Skip to footer

Penn State football: A dozen questions as the post-Paterno era begins

This year will be the most closely watched football season in the history of Penn State. The post-Paterno era comes with many questions. Here are 12.

8. Not the only game in town

  • By Ross Atkin Staff

If the football team’s fortunes head south, are there other Penn State teams ready to take up the slack?

Yes, for while most of the public only knows Penn State football, the university is no one-note athletic power. This fall, the women’s soccer team is nationally ranked. On Aug. 24, it  lost a 3-2 heart breaker to No. 1-ranked Stanford  before a capacity State College crowd of 5,117. The women’s volleyball team is a perennial powerhouse, with an unprecedented four national championships between 2007 and 2010, and is off to a fast start this season. As the football season winds down, winter sports are there to give a lift. Four starters return from last year’s Big Ten 25-10 runner-up women’s basketball squad, including first-team, all-conference selection Alex Bentley and the Big Ten Freshman of the Year, Maggie Lucas.  On the men’s side, the wrestling and volleyball teams enjoy strong traditions. The wrestlers are the two-time defending national champions, and the volleyball team regularly ranks in a Top 10 largely populated by California schools.

8 of 12
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.