Athletics

Leslie Johnson needs your help to win $10,000 for Elon University. The manager of the Phoenix men’s basketball team, Johnson, a junior marketing major from Raleigh, N.C., is one of four finalists in a video contest sponsored by the UPS Store in which people can vote for their favorite collegiate basketball manager.

The NCAA Division I Committee on Athletics Certification announced that Elon University is one of 26 institutions to be fully certified as part of the NCAA’s regularly scheduled, ongoing athletics certification process.

A team of Elon University researchers will examine the effects of concussions in student-athletes using a grant of nearly $17,000 awarded this month by the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine.

Three Elon University students in an environmental communications course have had a class video project named a finalist for a PBS television special in April, and if their work receives the top number of votes in an online contest, the network may show the project this spring to a national audience.

Athletics staff and coaches began the move into Alumni Field House on Jan. 14. The 30,000-square-foot facility at the north end of Rhodes Stadium in the North Athletics Complex is the new headquarters for Phoenix athletics.

Veteran ACC assistant football coach Jason Swepson has been named Elon's new head football coach. The announcement came at a Jan. 10 news conference in Alumni Gym, attended by more than 300 Phoenix fans and members of the football team.

Elon sophomore Chris Thomas was named the 2010 Southern Conference Men’s Soccer Player of the Year and six Phoenix players earned all-conference honors.

Deborah A. Yow-Bowden ’74, a member of the Elon University Board of Trustees and one of the nation’s most respected figures in collegiate sports, has been named the new director of athletics at North Carolina State University. She becomes the first woman in N.C. State’s history to head the Wolfpack athletics program.

As a women's cross country and track star and a bio-chem major at Elon, sophomore Emily Tryon finds few free moments during her days for extracurriculars or even relaxation. She maintains a steadily hectic schedule as the result of practices, meets and all the homework and studying that comes along with her field of choice.

Here’s something you may not have known: A worker riding a sanding machine on the hardwood floor of a gymnasium can reach speeds of up to 10 miles per hour, yet removing the paint from a basketball court still takes about two weeks. Such is the schedule for a father-and-son team that started work Tuesday on the floor of Alumni Gym as part of renovations to the home of the Elon Phoenix basketball and volleyball teams.