Designing the Future of Animation

Shane Lynch,style> a senior computer science major, and Chad Eby ’06,style> MFA, imaging and digital arts, are members of a UMBC research design team responsible for the newest development in editorial cartoons. Led by famed-cartoonist Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher, Lynch, Eby and staff from UMBC’s Imaging Research Center designed a 3-D virtual bust of President George W. Bush.style>

The project’s concept, making a three-dimensional caricature talk, walk and interact with the public in real-time, is considered unprecedented for animation.

The digital bust is the brainchild of Kallaugher, a cartoonist for the Economist and former cartoonist for the Baltimore Sun, who came to UMBC in January 2006 as an artist-in-residence, a position sponsored partly by the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation.

Lynch and Eby each had their own responsibilities for the project. Lynch programmed the coding for the 3-D cartoon, making it work in real-time. The stately figure can move its mouth in various directions, furrow its eyebrows and pop out its ears. Eby arranged the hardware interface, chose the equipment and programmed the software that operates the movements of the virtual puppet.

The project took four months to complete and required the diverse skills of the team members, which also included Dan Bailey,style> the Center’s director, and Eric Smallwood,style> technical director of the IRC.

Lynch and Eby both agree working with KAL and learning about the man behind the satirical cartoons was exciting and rewarding.

“We are pretty far ahead of the curve,” said Eby, who is beginning his first year as an assistant professor in Florida State University’s Art Department. “I have no doubt this is the future of animation.”

To view the design stages and to track the project’s progress, visit http://www.irc.umbc.edu/kal/.

(8/29/2006)

UMBC is an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Institution

A Destination for Cultural Life:
UMBC hosts world-renowned speakers

UMBC will host The Maryland Forum, a new speaker series featuring Ehud Barak, former prime minister of Israel; Bob Woodward, Pulitzer-prizewinning journalist; Cal Ripken, Jr., record-breaking former Baltimore Oriole; and former Vice President Al Gore. The series is presented in partnership with the Annapolis and Anne Arundel County Chamber of Commerce, Inc.

“UMBC’s mission as a public research university includes stimulating the intellectual and cultural life of the region,” said President Freeman Hrabowski. “We are pleased that our partnership with The Maryland Forum will continue to build the University as a destination for cultural programming. I am particularly excited that our students will have the opportunity to attend these lectures and learn about the experiences of former leaders of nations and leading figures from other fields who also have shaped our national story.”

Lectures will be presented in the Retriever Activities Center. UMBC students, faculty and staff may purchase discounted tickets for $5 (one ticket per UMBC ID). Tickets will go on sale Monday, October 9 at The Commons Information Desk.

The Maryland Forum 2006-07 schedule:

Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Ehud Barak, former prime minister of Israel, will discuss how national politics, international events, terror and the economy all influence national and international relations. He will also speak about economic development issues facing nations today.

Wednesday, November 8, 2006
Bob Woodward, who, along with Carl Bernstein, received the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the Watergate scandal, will discuss his latest book, The Secret Man, and his journalism career.

April 2007 (To Be Confirmed)
Former Oriole Cal Ripken, Jr., who broke Lou Gehrig’s streak of 2,131 consecutive games by 500, will speak about leadership, loyalty, patience and perseveranceóqualities that lead to success in baseball and in business.

Tuesday, May 8, 2007
The Honorable Al Gore, former U.S. Vice President, will give a special multimedia presentation of An Inconvenient Truth, which examines environmental issues and their impact on our global civilization. He also will discuss how physical changes in the planet will influence our global economy and key opportunities and challenges for the democratization of technology.

Tickets for the general public can be purchased online or by calling 1-866-49-FORUM. A discount is available to UMBC alumni. For more information about the Maryland Forum, visit www.themarylandforum.com.

(10/2/06)

UMBC is an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Institution

UMBC’s New Homepage & Portal

UMBC is launching a new home page on the Web (www.umbc.edu) and (http://my.umbc.edu). The strategy for the August 2006 launch and future phases is to refocus the UMBC homepage on the needs of external users, while making myUMBC more useful to internal users through richer content and self-service options.

The redesign, a collaborative effort between the Offices of Institutional Advancement (OIA) and Information Technology (OIT), reflects input gathered over the last three years during talks with prospective undergraduate and graduate students, and UMBC students, faculty and staff.

UMBC’s enrollment goals play an important role in the homepage design. In order to attract prospective undergraduate and graduate students, it will be important to use the homepage as a marketing tool, promoting campus life and student success stories, for example. Site users and prospective students said that information on both the old homepage and portal was hard to find and the homepage did not give a sense of the campus or what it is like to attend UMBC.

The new design by Jim Lord ’99, OIA’s associate director of creative services, features an upgraded navigational scheme that highlights audience-specific resources (prospective students, parents, alumni, etc.), a collage of campus photos and more room for events and feature stories. The new homepage and portal will also highlight our 40th anniversary and upcoming capital campaign.

The new myUMBC was designed by UMBC’s new campus portal architect B. Collier Jones in OIT. The redesign changes the look and feel of the campus’ internal site, which provides access to tools and utilities faculty, staff and students need to do their work and live on campus. For now, most of those functions remain the same; the presentation, however, has changed.

For the fall 2006 launch, the new portal is particularly focused on the needs of students and will be a one-stop shop for news about what’s happening on campus. The Start Page features announcements, information about upcoming events and news of interest to undergraduate and graduate students, such as student government, information about registration and commencement, residential life, arts and athletics.

In the next year, faculty and staff will have their own Start Pages, but the new portal currently features a front-page “dashboard” with access to most popular applications for faculty, staff and students – blackboard, e-mail and Oracle Calendar (for faculty and staff).

This facelift is just the beginning of plans to improve UMBC’s Internet presence. The OIA and OIT Web team, collectively known as “Emedia,” calls it “a down payment” on the future sites. In addition to Jones and Lord, the team includes John Fritz, director of instructional technology and new media and Jackie Ward, campus Web architect from OIT and Eleanor Lewis, associate director of internal and digital communications from OIA.

Read more about the new features on UMBC’s homepage and portal and next steps for a site-wide redesign.

Please send your comments and suggestions on the new homepage and myUMBC to helpdesk@umbc.edu.

UMBC is an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Institution

Capturing Distant Sounds: Fulbright Winner Tim Nohe

Tim Nohe,style> associate professor of visual arts, has received a Fulbright Scholars award, one of the nation’s most notable and highly competitive grants. Nohe will use the award in hopes of drawing awareness to the often ignored sounds of Australia’s Botany Bay.

Nohe’s research, entitled, “Sounding Botany Bay,” explores the sonic environment of one of Australia’s richest cultural and natural attractions. Nohe will record sounds from the city of Botany Bay, Sydney Airport and the Botany Bay National Park. He will edit and compose these sounds to create an “immersive surround-sound audio experience.”

“Sonic works challenge us to hear anew what we have chosen to filter out as we move through a noisy world,” said Nohe. “I hope to shape the rich voices and sounds of Botany Bay into an aural tapestry that will heighten and contrast what is and has been there.”

Nohe conducted similar research in 1998 when he participated in the Wendover, USA exhibit, which featured photographs, video and sound installations of the Wendover region. This area includes Wendover, Utah, home to the Bonneville Salt Flats and Wendover Army Air Field, a base that played a key role in the development of atomic weapons during World War II, and West Wendover, Nevada, host to a cluster of gambling casinos. Nohe made numerous samples of the region’s artifacts, including a sound exhibit.

Nohe will present “Sounding Botany Bay” and teach two sound-art courses at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales through June 30, 2007. He hopes to install a sound exhibition at various venues in the city of Botany Bay and create DVDs of the presentation.

Nohe won three Maryland State Arts Council awards and serves as a board member and composer for the performance art group Fluid Movement. His other works have appeared in local venues and international locations such as The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the Inter-Society of Electronic Arts, Paris.

(UMBC’s other Fulbright Scholar, John Stolle-McAllister,style> associate professor of modern languages and linguistics, is currently investigating indigenous political movements in Ecuador. A homepage feature story on his research is forthcoming.)

9/11/2006

UMBC is an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Institution

Capturing Distant Sounds: Fulbright Winner Tim Nohe

Tim Nohe,style> associate professor of visual arts, has received a Fulbright Scholars award, one of the nation’s most notable and highly competitive grants. Nohe will use the award in hopes of drawing awareness to the often ignored sounds of Australia’s Botany Bay.

Nohe’s research, entitled, “Sounding Botany Bay,” explores the sonic environment of one of Australia’s richest cultural and natural attractions. Nohe will record sounds from the city of Botany Bay, Sydney Airport and the Botany Bay National Park. He will edit and compose these sounds to create an “immersive surround-sound audio experience.”

“Sonic works challenge us to hear anew what we have chosen to filter out as we move through a noisy world,” said Nohe. “I hope to shape the rich voices and sounds of Botany Bay into an aural tapestry that will heighten and contrast what is and has been there.”

Nohe conducted similar research in 1998 when he participated in the Wendover, USA exhibit, which featured photographs, video and sound installations of the Wendover region. This area includes Wendover, Utah, home to the Bonneville Salt Flats and Wendover Army Air Field, a base that played a key role in the development of atomic weapons during World War II, and West Wendover, Nevada, host to a cluster of gambling casinos. Nohe made numerous samples of the region’s artifacts, including a sound exhibit.

Nohe will present “Sounding Botany Bay” and teach two sound-art courses at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales through June 30, 2007. He hopes to install a sound exhibition at various venues in the city of Botany Bay and create DVDs of the presentation.

Nohe won three Maryland State Arts Council awards and serves as a board member and composer for the performance art group Fluid Movement. His other works have appeared in local venues and international locations such as The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the Inter-Society of Electronic Arts, Paris.

(UMBC’s other Fulbright Scholar, John Stolle-McAllister,style> associate professor of modern languages and linguistics, is currently investigating indigenous political movements in Ecuador. A homepage feature story on his research is forthcoming.)

9/11/2006

UMBC is an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Institution

Closing the IT Gender Gap

Every college diploma represents the culmination of years of hard work and sacrifice by students and their families. But for the seven young women who were the first graduating class of UMBC’s Center for Women and Information Technology (CWIT) Scholars program, graduation was also a giant step forward for shrinking the high-technology workforce “gender gap.”

CWIT, the award-winning program that ABC News.com called “one of best resources for women on the web,” is dedicated to achieving women’s full participation in all aspects of information technology (IT).

The CWIT Scholars Program recruits talented male and female high school students who support women’s full involvement in IT and provides them with four years of financial, academic and personal support as they pursue IT-related bachelor’s degrees at UMBC.

Other benefits for CWIT Scholars include career mentoring from experienced technology professionals. Through initiatives like ESTEEM and Computer Mania Day, the Scholars inspire middle-school girls, an age studies have shown is when girls start to turn away from science and technology coursework and careers due to societal or peer pressure.

The first class of CWIT Scholars – Payal Aggarwal, Heidi Brueckner, Sumita Das, Lindsay Mannchen, Samantha Moffatt, Natalie Podrazik and Candice Scarborough – are off to a great start, with future plans ranging from jobs with top corporations like Constellation Energy, General Electric, Erickson Retirement Communities and Northrop Grumman to attending U.S. Naval Postgraduate School after completing a summer internship with Microsoft.

For the Scholars, building a strong personal and professional support network was the key to improving their confidence and sense of community.

“I really appreciate the networking opportunities that CWIT provided,” said Brueckner. “I was able to find a wonderful mentor, two internships and a job. I’m extremely grateful that I had such a supportive family behind me every step of the way.”

“There were many times throughout college where I found my classes very challenging and it was helpful to have other CWIT scholars to turn to,” said Das. “We’ve all been there for each other for the past four years.”

“The biggest thing I took away from CWIT is how important networking is to move up in business and achieve your goals,” said Mannchen. “Personally, the CWIT staff has encouraged me to go for what I want and to never to give up when faced with adversity.”

“The first cohort of CWIT scholars demonstrated first hand women’s ability to excel in IT and served as ambassadors of excellence in their internships and research experiences,” said Claudia Morrell, director of CWIT. “They are the students and future employees everyone wants in their labs and workplaces because they will set the bar high and achieve it every time.”

“The CWIT Scholar program taught me that if you work hard and believe in what you are doing you can achieve anything,” said Aggarwal. “They taught me that I can be anything, and even how to instill that in others.” 

(7/10/06)

 

 

Mentoring the Next Generation of Journalists

“There are some very bright students at UMBC – our best could compete anywhere.”

Christopher Corbett, who recently became acting chair of the English department, knows of whom he speaks.

For 16 years, he’s offered his quarter century experience as a professional reporter and editor to a growing list of former Retriever Weekly student newspaper staffers who have gone on to begin promising journalism careers.

“I tell them you are only of value to someone if you’ve had a job,” Corbett said. “It’s like baseball, there’s a farm system. You go work for a smaller paper for a few years, and once you have that experience, you have a much better shot at making your way back to a major metro area daily.”

The list of former Retriever staffers who now represent UMBC in the media world includes:

Vikki Valentine ‘96 is a staff writer at National Public Radio in Washington who writes about science and medicine and just returned from a year off getting her masters in the history of medicine at University College, London.

Jamie Smith-Hopkins ’98 was a President’s Scholar and valedictorian. She now works as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun.  She was recently awarded best overall individual entry and best serial in any medium along with best journalist under 30 prize by the National Association of Real Estate Editors.

Anna Kaplan ’03 works as a staff writer at the Stockton Record in California (a Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal affiliate).

Scott Daugherty ’02 and Pat Furgurson ’99 are general assignment reporters at the Annapolis Capital.

Amanda Krotki ’95 works at the Baltimore Sun’s Web site as senior producer of BaltimoreMetromix.com.

Grant Huang ‘06, a winner of the 2005 Cleghorn Fellowship offered by the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association, just joined the staff of the Maryland Gazette as a reporter.

Richard McNey ’03 works for Chesapeake Publishing Corporation as the editor of the Chesapeake Business Ledger, a monthly business publication that covers business much of Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

A former news editor and reporter with the Associated Press, Corbett wrote for many of the nation’s largest newspapers including the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is also the award-winning writer of Style magazine in Baltimore’s Back Page column and two books: Vacationland (Viking/Penguin), a novel about his home state of Maine, and Orphans Preferred (Random House/Broadway Books), which chronicles the legendary Pony Express.

Corbett’s next book will return to the American Wild West for a look at the role Chinese immigrants played in the making of that mythical era.

“Although I am a native of Maine, I like the open space out there,” he said. “I like the idea that you can drive all day and still be in Nevada. I like seeing signs that say ‘No Gas, No Water – 100 miles.’ The Pony Express is the story of a wonderful American tall tale, like Paul Revere’s ride. It’s anchored in fact but layered with 150 years of embellishment.”

Corbett’s wry style fits his affection for classic American satirists like Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken. He loves a good yarn, preferably about a true local eccentric, that is well told in person or in print. Thus, he is concerned about the steady decline of quality, hometown newspapers in the modern media business.

“A lot of things said to be journalism today aren’t,” said Corbett. “It’s mostly infotainment, insults and mentally disturbed people yowling on the radio. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not journalism.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “Journalism isn’t as pure as the driven snow. It’s gone through good and bad cycles in history. What’s really disturbing to me is the homogenization of the news product and the rise of newspaper chains. It’s two all-beef patties and special sauce that are the same in Spokane as Sarasota.”

Beyond advice to be wary of these trends, Corbett instructs his students to hone their news writing fundamentals by becoming involved with The Retriever Weekly.

“My teaching methods are simple,” he said. “I encourage them to read a newspaper – I’m often amazed by how few young people read newspapers today. You learn by doing, it’s like cake baking. The first few are inedible, but eventually, you get better. Employers usually prefer that you’ve made your rookie mistakes at a student paper before you go out and look for a job.”

Corbett is highly optimistic about the future of the English department and UMBC as the University gets ready to celebrate its 40th anniversary this fall.

“When I came to Baltimore, UMBC was only 14 years old,” Corbett said. “It was regarded as little more than a community college and not a very big one. I am amazed at how fast UMBC has taken off and how our faculty and students continue to prove naysayers wrong.”

(7/24/06)

 

 

 

Pedaling for a Cause

The summer’s rainstorms and blazing heat will not deter junior Mauria Uhlik and senior Peter Cailloux from climbing on their bikes for 4,000-mile cross-country journeys to raise money and bring awareness to two worthy causes.

Uhlik, a psychology major with a concentration in biopsychology, is riding in Habitat for Humanity’s Habitat Bike Challenge (HBC), which seeks to help end housing poverty by raising proceeds to finance the construction of five homes for the Greater New Haven affiliate of Habitat for Humanity. More than 90 college students from schools across the country will raise $4,000 each for Habitat before beginning the nine-week Challenge, which begins May 27.

Of the three bicycle routes the riders may take, Uhlik will travel HBC South, which starts in New Haven and finishes in San Francisco. For four of the six days they spend on the road, the will also work at local Habitat for Humanity construction sites or host an information session at a town meeting or community gathering.

Cailloux, a mechanical engineering major, is participating in Push America’s Journey of Hope, a bicycle challenge that raises funds for and awareness on behalf of people with disabilities. Journey of Hope, sponsored by Pi Kappa Phi, of which Cailloux is a member, is comprised of 80 Pi Kappa Phi brothers with their own fundraising goals.

With three routes (North, South and Trans America), the trek begins on June 11 at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, and the teams arrive in Washington, D.C. on August 12. After each day’s ride, the teams will participate in outreach events either performing Kids on the Block puppet shows or making friendship visits.

Previous participation in community service projects and awareness of social issues inspired Uhlik and Cailloux to sign up for the bicycle journeys. Uhlik, who has done volunteer work for people with disabilities and is an active member of UMBC’s Habitat for Humanity club, said the lack of affordable housing prompted her to enter Habitat’s bike challenge.

“Affordable housing should not be out of reach for anyone,” said Uhlik. “No one should have to worry about housing. They should be able to come home and know it’s their home.”

Cailloux has volunteered for many of his fraternity’s service projects such as Give a Push or GAP. Usually as a weekend project, the fraternity brothers travel to local campgrounds, building handicap accessible playgrounds, painting facilities and spending time with the campers.

For more information, visit the Habitat Bike Challenge and Journey of Hope’s Web sites.

(5/16/06)

 

 

Serious Students, Ancient Drama

While UMBC celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, a diverse group of talented students is doing its best to turn the clock back 2,500 years this weekend.

On May 11, 12 and 13, the grassy hillside between the Fine Arts and Chemistry buildings will be transformed to an ancient Greek natural theatre as student members of UMBC’s Ancient Studies Club and Theatre Council of Majors present a free performance of Frogs, the classical comedy by Aristophanes. (Information about the rain location is at the end of this story.)

The play, which starts at 4:30 p.m. each day, is open to the public and the entire UMBC community and comes complete with authentic costumes and free Greek food made by members of UMBC’s Hellenic Association.

Frogs began thanks to the vision of director/producer Steve Killen, a senior ancient studies major and president of the Ancient Studies Club. “I often walked by the hillside and thought how it would make a perfect natural theatre for an authentic Greek drama,” Killen said. “We’ve worked very hard to make the production as close as possible to how it was performed 2,500 years ago.”

Frogs tells the story of how the demigod Dionysus, having grown despondent at the state of the arts on Earth after the recent death of master poet Euripedes, takes a sometimes perilous and often hilarious journey to the underworld to find a good poet. There he encounters the two great Athenian poets, Euripides (senior biological sciences/psychology major Mark Hendricks) and Aeschylus (visiting lecturer of philosophy Greg Ealick) as the two get ready to square off in a poetic contest for the ages.

The producers of Frogs made one concession to modern technology by amplifying the actors’ voices. While the production includes some theatre majors like freshman Alexander Scally (Dionysus) and received advice from UMBC theatre faculty members, the idea behind Frogs was for it to be an independent, all-volunteer labor of love created entirely by students from a cross-section of majors.

The real labor came over winter break as many of the crew and cast spent their winter break making the play their own by working two hours a day, three days a week on a unique translation of the play from Greek to English with the help of Associate Professor of Ancient Studies Jay Freyman.

This type of dedication to academics is typical for the six Ancient Studies majors who worked on the translation, most of whom are seniors headed to prestigious graduate studies programs after completing undergraduate degrees at UMBC.

• Kristin Hulburt, stage manager/producer for Frogs, will attend the University of Chicago’s one-year intensive, interdisciplinary MA program in the humanities with future plans to pursue a Ph.D.
• Clare Ryan, who has several roles in the play, will attend Kings College London to read for M.A. in Classical Art and Archaeology.
• Rebecca Stephen, the play’s resident authentic Greek costume expert, earned a full scholarship for the combined M.A./Ph.D. program in Classical Archaeology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
• Joe Howley, co-salutatorian of the Class of 2006, was a finalist and alternate for the British Marshall Scholarship and UMBC’s nominee for the Rhodes Scholarship. He is editor-in-chief of The Retriever Weekly student newspaper. Howley will pursue a master’s of philosophy in classics at St. Andrews University in Scotland.
• Skylar Neil will spend her summer as an archeological intern with Anne Arundel County, Maryland’s Lost Towns Project, and will then pursue an M.A. in Classical Archaeology at Tufts University in the fall.
• Killen, who is not scheduled to graduate until fall 2006, will spend his summer narrowing down his graduate school application field and digging with an ongoing archaeological field research program excavation at Tel Beth Shemesh in Israel.

“In an age when so many of their generation are concerned with the immediate satisfaction of material wants, it is refreshing to find a group of students who pursue an intellectual exercise for its own sake, just because it is fun and intriguing to do and is healthy for the mind,” said Freyman. “The seriousness and depth of their analysis and discussion during these sessions would rival that of any graduate seminar.”

Important Note: The rain location for Frogs will be Lecture Hall 7, located in the UMBC Information Technology & Engineering (ITE) Building (building #21 on UMBC Campus Map).

For more information on the performance of Frogs, contact Kristin Hulburt at 240-460-7432 or Steve Killen at 443-851-3364.

(5/11/06)

 

Men’s Lacrosse Wins America East Title

The UMBC men’s lacrosse program achieved what most lacrosse observers believed was impossible at the beginning of the 2006 season. They went through the regular season unscathed (5-0), and then the top-seeded Retrievers won their first America East Conference Tournament by defeating third-seeded University of Albany 19-10 at UMBC Stadium on Sunday. The winner of the America East Conference tournament earns an automatic berth into the NCAA Division I tournament. It is UMBC’s first berth in the tournament since 1999, when they made their second of back-to-back appearances in the championships.

The top-seeded Retrievers defeated third-seeded University of Albany 19-10. The winner of the America East Conference tournament earns an automatic berth into the NCAA Division I tournament. This is UMBC’s third NCAA tournament berth overall since moving to Division I in 1981.

“These guys just came ready to play,” said Head Coach Don Zimmerman, who led the Retrievers to their first-ever NCAA Division I tournament appearance in 1998. “They believe in themselves…what you saw is a combination of some good talent, but great chemistry and a great attitude. I couldn’t be prouder of these guys.”

Lacrosse success at UMBC this spring was not limited to the men’s program. The UMBC women’s lacrosse team finished the season with a 12-10 record. They earned the right to host the America East tourney as the conference No. 1 seed but lost on May 5 in the America East semifinal to New Hampshire. Two UMBC seniors, Julie Libertini (Mount de Sales) and Kelly Fiorani (Liberty High School in Eldersburg, Md.) were named to the 2006 America East Women’s Lacrosse All-Championship Team, the conference announced on May 7.

On May 13, the men’s team will travel to Princeton University. The game time for this opening-round meeting with Princeton will be announced later in the week.

If the Retrievers upset Princeton, the No. 7 seed, they will advance to the quarterfinals on May 21 against the winner of an opening-round game between the University of Maryland and Denver. The quarterfinal will be played at a neutral site, Towson University.

The 16-team tournament concludes with the Final Four championships on Memorial Day weekend at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia. The University of Virginia is the tournament’s overall No. 1 seed. The other top four seeds are, in descending order, Maryland, Hofstra and Johns Hopkins.

The Retrievers enter the 2006 tournament on a six-game winning streak. In winning eight of their past nine, they have erased some of the bitter memory of losing at home each of the past two years in the America East tournament.

Defense has been a foundation of the 2006 team. Before defeating Albany to clinch the America East title, the Retrievers had held nine straight opponents, including Maryland, to single digits.

However, UMBC carries several outstanding players on offense, including Brendan Mundorf. The senior from Baltimore ( Mt. St. Joseph’s) is a two-time America East Conference Player of the Year. Against Albany in the America East title game, Mundorf had five goals and one assist and was named the tournament most valuable player.

Indeed, Mundorf is central to a “strength-against-strength” matchup that should be central to the May 13 opening-round game at Princeton. While Mundorf is one of the top attackmen in Division I, he will have to contend with Princeton’s standout goaltender, sophomore Alex Hewit, who has led Division I goaltenders in save percentage throughout the season.

Zimmerman has succeeded in recruiting standout lacrosse talent from the greater Baltimore-Annapolis region. Of the 35 players on the UMBC roster, 17 are from the Baltimore-Annapolis area. Among the seniors, those players are Mundorf, defenseman Justin Berdeguez (Annapolis High School), defenseman James Hyland (St. Mary’s of Annapolis) and transfer student and midfielder P.J. Kimener (Community College of Baltimore County-Catonsville).

(5/8/06)