Team Player

Peggy McCann Honored with 2013 Eileen Rice Award
for Outstanding Teaching

By Doug Goodnough

When Peggy McCann arrived on the Siena Heights campus in fall 2006, she meant business. The business of sports, that is.

McCann, an associate professor of Sport Management, was honored last spring with the Eileen Rice Award for Out-
standing Teaching, which is selected by previous winners and students. She said she was “shocked” when she learned about the award and called the moment “emotional” when she heard her name announced as the winner.

“It wasn’t anything I was expecting,” said the soft-spoken McCann of the award. “You have to share this award, because you can’t say that you did it all yourself.”

McCann’s “team” approach has worked well in the Sport Management program, which prepares students for careers in the business of sport – including college, professional and recreational. The Illinois native was a former four-sport standout high school athlete who was inducted into her school’s hall of fame as a bowler. McCann realized early that she wanted to carve out a career in an area she is passionate about. The teaching part came later.

“While I was at Michigan State (completing her PhD), I found out I love to teach,” McCann said. “I wanted to get a position in a teaching college.”

And she wanted to stay in Michigan. She heard from a friend about an open faculty position at Siena Heights, and hand-delivered her application to Adrian to check out the campus.

2013 Alumni Award Winners

Taking the Mission to Heart, and Out Into the World

Award Winners Honored at Homecoming Ceremony

The Acapelicans began the ceremony with a rousing version of “Hall of Fame” and the Siena Heights Cheerleaders brought down the house with a surprise tribute cheer at the end. In between, this year’s Alumni Award winners shared inspiring stories of service, challenge and accomplishment. Central to each person’s journey? The commitment to becoming more competent, purposeful and ethical—to teaching and learning through life—and to respecting the dignity of all. What a great kickoff for Homecoming!

Walk right in. Sit right down!

Campus Benches Commemorate Alumni, Friends

By Jennifer Hamlin Church

Outside the main entrance to the McLaughlin University Center, Alice Robie Resnick ’61 on one side waves to her faculty mentor, Sr. Ann Joachim, OP, on the other. At the opposite entrance, the 2012-13 Alumni Board sits for a spell.

And in Trinity Garden, Marjorie (Mickey) Gable Reagan ’44 tosses her red curls and laughs, inviting classmates to stop for a visit as they pass by.

OK, so those people are not here, not in body anyway; but they—and others—are back at Siena in spirit, engaged in today’s University thanks to the new commemorative benches all around campus. Ten benches, each with its own plaque, invite students, faculty and visitors to rest for a moment and—perhaps—remember or imagine the people named there.

When the bench project reached mailboxes a year ago, Jim Reagan, Mickey Reagan’s eldest son, was one of the first responders. His mother had died recently. He and his four brothers—Bill, Dan, Chris and Shawn—thought a bench on campus would be “a wonderful tribute to our mother who had great memories of her days at Siena Heights.” The daughter of a St. Joseph Academy alumna, Mickey Gable came from Lorain, OH, to enroll in Siena’s two-year secretarial program. Pictures from 1943 and ’44 show her smiling—always—with friends: laughing at the top of a flagpole pyramid in front of Sacred Heart Hall, perched on the railing overlooking Trinity Garden, posed in front of the archangel sculpture on a spring day as the snow melts. Mickey’s bench now sits under the Trinity Garden gingko tree, just outside Benincasa, a welcome resting spot for students between classes.