School spirit Lost on Some Fans
Trey Reed | Staff Reporter

There always has to be one of you out there.
You know who you are. The party-pooping, ever-complaining bump on the log sitting behind an energetic group of students going all out to show their school spirit.
Yeah, that’s you. The one that moans about not being able to see over this hoard, knowing full well that when you came to a sporting that someone just might stand up and cheer.
The scenario was played out once again two weeks ago when the Indians routed Angelo State in front of a couple-thousand in attendance at Memorial Stadium.
I got wind of an incident at halftime that a certain individual made a big enough scene to actually make The Tribe sit down.
In case you haven’t heard, The Tribe is a student organization created to exhibit school spirit and support for MSU athletics. I don’t know what I’m more upset about. The lady bitching and complaining loud and long enough to get The Tribe squatting or The Tribe not having enough fortitude to point out the empty seats on the east side of the stadium.
I’ll guarantee you won’t have to worry about seeing over anyone’s head over there. Heck, you can even lay down and claim your own section.
I also think it’s interesting that in this day and time that a student organization is needed to encourage students to show spirit and cut loose at games. The way I see it, every student at the university should be a member of The Tribe. We are all students and we are all Indians. All of us are bonded by the common goal of obtaining a degree from Midwestern State.
Why not have a little fun and show some support to our fellow students while we do it?
And if some couch potato wants to complain out you standing and showing spirit at a game, then just let them waste their breath and keep standing anyway.
Believe me, that’s the way it’s always been. I can tell you from personal experience that it works. Picks and Ponders -I hate to disagree with my Wichitan colleagues, but I will. Last week, David Roach told you that it is offense that in facts wins championships.
While it’s true the object of any ball sport is to outscore the other team, it is much easier in football to drive the ball 40 yards instead of 80. That’s what a dominant defense will do for you. Not to mention, your margin of error is much greater when you just don’t allow the other team to score.
It’s no coincidence that the winners of the last four Super Bowls (New England twice, Tampa Bay and Baltimore) have relied on great defenses.
-The Indians offense has gone over the 500-yard mark in each of their last two wins. Credit the development of Rahsaan Bell who doesn’t look quite as shaky in the pocket anymore.
In turn, the running game looks much better now that Bell is a formidable passing threat. Jerad Estus and Ross Harrison have each gone over the century mark in the past two games. The true test comes a week from Friday when the Indians will travel to Kingsville to face the undefeated and No. 4-ranked Javalinas.


MSU goes 1-0-1
Whitney Schoening | Staff Reporter

After a well-played game, the Lady Indians’ match against the Fort Lewis Skyhawks on Saturday ended
in a 1-1 tie.
The Skyhawks took an early lead as Becky Gilmore nailed a goal at the 64:00 mark.
Following the Lady Skyhawks goal ten minutes later the game was tied when Lady Indian, Brittany Burney took a corner kick and a Skyhawks defender attempted to clear the ball but it went off her head and sailed into the
Skyhawks goal.
The Lady Indians out shot Fort Lewis, 19-17 with MSU keeper, Elli O’Dwyer.

Mesa State 1, MSU 3
After a scoreless first half against Mesa State College, the Lady Indians decided it was time to get back to business.
Crystal Sanchez pulled through an amazing unassisted goal following a rebound of a corner kick at the 61:38 mark.
Mesa then returned the goal with one of their own with a goal at the 63:43 by Alisha Phillips on a penalty kick.
Later in the game, Sanchez added yet another goal at 70:37 mark on a penalty kick. The Lady Indians then extended the lead to 3-1 when Megan Dodson scored at 74:27 with an assist from Aubree Harris.
MSU was able to out-shoot Mesa, 19-10 with four saves from goal-keeper Elli O’Dwyer. The Lady Indians play at Texas Woman’s University on Wednesday.


Dropped: Lady Indians lose fourth Straight
David Roach | Staff Reporter

The Midwestern State University Lady Indians (8-13, 0-1) were closing in on their goal of topping .500 but recently dropped their fourth-straight volleyball match when they fell to the Lady Pioneers of Texas Women’s University, 3-1 (30-19, 30-27, 24-30, 30-28) in what turned out to be quite a dog fight at D. L. Ligon Coliseum here in the “Falls” Thursday night.
The loss was the Lady Indian’s first in Lone Star Conference play.
“It’s tough,” Lady Indian head coach Venera Flores said following the close loss. “What can I say? We tried hard at times, and then, at times, we froze a little bit.”
The one point in the match when it seemed like a Lady Indians’ freeze mattered most was when they were battling in the fourth game to take the match to a fifth.
MSU was on a bit of a run and held an 18-15 lead but then allowed the Lady Pioneers to comeback and take a commanding 29-25 lead. The Lady Indians then scored three-straight points, but it was all they could do in prolonging their defeat.
Game four was not the only one MSU lost in a close battle but the second game was also a bit of a nail-bitter. It went back-and-forth until the squads were knotted up at 27-27. But then, the Lady Pioneers scored the next two points to take a 29-27 lead and the momentum in the game. They won the game on the next rally.
“We just need to take advantage of our opportunities,” Flores said. “Serving is an issue. In close games like this, you can’t give away points on bad serves. There was one situation where a ‘free ball’ dropped in between two of my players. We’ve got to learn how to cover. We need to clean up our game a little bit, and then maybe we’ll find ourselves on the winning end of some of these situations.”
Another problem the Lady Indians seemed to have on the floor was blocking. MSU put up a mere five blocks as a team for the entire match.
Junior Kate Pence, sophomore Abbi Meyer and lone senior Melissa Minus all posted kills in double figures for the match as Meyer led the way with 19. Junior Whitney Johansen assisted 53 of the Lady Indians’ 64 total kills.
The Lady Indians certainly could have given up Thursday after being down 0-2, but they showed a lot of guts to fight back for their faithful fans at home and nearly send the match to a deciding fifth game.
“They had heart,” Flores said. “That’s what you need to overcome when you’re down. Sometimes we just didn’t have it at key situations, and, you know, sometimes that happens. That was our first conference game, and we’ve got nine more to go.”



Men's Soccer catch weekend Victory: Gallagher leads team to 4-0 win with a hat trick, 75 yard goal
Whitney Schoening | Staff Reporter

This weekend the Indians went up against University of Colorado Mountain Lions and ended the game with a final score of 4-0 with three goals by Elliot Gallagher.
 The Indians got an early start when at the 9:12 mark Jimmy Krueger scored when teammate Gallagher directed a header from the center circle for a breakaway goal. Gallagher then went on to score three more times, by far his best performance of the season.
“He (Gallagher) really played well,” stated assistant Coach Alan Koch. “This was his best game of the season.
At the 44:13 minute mark, Gallagher scored on an assist by Scott Leonard. Then again at the 67:24 Gallagher scored with an assist from Krueger on a cross-redirected to the left corner.
Gallagher’s final goal of the night was the one that sealed the deal and had every person in attendance on their feet. At the 83:44 mark Gallagher saw an opportunity and he took it. Looking down the field he saw that Mountain Lions goalkeeper, Justin Elliot who was making his first start of the season, was off his mark. From 75yds away Gallagher took a chance and watched as the ball sailed over Elliot’s head and into net.
Midwestern is now ranked fourth in the Midwest region and are looking for big wins as this weekend as they take on the Colorado School of Mines on Friday followed by a game against Ft. Lewis College. Both of these games are key games of the season, as they need these games to secure a trip to the National Tournament.





MSU goalkeeper faces tough challenges on and off the field
Trey Reed | Staff Reporter

Elli O’Dwyer couldn’t have know that she was in the right place at the right time.
She was a young girl of seven the day the American couple came to her Romanian home and snatched her six-month-old brother out of her life.
Heartbroken, O’Dwyer soon found herself in an orphanage and the horror stories of the fate of the young children that were adopted were numerous.
“There are a lot of rumors in the orphanage - a lot of horror stories that go around,” O’Dwyer said. “One of them as that this little boy was adopted and the family was cutting up his fingers and sending them home to his parents. A different body part every week.”
The gruesome stories only fed to her anxiety of the fate of her brother. So when she was asked if shewould like to visit her brother in  Dallas four years later, O’Dwyer was overjoyed.
“The translator asked if I would like to go and see my little brother and live in Dallas,” O’Dwyer said. “I was thinking I was going to see Bobby on the show ‘Dallas‘, so I was like, ‘yes’.”
Of course, the translator left out one minor detail. “They didn’t tell me I was being adopted,” O’Dwyer said. ““I kept asking them when I was going to go back and they had to tell me that I was adopted.”
She couldn’t have known that her fate was sealed four years earlier when she tearfully watched her baby brother being carried away by William and XXXXX O’Dwyer.
The memory of a crying girl mourning the loss of her younger brother Billy was etched in their minds. Ironically, they had come to adopt Billy and another younger sister, but a disagreement with her mother’s boyfriend left the O’Dwyers searching for a sister for Billy.
“They couldn’t get her so they saw me crying and I didn’t want to let go of my little brother,” O’Dwyer said. “It was really my luck to be in the right place at the right time. If I was not there when they came to pick him up, I would not be here right now.” Once in America, Elli found Dallas much different than the television show. She was in a foreign land, trying to feel her way through a new language while
making new friends. And that even had to start at home getting reacquainted with Billy, who was then four years old. “I don’t think he understood that I was his real sister,” O’Dwyer said. “He was the only one that understood what I was trying to say because a lot of
my English was mixed with Hungarian.” The language barrier also meant a setback in school as well.
I was supposed to be in sixth grade and they put me in fourth,” O‘Dwyer said. “It was very hard to get used to.”
Much of her days were spent in ESL (English as a Second Language) classes in an attempt to help speed her understanding of the language and aid in moving her back up to her age level.
“The first ten months, it was more just a pointing game,” O’Dwyer said. “After that, things just starting clicking and I started spending less time in ESL. I was in math and started doing a lot of other stuff.” Her parents helped the process of learning the language and gaining friends by getting Elli involved in sports from the outset.
O’Dwyer fondly recalls one of her first experiences on an American playing field when she was picked to field third base on her 11-year-old softball team. “I had a really strong arm and I could throw really far, sometimes the ball would go over the dugout on
the other side,” she said. “I had no control.” So when the team took infield practice, it was adventure. Elli didn’t quite have a grasp on the
language or the concept of the game.
Her coach hit a grounder to her and she fielded it cleanly.
“My best friend to this day, she was the one that was chosen to run,” she said. “I got it and she’s running and all the other kids are yelling, ‘get her out, get her out!’ ” O’Dwyer let loose with a ferocious throw and got her
out in her own understanding of the game. “I just wound up and hit her smack in the back,” she said. “She fell over crying and I’m going ‘yes!’
“It took me a while to understand what they meant by get her out.” O’Dwyer credits the early exchanges between her teammates on the athletic field for helping her learn English.
“My teammates would point the little things out to me and feel like they were helping me in their own way” she said.
O’Dwyer quickly closed the gap two-year school grade gap and joined students her own age and she quickly found her two sporting loves - soccer and volleyball. She was playing both feverishly at the beginning of her high school career at the club and school level.
She made varsity in volleyball as a sophomore, but conflicting practice times forced her to make a decision between the two.
“I was doing everything club and school. I had to choose between club soccer and volleyball, so I quit the school volleyball team,” she said. “I don’t know why I chose soccer because I was equally good in both. “Something told me soccer, so I played soccer.”
Soon, college coaches began to notice her abilities on the field and the goal of playing soccer on the collegiate level began to consume her. “I was so happy when my parents said that this coach wanted to talk to me about coming to college to play soccer,” O’Dwyer said.
One of those coaches was Midwestern State coach Jeff Trimble and it was his interest that brought O’Dwyer to campus.
Now a junior and third-year starter for the Lady Indians, she is the anchor to a stellar defensive combo and she did not allow a goal in her first 512 minutes of the season.
It’s that kind of play that has sparked the idea of returning to Romania to play on the national team after her college playing days are completed. “Now my parents want to go back to Romania to play on the national team. They are trying to find information
on that,” she said. But she doesn’t want it to interfere with obtaining her education degree or with the goals of the Lady
Indians. “I do want to do it. It’s my goal after college,“ she said. “It would be a really good goal for the future,
but right now I’m just focusing on game-by-game, day-by-day, getting through with my college career and being a teacher.”
With current and future goals in place, O’Dwyer still remembers her life in Romania and knows things would have been much different had she not been there that fateful day when Billy was taken away.
“I was just so amazed how far I’d gone from being a little Romanian girl that couldn’t even speak English. I didn’t even know what soccer was. I’m just so amazed that I’m still here and people want me to play.” “I don’t ever regret coming here. I’m so glad that I
am here and I’m so thankful.”