Latest news with #Aquinas
Miami Herald
16-05-2025
- Sport
- Miami Herald
St. Thomas Aquinas barrels its way into the Class 6A state baseball final
Teams can sometimes succumb to jitters when it's their first time playing at the state final four. Not St. Thomas Aquinas' baseball team. The Raiders were itching to get on the field Friday at Hammond Stadium. And when they did, they barely stopped hitting. Aquinas unleashed an offensive barrage in its first trip to state since last winning a championship in 2018, and routed Valrico Bloomingdale 15-0 in four innings in a Class 6A semifinal. The Raiders (28-6-1) will next take on Gainesville Buchholz in the 6A state championship game on Saturday at 2. Aquinas is seeking its fourth state title all-time. 'We looked to this game with anticipation,' Aquinas coach Joey Wardlow said. 'We had a long last week after that regional final and during the week as we ramped up, we could feel the adrenaline. 'When we stepped out in that first inning, it went well on defense and well on offense and it took away any jitters we might have had.' Junior center fielder Nico Sabatino was the tone-setter for the onslaught, roping a leadoff double to left off Bloomingdale starter Hayden Porter to start a five-run first inning. Sabatino would later hit his eighth home run of the season on a solo blast to right field. 'My job is to get the team going,' Sabatino said. 'I saw that fastball and I took it. I was just in that flow state and now the offense is ready to go.' Aquinas' power was a major reason it made it to Fort Myers this season as it hit 67 home runs entering the state final four. 'We kind of look at baserunners and barrels,' Wardlow said. 'If we get baserunners, somebody is gonna barrel up a ball. If they stay in the middle, they'll open it up. If we can get out front and just stack up one and another, we can hold teams down.' Cole Lasher, who has seven homers this season, went 2 for 2 with a double and three RBI. Andrew Alvarez, who has 13 home runs, went 3 for 3 with two doubles and two RBI. And Zack Malvasio, who has hit a team-high 16 home runs, went 2 for 4 with two RBI. 'We just had to put it on them early and not let up,' Alvarez said. 'We had to keep that type of energy and not let up.' Senior Thomas Giltner did the rest as he gave up two hits over four shutout innings and struck out two, sparing Aquinas from having to use any more pitchers before Saturday's final.
Newsroom
11-05-2025
- Newsroom
The bra-stealing rascals of Aquinas
In 1956 Aquinas students raided Knox College and stole the cutlery and cooking utensils before dumping them at Selwyn and Arana halls. The police were called and the culprits eventually confessed. James Ng, a resident from 1954 to 1958, described a recurring prank that involved fishing line to pull the chapel bell in the middle of the night; and in the winter of 1955 the students poured water on the flat roof to create a skating rink. Dominican Friar, Father Tom Fitzgerald, arrived at Aquinas in December 1957. He came to Dunedin to take over as superior at Aquinas and parish priest at Sacred Heart. He worked hard to create a spiritually uplifting atmosphere at Aquinas and to foster the hall's reputation as a 'house of study'. The residents were not always obliging He had little tolerance for disorderly behaviour. In conference with the dean of students and committee of the Students Association at the start of the 1958 academic year, he announced: 'Aquinas Hall is the property of the Dominican Fathers. Inmates of the Hall may do only those things which they are permitted to do by the owners of the Hall.' His warning fell on deaf ears. Just a few weeks later students from Aquinas raided Dominican Hall. Fitzgerald interviewed every member of the hall personally to find out who was responsible. He charged the Students' Committee with the bill for damage and wrote a furious letter to the ring leaders: 'Be good enough to present yourself at my office today, to show cause why [you] should not be dismissed from residence at Aquinas Hall, in view of the fact that, being responsible for the behaviour of students on the premises of Dominican Hall, 44 Park St, Dunedin on the 18th inst., you did allow them to enter by night the private apartments including bathrooms and dormitories, of the women proprietors and residents there, in the course of which entering, roof tiles and windows were broken, accessory soiling and inconvenience were caused, and later the building was exteriorly bespattered with mud, the ornamental pond was flooded, and metalwork and flower pots in the same were broken…' Really great photograph of Dominican Brother Martin Keogh wearing the traditional black scapular of a co-operator brother, taken from the newly published Preachers, Pastors, Prophets: The Dominican Friars of Aotearoa New Zealand by Susannah Grant * He was succeeded by Father Paul Jackson, dean of students at Aquinas from 1960 to 1975. Jackson, known variously as 'Jacko', set the tone. He ran the hostel with a light hand but was serious about study and spirituality and considered Aquinas 'a university community of scholars and Christian gentlemen'. The students at Aquinas enjoyed an active social life. The initiation of freshers usually involved early morning wake-ups; in 1968, freshmen were woken at 5:30am and mustered on the grass beside the chapel for a 'vigorous drill' of press-ups and knees-ups in their pyjamas. The day's initiation ended with a party in the television room. In 1970 the wake-up came at 4am. Freshers started the day 'very cold, very wet and very dirty, not the best time for a bath in flour and mud in the bush above the convent'. The students usually marked April Fools' Day, too. In 1966 they tied a goat to the chapel bell, which delivered a solitary mournful toll every time the animal reached the end of its tether. Aquinas entered some memorably shocking floats in the university capping processions. That of 1967 took the form of a church with a flaming cross and an effigy of Martin Luther King being hanged. The students dressed as Klu Klux Klansmen under a banner that read 'The Clueless Clots'. In 1969, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the police objected to and banned many of their signs, Aquinas won a prize for their float titled 'Piggy Muldoon Smothers Otago University'. Hostel raids were still common in the sixties. In 1964 the Dominican Hall girls penetrated as far as Jacko's bedroom, tossing confetti everywhere and pasting newspaper on the windows. The Aquinas boys stole bras from Dominican Hall and strung them up like flags. A month or two later, when the residents at Aquinas had let their guard down, the girls broke in and put molasses on the stair rails and black nugget on the toilet seats. * By the end of the 1970s Aquinas was in serious financial difficulty. In 1978 a Board of Governors was established to assist the Dominicans with the administration of Aquinas. They needed a radical plan to get the college out of debt. In August 1978 the board voted to accept female students for the coming year. But even with more students paying higher fees (up 20 percent from 1978) the college still struggled. Food and power costs had increased, and the college had to borrow more for urgent repairs. In February 1980, with support from the College Board of Governors, it was recommended that Aquinas be closed at the end of the first term. The existing debt combined with rising running costs was insurmountable. With support from Otago University Chancellor Jack Somerville and ex-Aquinas residents they managed to battle on until the end of the year, but on October 5, 1980 the college celebrated its last formal dinner. Within a few weeks exams were over and the college began to empty out. The house chronicle recorded 'emotional scenes as some of our lady students left today. Tears and hugs for our lucky members of the community who were home.' Aquinas was sold to the Elim Church, who sold it on to the university. In 1988 the university reopened a student hostel on the site under the name Dalmore House, and later restored the original name. At time of writing, Aquinas College houses 152 students; the chapel has become a gymnasium. A mildly abbreviated chapter taken from the newly published history Preachers, Pastors, Prophets: The Dominican Friars of Aotearoa New Zealand by Susannah Grant (Otago University Press, $60) is available in bookstores nationwide. As heirs to a spiritual tradition dating back to the early thirteenth century, the friars have served in New Zealand as university and hospital chaplains, parish priests, liturgists, itinerant retreat leaders and theologians. Although no longer involved in active ministry the New Zealand friars continue to fund and facilitate Aaiotanga – the Peace Place – a community space in downtown Auckland focused on peace and social justice issues.
Miami Herald
11-05-2025
- Sport
- Miami Herald
St. Thomas Aquinas baseball tops Doral Academy to punch ticket to Fort Myers
The task in front of the St. Thomas Aquinas baseball team when the Raiders traveled south into Miami-Dade County on Saturday was a big one. After splitting the first two games of their Region 4-6A final best-of-3 series, the last thing the Raiders wanted was to have to play a winner-take-all contest on Doral's home field, a place they refer to as 'the birdcage' because of its match-box style unusual dimensions that have given opponents fits for years. But the Raiders never blinked. St. Thomas wrapped out 13 hits including three long home runs and brought an end to Doral's long home postseason win streak with a 12-6 victory before a standing-room-only crowd. Doral, the No. 2 seed, entered Saturday having won 13 consecutive regional playoff games on its home field dating back to a 4-1 regional semifinal loss to Belen Jesuit in 2017. Aquinas knew it would have to bring its big bats with them to beat the Firebirds at their own game and that's exactly what happened. The win clinched the program's 10th trip to the state final four and first since 2018 when the Raiders won their last of three state championships. Aquinas (27-6) will be the No. 2 seed and take on No. 3 Valrico Bloomingdale at Hammond Stadium in Fort Myers on Friday in a Class 6A state semifinal. 'We just had to get back to business today,' said center fielder Nico Sabatino who went three-for-five with a double and two RBI and also hit a grand slam home run in the first game of the series to propel the Raiders to a 8-4 win. 'We didn't let Thursday's loss effect us too much. It happens, that's why it's a best-of-three, a chance to come back and make things right. We came in here today, trusted each other, did our job and this was the result.' Doral (27-7) had Jadyn Nunez, a North Carolina commit, on the mound but the Raiders were unimpressed. After retiring the side in order in the first, Nunez struggled in the second, putting two batters on by hitting them. Cole Lasher then hit a ground ball up the middle that shortstop Kobe Carrion got to but couldn't handle. He then tried to fire back to third to double back the runner but threw wild into the stands, scoring two runs when each runner was awarded two bases. Shortstop Jayden Doverspike, the No. 8 hitter in the lineup then stepped up and launched the first of three Aquinas home runs over the high net in left field and just like that, the Raiders led 4-0. The Firebirds quickly answered with three runs in the bottom of the inning, a solo homer by George Pardo Jr. being the big hit, but the Raiders had an answer to that when they plated five more runs in the top of the fourth to open up a 9-4 lead. Lasher opened the inning with a base hit, was sacrificed to second before C.J. Pangello drew a walk and Sabatino followed with an RBI single which would be Nunez's last batter. Matthew Paez took over on the mound for Doral but things got no better. He gave up a walk, an RBI sacrifice fly by Zack Malvasio and then the big blow when first baseman Brady Buxbaum stepped up and blasted a three-run shot over the fence in left center to finish off the big inning. 'I just tried to change my approach today,' Buxbaum said. 'This entire series I was going up there a little too anxious trying to do too much so it was just a matter of trusting myself and trusting my guys behind me. I got a curve ball, middle, got under it and lifted it up and out. That was a big inning for us because it gave us a big cushion.' With a 10-4 lead, Aquinas starter Jonathan Lopez, normally the team's shortstop, had hung in there, battling the searing mid-afternoon heat for five innings. But when Jaivyn Francois, Gavin Ruvalcaba, Tyler Rodriguez and leadoff hitter Gabriel Milano led off the inning with four consecutive singles to make it 10-5, Lopez came out. With the bases loaded, no outs and Doral's No. 2, 3 and 4 hitters headed to the plate, reliever A.J. Lopez (no relation) induced a sacrifice fly to center off the bat of Leonardo Hernandez and then struck out Caleb Hernandez and Nunez to end the inning. St. Thomas' Andrew Alvarez then finished things off in the seventh with his team's third home run of the game, a two-run shot, again over the high net in left and the Firebirds were done, going down in order in the bottom of the inning to end the contest. The win ended years of frustrating regional losses for Aquinas coach Joey Wardlow, who took over the program a year after Troy Cameron delivered that state title in 2018. 'I don't look at things like that,' Wardlow said shurgging his shoulders. 'The way I approach things is the windshield is bigger than the rear view mirror. I'm always looking forward and that's the way we do things with our kids. We're going to go back to work on Monday doing the same things we've done, not changing anything. Today was great but we've got two more to go and I made sure our guys knew that.'
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Miami Herald
09-05-2025
- Sport
- Miami Herald
Doral baseball tops St. Thomas, pushes Region 4-6A final series back to ‘The Cage'
Because of its small match-box style dimensions, the Doral Academy baseball team refers to its home field as 'The 'Birdcage.' And the Firebirds have been historically very tough to beat there. Thus, following a tough loss on Wednesday night in the first game of a best-of-3 series in the Region 4-6A final, their goal when they traveled for a second consecutive night to Fort Lauderdale to take on St. Thomas Aquinas was to do whatever it took to find a way to push the series there. Thanks to a strong pitching performance from Aaron Elissalt, a big two-run third inning blast over the left field fence by Dylan Prince, and two brilliantly executed double plays at crucial moments, that's exactly what happened as the Firebirds hung on to top Aquinas 5-3. St. Thomas will now travel to Doral Academy on Saturday at 1 p.m. with the winner advancing to the state final four at Hammond Stadium in Fort Myers. 'We've got'em back in 'the cage' on Saturday and that was our goal coming into tonight,' Prince said. 'We really play well at home in front of our fans and wanted to get this thing back to our place.' Prince's two-run shot completed a five-run rally in the top of the third that staked Elissalt to a big 5-0 lead. But one that he almost lost in the last of the fourth. That's when the Raiders came back around to face him for the second time in the lineup and really hit him hard. After Elissalt hit Brady Buxbaum to open the inning, Josh Jennings followed with a deep shot off the fence in left center to put runners on second and third. Andrew Alvarez then stepped up and launched a towering blast over the high fence in dead center field for a three-run homer and suddenly Elissalt's five-run lead was down to two. It appeared the lead would be cut to one in the next inning when Jonathan Lopez launched another towering high shot to dead center. But in a bizarre fortunate twist for the Firebirds, the ball hit the top of the fence and dropped straight down into the glove of center fielder George Pardo who quickly fired to second, holding Lopez to perhaps the longest single in St. Thomas history. The next Aquinas batter, Zack Malvasio, then hit a laser right at third baseman Gabriel Milano who cooly fielded it and fired to second and then to first for an inning-ending 5-4-3 double play. One inning later, the Raiders had runners on first and second with one out when Jayden Doverspike hit a shot in between third and short. Shortstop Kobe Carrion not only got to the ball but quickly fired to second and then to first for another brilliant turntable inning-ending double play. Closing in on his max pitch count, Elissalt managed to finish the game with a quick three-up, three down last of the seventh to secure the win for his team. 'They've got some big bats and were really hitting it hard but I just wanted to attack every hitter I faced, make them hit the ball and then leave it up to my defense and you saw what happened out there,' Elissalt said. 'Those two double plays were huge. Now we've got them back at our place on Saturday in front of our fans and on our field where we feel like we're tough to beat.' Before Prince came to the plate in the third, Doral had already scored three runs thanks to base hits by Milano and Caleb Hernandez with a walk to Jadyn Nunez sandwiched in between. Leonard Hernandez then stepped up and cleared the bases with a double off the fence in left center setting the stage for Prince's big two-run blast. 'A great job tonight to come in here and get this thing done on their field,' Doral coach Ralph Suarez said. 'Now we've got it back at our place on Saturday and we'll see what we can do.'
Yahoo
24-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Opinion - What Burke, Aquinas and Gramsci can teach Canadian conservatives
As Canada approaches another federal election, we find ourselves not simply at a political crossroads, but at a civilizational reckoning. Mark Carney has succeeded Justin Trudeau as Liberal leader and prime minister. And although the mask has changed, the regime remains the same. This regime is rooted in managerial orthodoxy — a technocratic class committed to global abstractions and detached from the moral and cultural roots that once anchored Canada. The recent party leaders' debates were sterile exercises — empty theater that obscured the deeper crisis we face. For Canadian conservatives, the question now is not just how to win an election, but how to understand the nature of the battle we are in. This requires us to stop thinking like campaigners and start thinking like cultural strategists. We need to recover insights from three thinkers rarely spoken of in the same breath: Edmund Burke, Thomas Aquinas and Antonio Gramsci. Let's start with Burke. The father of modern conservatism grasped something profound: that political order rests on pre-political foundations. Society cannot survive on rights and rules alone. It needs manners, customs and mores — habits of the heart passed down like heirlooms. Burke described these as becoming a people's 'second nature.' They are not consciously chosen in the marketplace of ideas but are absorbed through family, ritual and shared memory. The child who stands quietly for the national anthem, who learns to revere sacrifice and abhor cruelty, is not engaged in abstract reasoning. He is being formed, given a soul fit for freedom. This is what modern liberalism, in all its managerial coldness, fails to understand — and what Canadian conservatism too often forgets. We speak of tax rates and GDP as though economic metrics can substitute for moral cohesion. We campaign on 'affordability' while the very foundations of our culture — the family, faith, even the idea of Canada as a coherent nation — are treated as embarrassing relics. But these foundations are not mere preferences. This is where Aquinas matters. His theory of natural law reminds us that there is a telos to human life — a purpose inscribed in our nature. Justice is not whatever the state declares it to be, nor is liberty an unlimited field for expressive individualism. Aquinas taught that true freedom is the freedom to pursue the good, and the law exists to aid in that pursuit. Human beings are social, rational creatures. The natural law flows from that nature: to honor our parents, to raise our children in truth, to live in stable communities, to tell the truth, to worship God. These are not right-wing talking points. They are the basis of any sane and enduring order. What's astonishing is that the Canadian state now actively militates against these basic goods. It funds programs that fracture the family, that undermine parental authority in schools, that redefine the human person in law and medicine — and calls all of it 'progress.' And here's the cruel irony: progressive forces don't need to win elections to win the war. That brings us to Gramsci, the Italian Marxist tactician of culture. He understood that power is rarely seized through direct confrontation. Rather, it is cultivated through a long campaign of 'cultural hegemony' — the capturing of institutions that shape how people view the world. He argued that a revolution in 'common sense' had to precede any revolution in politics. That meant patient work in the trenches of culture: schools, churches, the media, professional guilds. Influence those, and eventually the masses will come to see your worldview not as ideology but as normality. This is exactly what progressives have done in Canada. They have turned their vision of the world into the ambient common sense of the bureaucratic state. You see it when public servants issue press releases in the language of activist NGOs, when journalists scoff at 'traditional values' as though they were some imported superstition and when speaking obvious truths becomes an act of professional suicide. And what has the conservative response been? At best, timid objection; at worst, complicity. We have acted as though elections are enough — as though winning a parliamentary majority can somehow roll back decades of cultural engineering. It can't. The war of maneuver or the frontal assault for political power will always fail if the war of position or the slow battle for cultural ground has already been lost. The recent debates only confirmed this. Carney, cool and measured, offered no vision beyond technocratic drift. Jagmeet Singh reprised his usual role as progressive placeholder. Yves-François Blanchet indulged his Quebec-first vanity project. Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre spoke fluently about inflation and housing, but said little of Canada as a nation, tradition or moral project. On national defense, there was nothing beyond surface gestures. No one spoke to the deeper question: What is Canada for? And without answering that, everything else is noise. So where do conservative Canadians go from here? First, we must begin the long, unglamorous work of cultural renewal. That means building institutions that can shape minds and form character. We need to nurture writers, clergy, professors, filmmakers and policy thinkers who understand the nature of the struggle. Second, we must speak a language rooted in moral clarity. No more bureaucratic euphemisms. No more apologies for believing that children need mothers and fathers, that nations have borders, that life is sacred and that truth is not a social construct. Third, we must stop being afraid of the past. Burke's second nature, Aquinas's natural law, Gramsci's cultural common sense — all remind us that our task is not innovation but restoration. We don't need new values. We need the courage to reassert old ones that still speak to the permanent things. Finally, we must embrace Gramsci's realism without his materialism. The war of position is slow, quiet and often thankless. But it is how we win. And if we are truly serious about saving this country from managed decline, then we must wage that war with everything we have. Because if we do not shape the common sense of tomorrow, someone else will. In fact, they already are. Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., a senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, and a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities in Washington, D.C. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. 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