and then we got shut down, so this year is huge. You have already seen the benefits of how we’re able to structure our practices, the things we’ve been able to do in there, it’s an amazing facility.” An amazing facility indeed. The MAC is something that Saint Ignatius has that almost no other school in the state has, and the results will show on the field this season.
This season’s schedule is not easy for the Wildcats. All home games will be played at Brookside Reservation this year, and there are top-tier teams in the area that will come to Brookside. On April 8, they take on that team from Lakewood, Solon travels west to play the Cats on April 22, and the team battles Avon on April 26. April 27 is when the other Wildcats from Mayfield play the baseball team, and then the reigning state runner up Mentor Cardinals will travel to Brookside. Notable road opponents the Wildcats will play are Amherst, Gilmour, Strongsville, and Walsh. These are all tough opponents that will prepare the baseball team well for a postseason run. When talking about the schedule, Conroy stated, “I’m looking forward to playing Walsh in the Ohio Jesuit Tournament the most. Although we are the reigning state champions, Walsh is ranked higher than us in the preseason rankings.”
When asked about the goals for this season, Coach Ganor commented: “The ultimate goal of this season is the same as every other division one school in the state.” Ganor said, “The ultimate goal for me though, is to make this an amazing memorable season. Hopefully it culminates with a championship, but that’s hard to do, those aren’t guarantees, but I can guarantee that we’re going to work very hard to create memorable, amazing experiences for these kids.”
The baseball team has gone through many obstacles to get where they are today. They are ready to take on this season, and whatever challenges come their way. With high morale and a lot of preparation, the Wildcats will have a fun season, and have a lot of success.
The Ups and Downs of WandaVision – the Beginning of a New Age for Marvel
By Nathaniel Colón ‘21
WandaVision is the the next stage of the acclaimed Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it is safe to say that in general fans enjoyed it, with it garnering a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes. I, too liked the show, but could not help but feel that some aspects of it were kind of bland or weak. It suffers from a lot of the same problems that plagued other MCU movies, but before getting into the specifics of what I didn’t like, let’s talk about what I did like.
For one, this show came out at the perfect time. It had been so long since we had seen anything Marvel related, so just having a taste of some Marvel action was well appreciated. The general environment of the show was also really fun to watch. Transitioning through different styles of sitcoms as the episodes progressed was a really fun experience as a viewer, going through parodies of sitcoms such as Bewitched, The Office, and Malcolm in the Middle. These different styles kept every episode feeling fresh and original, which is something that Marvel movies can somewhat falter in at times, as Marvel movies can feel repetitive and just like the last one at times. The show having released a new episode once a week really built up the tension between every episode which a typical movie can not replicate.
One of my personal favorite things about the show was the inclusion of Evan Peters as Peter/Pietro Maximoff, also known as Quicksilver. As you may or may not know, Evan Peters played Quicksilver in Fox’s X-Men movies, which were recently bought by Disney. Peters’s presence in WandaVision seemingly unlocks a whole treasure trove of possibilities for how the X-Men may be introduced into the MCU. It also introduced the possibility of a multiverse, as Quicksilver was previously portrayed by Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Avengers: Age of Ultron. With two Quicksilvers in the MCU, the possibility of a multiverse grows greater.
But Evan Peters’ Quicksilver comes with one of my problems with the show, and that’s that they didn’t do enough with him. Quicksilver has a significant role in one or two episodes before essentially being reduced to cameo roles after that. On top of this, in the finale once Wanda’s spell wears off, it is revealed that Peters isn’t really Pietro/Peter Maximoff, but a stranger by the name of Ralph Bohner. While the name is funny, it doesn’t clear up what Ralph’s role is. Many fans, including myself, are optimistic that Peters will return to the MCU in some degree, but for now the multiverse possibilities have been dampened.
I think many people found the finale of the series underwhelming. Wanda realizes that what she’s doing is wrong and ends the spell. She defeats the evil witch Agatha Harkness and restores Westview to its original state. She also finally dawns the Scarlet Witch costume, which was an awesome scene, but an expected one at that. The finale of WandaVision suffered the same fate as many MCU movies in that it was pretty predictable. Once I knew that Wanda was controlling the citizens of Westview, I had a feeling that the show would end with her realizing her errors and letting go of her control. Likewise, once I knew that Agatha was the main villain of the show, I could easily predict that the show would end in her defeat. Thanos has not been the biggest villain of the MCU, predictability has been.
I know I talked much more negatively about the show than positive, but I really do like the show. I love Wanda and Vision’s relationship, the ever-changing setting in Westview, and Randall Park as Jimmy Woo. This show has so much to like, but there is also a good deal of stuff that I find trouble in enjoying. WandaVision proves to be a good start for what the future holds for the MCU, but like all things Marvel, is far from error.
Final score: 7/10
Why March 15th Was The Day Ignatius Returned Full-time
By Nathan Kuczmarski ‘22
Since the first week of school in August, a return to full-time in-person learning has been constantly looming. For some, this inevitable return was openly welcomed as it would allow for greater social interaction and preparation for next year. For others, a return seemed nonsensical as most students and parents still lacked vaccines and saw no issue with the half-day schedule.
Regardless, on Monday, March 15th Saint Ignatius came back as an entire student body, but the reasoning behind this decision was never entirely evident. On March 11th the teachers got the second dose of their vaccine, but was that the only reason? Cases have been trending down, but at what point was it low enough? Were the views of parents and students taken into consideration?
According to Principal Dr. Anthony Fior, the decision came from all of those things and more. “Last June, I didn’t really know, you know, everything was so uncertain still. We didn’t know a lot about the virus.” As school closures spread across the country, Saint Ignatius joined the charge for the safety of faculty, students, and their families. Originally, this measure was largely precautionary as cases were still very low, but so was knowledge of the virus.
So, for the remainder of the 2019-2020 school year, students worked from home, but as the next school year approached, newly appointed principal Dr. Fior held on to the eventual return. “At this school, our number one priority was to get kids on campus as much as possible.” In August, this meant bringing in only half of the students for half of the day to ensure 6 feet of distance could be ensured in classrooms. Fior then added, “as we worked through the fall semester, we started talking about, well, what would it look like if we could get all of our kids back on campus at some point?”
According to Dr. Fior, “[the school has] yet to have a case, to my knowledge, of [the virus] spread on campus in a classroom–-from student to student in a classroom.” Seeing that Ignatius could return safely without internal spread, the idea of a full return began gestating in the minds of administrators. Despite this lack of internal spread, however, students were still reporting getting the coronavirus.
“The majority of our cases that we’ve had as a community have really been around two things: the socialization of sports, to be honest, and really a lot of adult spread,” says Fior. During the 2020-2021 school year, sports teams have not halted practices. Even in December when all classes shifted to virtual learning, sports continued. Whether this continuation in times of high spread caused cases to linger and spread further is unclear. However, in an interview shortly after the announcement to go virtual, Dr. Fior defended the choice saying “most COVID cases are happening around the socialization of sports… Parents watching games, some of the locker room stuff, but it’s not the sport specifically.” One would wonder how the socialization of a sport is not linked to the sport itself, but sports continued regardless.
Following Christmas break, new cases were steady with about 5-10 students actively having the virus at a time with 10-20 usually being quarantined. At this point, Dr. Fior says school leadership “had heard from a lot of parents. I had personally received many phone calls, many emails from parents saying, ‘hey, when are we going to get all the kids back?’, ‘When are we going to get all the kids back?’, ‘Other schools have been in person all year.’ So he started having these conversations.”
In addition, Fior notes President Fr. Raymond Guiao’s support of going back saying, “it was very important to Fr. Ray that we could get kids back on campus as soon as possible, but we also wanted to make sure we could do it, do it well, and do it as safely as possible.” So to begin the process of choosing a date to make that happen, Fior recalls talking about a weather improvement in March. Furthermore, he noted that going into the month of March, cases were declining and still less than 1% of the school’s entire population has been COVID positive in the second semester.
Speaking on the safety of a return, Dr. Fior addressed some of the potential concerns that might arise from having more students in person. “We would have to eliminate the six-foot distancing in all of the classrooms. And there are some studies out there that say three-foot is sufficient, and we still know that we can’t do three-foot in every classroom.” Just as the safety of the hybrid schedule at the beginning of the year was uncertain, so too is this relaxing of distancing, however, based on the ultimate decision, it is apparent that the school is willing to take that risk to allow for an in-person educational experience.
At the time of the return, however, not everyone was equally at risk as faculty members received their second dose of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine the week before the return, while likely no students and few parents can say the same thing. Some have seen this as a case of those in power only looking after themselves, to which Dr. Fior responded: “I don’t think I don’t think that’s true. Like knowing myself, knowing Father Ray, knowing our leadership team, the senior staff and the administrative team of the school. We all really care about kids. That’s why we’re here.”
To support this move, Fior also added, “we were also really concerned about mental and emotional wellness of kids. We wanted to provide many, I would say the majority, of our families the option to send their sons to school in-person every day. Still, Fior acknowledged that some families are not ready to return and has left the option to remain or start going virtual open.
Dr. Fior highlighted that it was ultimately a balancing act saying “there’s no perfect answer.” But given all of the factors that have just been laid out, Dr. Fior and other administrators felt a return was acceptable.
So far, Dr. Fior has been happy with the results. “I talked to the freshmen today during their lunch period. They haven’t been together as a class since August, you know, and that sense of community, that sense of brotherhood, the in-person relationships, everyone here in the Saint Ignatius community knows how important those are.”
Despite such optimism, fear and anxiety still somewhat remains as Dr. Fior said “Am I anxious? We haven’t had 1,500 boys on campus in a year. So if we’re not anxious, that means that we don’t care and we all care.” He then continued saying “It’s going to be a little messy, but that’s okay. We’ll get through it. We’ll make changes.”
At the end of the day, Dr. Fior says he wants to be in-person, but will do what is best for the community. Thus, a final reason for the timing of March 15th is that it gives two weeks of full in-person learning before spring break. “So, if there were some serious adjustments we had to make, we would have that little bit of break to make those changes.”
“I just hope that we, as a community at Ignatius and a larger community, still realize that we’re, you know, we’re not at the end of the tunnel yet. We haven’t crossed the finish line. We still need to wear our masks. We still need to distance when we can, we still need to wash our hands and stay home if we don’t feel good. We need to continue to do all of those things.”
At the End of the Day, Interests Outweigh Values in Foreign Policy
By Terry McCafferty
About a week ago, President Joe Biden made two important and revealing foreign policy decisions. First, he refused to give Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (M.B.S.) of Saudi Arabia any significant punishment for the killing of journalist and United States resident Jamal Khashoggi. Then he bombed Syria without congressional approval.
As a candidate, Biden said that he would make Saudi Arabia “pay the price, and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are” for actions like the murder of Khashoggi. He even went as far as to say that he saw “very little social[ly] redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia,” and a key component of his campaign was to restore American leadership abroad. On the campaign trail, Biden said, President “Trump’s erratic policies and failure to uphold basic democratic principles have surrendered our position in the world.”
Unfortunately, by following in his predecessor’s steps of doing next to nothing to punish M.B.S., Biden also surrendered our values. Nicholas Kristof, in a scathing piece titled “President Biden Lets a Saudi Murder Walk”, wrote, “this is a betrayal of my friend Jamal Khashoggi and of his values and ours.” Kristof articulated perfectly the danger of abandoning American values in the situation of Saudi Arabia saying, “in this great balancing of values and interests, the towering risk is that M.B.S., who is just 35, will become king upon the death of his aging father and rule recklessly for many years, creating chaos in the Gulf and a rupture in Saudi-American relations that would last decades.”
But this was not the only decision Biden made recently that deserted our values, that is if we value a more free, democratic, peaceful, and safer world. He also bombed Syria without any approval from Congress.
In 2017, Jen Psaki, before she was Biden’s Press Secretary, asked, “What is the legal authority for strikes? Assad is a brutal dictator. But Syria is a sovereign country.” In 2018, Kamala Harris, before she was Biden’s Vice President said “I am deeply concerned about the legal rationale of last night’s strikes. The president needs to lay out a comprehensive strategy in Syria in consultation with Congress.” In 2019, Biden himself said, “Donald Trump’s recent actions in Syria and how his erratic, impulsive decisions endanger our troops and make us all less safe.”
But now that Biden is president, he seems to be continuing down the same destabilizing and dangerous foreign policy path in the Middle East. Acts like these will only make it more difficult to reenter the Iran Nuclear Deal (which the United States pulled out of) and to take other measures to bring about peace in that part of the world.
But the Middle East is not the only part of the globe where we trod on our own values on behalf of our interests. Perhaps the most obvious other example is China. In its effort to crackdown systematically on any dissent within the country, China continues to violate basic standards of human rights. Most notably among their human rights abuses is the fact that they are using over one million Uighurs there as forced labor and large numbers of women are being forcibly sterilized. Yet no consequential action has been taken to incentivize China to stop because such action could put the economic interests of the United States in jeopardy.
I am not saying that our leaders should leave American interests unconsidered when making foreign policy decisions. I am not even saying that every decision that prioritizes our interests over our values is wrong. But the degree to which both Democratic and Republican Administrations have been willing to turn a blind eye toward advancing human rights, protecting peace, and spreading democracy abroad in favor of evanescent economic and fleeting militaristic gains is not right.
At the end of the day, it is in America’s best interest to restore our values to the forefront of our foreign policy decision-making because the cost of continuing to turn a blind eye toward the injustices of our world makes us complicit. In a world with far too much oppression and injustice, that is the last thing we should allow our country to become.
– No. 6 –
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‘At the End of the Day’ is a weekly column written by Terry McCafferty ‘22. Each week focuses on a different topic often related to politics, faith, culture, or society at large.
Schedule for Full Return Released as Specifics Become Clearer
By Peter Karim ‘23
After it was announced that Saint Ignatius High School was returning full time in-person, many in the community wondered what schedule would be adopted for the rest of the year. While the school waited for its answer, speculation about the return schedule grew and anticipation around it built. On Wednesday, March 3rd, it was finally released and it is not what many were expecting.
There were various options for the March 15 schedule. The process of narrowing these various options and choosing a final schedule, according to a letter sent by Principal Dr. Anthony Fior ‘02, “was not an easy [decision] to make nor immediately clear.” Other than the one that was ultimately chosen and released to the school, the other schedule options included one, according to several teachers, that would have been a modified, 9 period schedule. The 9 period schedule would have been a normal schedule except the common period would have been completely removed. Lunch would have been eaten during a student’s free period or, if the free period was too early or late to reasonably eat lunch, during a student’s 4th or 6th period class. This schedule would have also ended earlier and maybe would have started later.
At their first glance of the schedule that was chosen, many students objected with comments like, ”I don’t want to sit through 70 minutes of class time,” and, “I’d rather just have the normal 9 period schedule.” Not many students seemed to like the new schedule that would be inplace on March 15, but they might not have gotten the whole picture.
According to several teachers who would prefer to remain unidentified, this schedule was made for students. This schedule was picked in part because of interviews with other Jesuit schools and their students. Other Jesuit schools with this schedule reported that at first, their students, just like Ignatius students, disliked the idea of the schedule, but after having it for a while, the students came to appreciate it. According to teachers, the schedule is designed to lower stress, decrease student’s homework load, and have other benefits for students. The 70 minute classes are not intended to be 70 minutes of lecture time. It often, instead, will be broken into parts. For example, maybe 35 minutes of learning, 20 minutes of group work, and 15 minutes to do homework. Teachers are also supposed to only give around 30 minutes of homework to their students per class, not per night. With 35 minutes of free period between 2 and 3 periods or 7 and 8 periods plus 70 minutes of free time during free periods, students can hope to finish a reasonable amount of their homework at school.
Another reason that this schedule might have been picked is because of lunch. Getting around the issue of lunch has been tough for the school and is what probably caused the initial A and B half-day schedule we have had for the majority of this school year. Eating is the only time students have masks for an extended amount of time which highly increases the risk of spreading COVID. Splitting the lunch period into two groups will make lunch most likely more safe for students.
But will the implicated benefits of this new schedule be fully recognized by students once it is implemented? That remains to be seen. Until then it is likely that trepidations of the student body will persist. Regardless, on March 15th, the use of the released schedule is all but inevitable.
End the Costly Policy of Supplying Limitless Plastic Bottled Water
By Conor McGuire ’22
The COVID-19 pandemic brought many problems to the Saint Ignatius community. The school had to figure out how to properly have in person classes, effectively switch to online streaming, and keep track of any students who got the virus. One of the problems the school dealt with was preventing the spread of COVID through water fountains. In order to do this all water fountains were shut down at the beginning of the school year, and in order to provide water to students single use plastic water bottles were made accessible throughout the school.
The issues with providing single use water bottles are the environmental and financial impacts that it has on the school and the city of Cleveland. The costs to the planet and to the school from production to purchasing to disposal far outweigh the alternative of having reusable water bottles and easily available filling stations.
According to Ban the Bottle, an organization dedicated to spreading awareness about the negative impacts of bottled water, to produce one plastic bottled water, it takes three times the amount of water that is actually in the bottle, 2000 times more energy than the production of tap water, and around a quarter of a bottle’s worth of oil.
Furthermore, after all of those negative impacts in the stages of production, the disposal of plastic bottles is also costly to the plant. According to the Villanovan, the official student newspaper of Villanova University, “citizens in the U.S. throw away 35 billion empty water bottles annually. Of those, just 12% are recycled.” A water bottle in a landfill could take around 1000 years to decompose creating an environmental crisis from the large amount of toxic chemicals they leak into the ground.
The claim could be made that most students would recycle their plastic water bottles after using them which should put the issue to rest. However, Cleveland’s recycling program has had issues with contamination for many years. As of October 2020, according to Cuyahoga County Solid Waste District Executive Director Diane Bickett, 65% of the city’s recycling was contaminated meaning it had been thrown in a landfill rather than properly recycled. Therefore, having faith that simply recycling single use plastic bottles solves the problem only enables it.
Additionally, according to Beyond Plastics, a project aimed at ending plastic waste, the cost of bottled water is far greater than that of tap water, so the school is paying more to distribute bottled water. Furthermore, a study found “microplastics contamination in 93% of the globally source bottled waters tested”. Attempting to help the environment by reusing a single use bottle could cause unwanted microplastics contamination.
One solution to this issue is to provide students with reusable water bottles that they can carry with them throughout the day. Saint Ignatius already has water fountains that function as bottle filling stations, and most of them have not been shut down since they do not add to the spread of coronavirus. This proposal is environmentally friendly, cost effective, and healthy. Whether or not the school decides to provide students with an alternative to single use plastic water bottles, the excessive use needs to be controlled.
Are the Bricks on the Mall Cracking?
By Samuel Eldridge ’22
Short answer: A little.
Longer (and more interesting, so stick around) answer: The bricks on the mall are quite old, with many being used from the original cobblestones in the street that once ran through the school between the Main Building and Loyola Hall. The bricks are unmortared, so they simply sit in place in the ground, with nothing between them. This allows water to get between the bricks in the winter, freezing and possibly damaging the bricks.
Despite this, an inspection of the mall yields a few chipped bricks, no more. After decades in the rain and snow, why are the bricks in such good shape? The answer lies in building material. Cobblestone bricks are more resilient than concrete or asphalt, so these bricks will hold up for far longer than a normal sidewalk would.
This allows for bricks to remain undamaged by environmental conditions, although they can still be dislodged or broken by sudden force or warped by changes in the ground they are set into (or if a person, say, picks one up and drops it).
Hence, while a few of the bricks on the mall may appear to be cracked, they still provide a beautiful walkway between the buildings on campus, contributing to the overall aesthetic of Saint Ignatius students all know and love.
Meet a Furry Friend for Others on Campus
By Danny Becker ‘22
If you have ever taken a stroll through the 3rd floor hallway in the main building, there is a very good chance that you have encountered a small fluffy little friend. It is none other than Georgia, a 4 year old Affenpinscher, who is cared for by Señora Barnes. Georgia is a black, furry, and energetic dog who walks the halls like a Saint Ignatius student. A fun fact about Georgia is that she is a descendent of Banana Joe, who won the 137th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. Her prestigious legacy made obtaining Georgia very difficult for Señora Barnes who had to sign numerous documents swearing that she would not breed Georgia.
Around 4 years ago, when Señora Barnes was thinking about getting a dog, Mr. Bradesca (the principal at the time) talked with Señora Barnes about the possibility of training her dog to be an emotional support dog on campus. They ultimately decided it would be a great idea that would benefit all students, and Señora Barnes went ahead with getting Georgia trained. Soon after, Georgia joined the Saint Ignatius staff at the young age of 6 months old (the youngest Saint. Ignatius staff member in history). Even more impressive is the fact that since she is taught alongside Señora Barnes’ students, Georgia is semi-bilingual.
When Georgia is not learning Spanish III in room 316, she likes to play hide and seek and will often win. In addition to her many talents, she cheers up Saint Ignatius students daily with her mere existence in the classroom.
With such busy days ahead of her, Georgia needs good food for energy; her regular diet consists of Fromm Dog Food which she eats daily. But as most students who have had either Señora Barnes or Señor Torres know, Fromm is not the only food in her diet. When Georgia takes her daily stroll down the hallway into Señor Torres’ classroom, she is met with a plethora of snacks and treats. Señor Torres has been seen spoiling Georgia with dog treats, small snacks, bites of a hotdog, and even bites of a hamburger. It is no secret why Georgia likes to stop into Señor Torres’ classroom just down the hall.
