Latest news with #Trevecca
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Hear from Blackhawk after its WPIAL softball semifinal victory over Elizabeth Forward
New Trevecca women's basketball coach Doug Novak talks about his philosophy Doug Novak was the interim head coach at Mississippi State in 2023-24 and has been the head coach of three men's programs. 1:13 Now Playing Paused Ad Playing
Yahoo
25-03-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Former Vanderbilt star Karen Booker fired as Trevecca women's basketball coach
After leading the Trevecca women's basketball team to an 8-20 record this season, Karen Booker was fired Monday as the Trojans' coach. Trevecca lost 10 of its last 12 games in her third season at the helm. The Franklin native and former Vanderbilt star player led the Trojans to winning records in 2022-23 (22-10) and 2023-24 (19-12). Her record at the school was 49-42 overall, 33-29 in the Gulf South Conference. "I'm thankful that I had the opportunity at Trevecca and I wish them all the best," Booker told The Tennessean. Booker previously coached at Cal Poly (1995-97) and Sewanee (2001-03). Her career record is now 75-118. She said she will attend the NCAA Women's Final Four in Tampa, Florida, in search of a new job. "I know God has good things in store for me and I'll be anticipating a good next step," Booker said. Three of Trevecca's top players from the 2023-24 season — Keeley Carter from Macon County, Lili Wilken from Page and Konnor Gambrell from Alexandria, Virginia — did not return. Carter had averaged 21.1 points and 7.7 rebounds; Wilken averaged 10.4 points and 3.2 rebounds; and Gambrell averaged 12.0 points and 5.0 rebounds. Carter transferred to Tennessee Tech and helped lead the Golden Eagles to the NCAA tournament. "There are a lot of components when evaluating the success and direction of our athletic programs," Trevecca athletic director Mark Elliott said in a news release. "While this decision is very difficult, it's important to acknowledge the on-court success that our program had under Karen's leadership. We thank Karen for her contributions to the women's basketball program." Booker had seven players return from last season; they had 11 starts in 2023-24 combined. The Trojans started the season 4-6 and won just one of their first eight conference games. They finished in 10th place in the Gulf South. Reach Mike Organ at 615-259-8021 or on X @MikeOrganWriter. This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Karen Booker fired as Trevecca women's basketball coach
USA Today
06-02-2025
- Politics
- USA Today
Trevecca's president on growth, immigration and the challenges facing Christian higher ed
Dan Boone, president of Trevecca Nazarene University in Nashville, transitioned off leadership role with Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) as board chairman over two years. At least five CCCU-member institutions closed or merged in past couple years amid enrollment and revenue decline. Meanwhile, Trevecca enrollment losses stabilized. Boone discusses Trevecca's approach to holding in tension different opinions amid broader divisions in Christian higher ed over LGBTQ+ rights, diversity in hiring and admissions, and immigration. Dan Boone, who leads Nashville's Trevecca Nazarene University, just transitioned off his leadership role with the nation's top consortium for evangelical Christian colleges during an especially tumultuous season. For the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities – a nonprofit for which Boone served as the board chair for the past two years – at least five governing member institutions closed or merged due to enrollment losses and revenue declines, according to an analysis of news reports. Meanwhile, a federal lawsuit and a congressional fight over legislation sparked renewed debate about Christian colleges' treatment of LGBTQ+ students, faculty and staff versus those institution's religious freedoms. That fight is part of a broader trend in which social issues on these religiously conservative campuses are increasingly politicized as many evangelicals deepen their loyalty to the Republican Party and President Donald Trump. But Boone's job as Trevecca's president is less black-and-white. For one, he said he has sought for the university to balance different opinions on these highly charged social disputes. 'We (Trevecca) live more in a messy middle where people on both sides of an issue might be a part of the same community, and we think it's quite healthy to come together in our covenant communities and work on these things together,' Boone said in an interview. Also, Trevecca's enrollment has meant the university hasn't faced the type of financial challenges that some peer schools have. The university has repeatedly touted record new student enrollment. Its full-time undergraduate fall enrollment, despite steadily declining year-over-year between 2019-2023 from 1,679 students to 1,328, according to most recently available data reported by the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. But the rate of those enrollment losses have lessened in the years after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to precipitous rates of enrollment decline across higher education. In a Q&A, Boone shared more about his observations about Christian higher education broadly and how it compares to Trevecca's own experience. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Other recent Trevecca news:Trevecca Nazarene University is taking students from a closed sister school. Here's why. What has the past couple years of leadership with the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities taught you about the present state of Christian higher education? Dan Boone: It's how critically necessary Christian higher education is for the kind of citizenship we will have in the future. It is in the Christian universities that the community rooted in Jesus Christ gives us the greatest possibility to have the most difficult conversations between people who disagree vehemently with each other. So, I believe the Christian university may be succeeding at raising up a generation of students who know how to enter the public dialogue on very divisive issues but do so with levels of educational training, rationality, human respect and regard, kindness, neighborliness. Boone related:How a new effort aims to reclaim evangelical Christian label and bridge partisan divides The CCCU and its member institutions have been front and center on a series of politically charged debates within higher education, whether that's about LGBTQ+ rights, diversity in hiring and admissions, and serving students from immigrant families. How have you seen these divisions play out within Christian higher education broadly and how has Trevecca specifically approached it? Boone: I think there are two movements that are colliding. One of those movements is among parents who want their children to have moral footing. At the same time, there's a turn toward a more conservative bent in our nation. Both of those groups come to a college, and you take an issue like human sexuality, and you've got folk over here and over there. At CCCU schools, different faith tribes approach the divisive social issues differently from each other. For us, it's these covenant relationships so the community becomes more important so the way that God guides the community to reconcile it and help it to be a witness and servant in the middle of the world. We believe we have something significant to offer in Christian higher education and we really want our Christian faith to determine how we carry out our mission, instead of a political party. Neighboring faith-based higher ed:Why Nashville's Belmont University is hiring non-Christian faculty and staff Immigration is among the highly contentious and politicized issues facing Christian colleges. Talk more about Trevecca's efforts to serve students from immigrant families and how other Christian colleges have struggled with this question. Boone: We try to serve a lot of different groups. But for a lot of universities, serving DACA students or even undocumented students is a political issue. We are part of a denomination that is global. The DACA students have been the most hardworking and the most serious about their education as any group of students that I've seen come through. For someone to try to lead away to expel them from the country and have something of a federal government mandate behind them, that's a very hard context in which to lead a university. The minute Christian colleges and churches and schools start getting raided (by immigration enforcement), that's going to be a really sad day in America. Amid these social and political debates, Christian colleges are wrestling with a concurrent crisis of decreasing enrollment and revenue loss. In which ways has Trevecca struggled and how does that differ from other struggling CCCU-member institutions? Boone: COVID separated the pack of CCCU schools into ones that were on solid financial footing and the ones that were not. Some of our small and struggling schools received enough federal money through COVID that they were functioning at a better financial level than they were normally. But it kicked the can down the road of whether they could make it. Once the federal cap closed, you began to see that domino effect of a lot closing. The ones that were strong before COVID came through COVID and we took it on the chin. We lost revenue in some of those years. Especially those that have significant adult student pipelines. Trevecca lost 800 adult students during COVID and that's a $6 million revenue line. The reason we're doing better than the average CCCU school is Nashville is growing, it is a buckle of the Bible belt, we have been able to get beyond the denomination that we serve to be the servant of broader Christianity. We've moved from about a 7% diversity to 44% diversity in our student body. So, we've learned to pay attention to the students that are graduating, and we've done well with growing Hispanic, African American, and Coptic Christian student populations. During your tenure as CCCU board chairman, the consortium hired a new chief executive, David Hoag, to succeed longtime CCCU President Shirley Hoogstra. What's Hoag's vision for helping CCCU member institutions in this financially difficult season – especially with an encroaching demographic cliff? Boone: For the new CCCU president, David Hoag, one of the four pillars he's establishing is we really need to create wiser business models for our schools that are failing. We need to have metrics a whole lot earlier to show the trajectory is headed in the wrong way. We need to enhance the possibilities of mergers for them. Maybe as an association we need to create services that are very expensive for colleges that the cost might be shared instead of born with an individual vendor. So, he is really paying attention to the business models to try and help strengthen the weaker among our schools. Liam Adams covers religion for The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at ladams@ or on social media @liamsadams.
