BROOKVILLE, N.Y. (March 5, 2020) – Long Island University President Dr. Kimberly R. Cline, in conjunction with LIU Athletics Director Dr. William E. Martinov Jr., today announced the addition of a women’s gymnastics to their athletics department, with immediate recruitment and competition beginning in 2020-21.

“As educators and administrators, we strive to continuously expand opportunities for our students,” said Long Island University President Dr. Kimberly R. Cline. “The addition of women’s gymnastics supports the forward movement and progression of our athletics program and the LIU community as a whole.”

The Sharks are slated to compete as a member of the East Atlantic Gymnastics League (EAGL). The EAGL was formed in July of 1995, by eight universities who banded together to create a league solely for women’s gymnastics teams on the East Coast. In August 1996, the NCAA Council accepted the EAGL as an affiliated member of the NCAA. The league now consists of six Division I Universities along the Mid-Atlantic: George Washington University, North Carolina State University, Towson University, University of New Hampshire, University of North Carolina, and University of Pittsburgh. LIU will become the seventh member of the league.

“We are thrilled to be adding women’s gymnastics to our Shark family,” Martinov said. “We are looking forward to hiring an exceptional coaching staff to recruit and train some of the best and brightest new Sharks. Gymnastics is one of the fastest growing women’s sports, and collegiately, women’s gymnastics has the highest graduation rate for any women’s NCAA sport. We look forward to our continued pursuit of excellence both in the classroom and on the field!”

LIU is home to a unique Division I athletics program, fielding 30 athletics teams on two campuses. LIU’s united NCAA Division I program builds on a foundation of excellence and tradition. In LIU’s history, its teams have combined for 23 national championships, 218 conference championships, and 376 All-Americans.

Potential future student athletes are encouraged to fill out this questionnaire for more information.

A national search for a head coach will begin immediately.

About Long Island University

LIU, founded in 1926, continues to redefine higher education through innovative programs, prestigious faculty, experiential learning opportunities, and cutting-edge research. Recognized by U.S. News & World Report as a Best National University, and Forbes for its emphasis on experiential learning, LIU offers more than 350 academic programs, with a network of over 265,000 alumni including industry leaders and entrepreneurs across the globe. Visit liu.edu for more information.

The Long Island University women’s ice hockey team continued to do what they have done all season, make history! The Sharks capped an incredible inaugural season when they defeated No. 3 seed Saint Anselm College, 1-0, to capture the 2020 New England Women’s Hockey Alliance title on Sunday evening.

Paula Bergström scored the game-winning goal four minutes into the second period when the Sharks were on the power play. Kenzie Harmison was flawless in net once again as she saved all 27 shots faced for her third consecutive shutout.

Even though it was a scoreless first period, the Sharks came out firing and out-shot the Hawks 12-5. LIU went on its first power play of the day at the end of the first when the Hawks were assessed a major penalty and a game misconduct, an advantage that carried into the second period.

With time winding down on the power play, Bergström fired home a shot from the point to give the Sharks a 1-0 lead, one they would not relinquish for the remainder of the game. The Hawks nearly evened the score on their first power play opportunity of the night, but Harmison made a diving save to keep the puck from crossing the goal line. The Hawks had a 5-on-3 opportunity where they took five shots, but Harmison continued to play strong as she did not allow the Hawks to cash in on the two-player advantage. Saint Anselm attempted a game-high 14 shots on goal during the second period, though Harmison kept her composure and did not allow any pucks over the goal line.

Despite the Hawks being on a power play to begin the third, the Sharks’ penalty kill remained perfect. Abby Latorella nearly extended the Sharks’ lead, but Saint Anselm goalkeeper Michaela Kane came up with a save.

After LIU killed off another power play late in the third period, Saint Anselm called a timeout with 53 seconds left to play. Saint Anselm fired off three shots in an attempt to tie the game in the final seconds, but one missed wide and Harmison made two more saves in the closing seconds to fend off the Hawks and lead LIU to the title.

Alva Johnsson and Carrigan Umpherville finished with a point as they both had assists on Bergström’s goal.

Harmison was named the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player after she posted three shutouts and made 85 saves over the three postseason contests. Bergström, Umpherville, Harmison, and Saige McKay were also named to the All-Tournament team.

In its first ever season, the Sharks finished with an overall record of 14-18 and a 11-9 record in conference play.

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Coverage of Chinese Repression, Boeing Failures, Taxi Scandal Among the Winners

WASHINGTON, DC (Feb. 19, 2020) – Long Island University (LIU) has announced the winners of the 71st annual George Polk Awards in Journalism, honoring 15 winners in 14 categories for their reporting in 2019. Their work sheds light on a range of deceit and corruption — with profound and sometimes deadly consequences — in world capitals across four continents as well as federal agencies, corporate offices and local governments in the United States.

Among the award winners announced today in the First Amendment Lounge at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. were reporters who exposed the massive extent of Chinese repression of its Muslim minority, used advanced visualization techniques to establish that Russian pilots bombed Syrian hospitals, and defied acute danger to provide harrowing accounts of Central American gang violence.

Other winners revealed how Boeing and the FAA cut corners to speed a new plane into the air with systemic flaws that caused two horrific crashes, predatory lenders heaped insurmountable debt on unsuspecting taxi drivers leading to at least nine suicides, wealthy developers reaped windfall savings from a law ostensibly enacted to aid depressed areas, and the Department of Agriculture buried its own research into ways farmers can adapt to climate change.

George Polk Awards also went to journalists for reporting that led to the ousting of mayors accused of misconduct in Baltimore and Wichita, forced the closure of a Pennsylvania reform school for gross abuse of children in its care, showed how the Trump Administration used dubious claims to justify the continued separation of immigrant children from their parents, and unearthed a trove of documents disclosing how U.S. officials misled the public for nearly two decades about the war in Afghanistan.

Three awards focused on racism past and present — a New York Times supplement examining the central role of slavery in American history and its continuing legacy in present-day society, an investigative report on widespread suburban housing discrimination on Long Island, and an eye-opening account of the massive seizure of black-owned land in the South under “heirs’ property” laws.

“In an age when much of our most incisive journalism is the product of multi-organization collaboration and team reporting, it is heartening to note that eight of this year’s Polk winners are the work of individual reporters,” said John Darnton, curator of the awards. “This speaks to the legacy of the man whose work these awards continue to honor 72 years after his assassination.”

The George Polk Awards are conferred annually to honor special achievement in journalism. The awards place a premium on investigative and enterprising reporting that gains attention and achieves results. They were established in 1949 by LIU to commemorate George Polk, a CBS correspondent murdered in 1948 while covering the Greek civil war.

Below are the winners of the 2019 George Polk Awards, chosen from among 551 entries nominated by news organizations and individuals or recommended by a national panel of advisors:

Azam Ahmed of The New York Times, receives the award for Foreign Reporting for risking his safety time and again to portray the reality and impact of violence perpetrated by gangs, drug cartels and even police in firsthand dispatches from Brazil, Jamaica, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico, where he is stationed as the Times Bureau Chief.

The award for National Reporting goes to Lomi Kriel of the Houston Chronicle for revealing previously unreported aspects of the Trump Administration’s immigration policy and tactics that extracted a heavy and sometimes lethal toll on Latin American refugees, including the continued separation of some families without apparent reason.

The staff of Newsday receives the award for Metropolitan Reporting for “Long Island Divided,” a series three years in the making that exposed an endemic pattern of discrimination by suburban realtors steering homebuyers of color away from white enclaves in violation of federal and state law. It drew promises of action from officials at every level of government.

The award for Local Reporting goes to Brian M. Rosenthal of The New York Times for unearthing a pernicious scheme by unscrupulous lenders to drive up the price of taxi medallions and turn huge profits by selling them to unsophisticated cab drivers with loans they could never repay, leading borrowers into financial ruin so devastating at least nine committed suicide.

Mark Scheffler, Malachy Browne and the Visual Investigations Team of The New York Times are honored for International Reporting for using local plane spottings, satellite imagery, cockpit recordings and Google Earth tools to map and geolocate the attacks to establish that Russian pilots in Syria bombed four hospitals, a busy commercial street and a refugee camp, killing scores of civilians. It was one of a number of wide-ranging coups the team pulled off combining advanced technology with ground level reporting in Venezuela, Afghanistan, Libya, North Korea and Hong Kong.

The award for Financial Reporting goes to Noah Buhayer, Caleb Melby and David Kocieniewski of Bloomberg News for groundbreaking stories on how wealthy, well-connected individuals perverted the stated intention of “opportunity zone” incentives in the 2017 federal tax code for their own profit. The program was aimed at spurring economic growth in depressed areas, but some developers reaped tax breaks by using it for such high-end projects as a long-planned $4 billion luxury North Miami development and the construction of a Ritz-Carlton hotel in downtown Portland, Oregon.

Dominic Gates, Mike Baker, Steve Militech and Lewis Kamb of The Seattle Times are honored in the Business Reporting category for first exposing the cooperative arrangements between Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration that led to approval of design changes in 737 Max jets blamed for two crashes, killing 346. Times reporters traced FAA approval of the flawed flight control system to its decision to defer to Boeing’s own safety analysis, which they attributed to pressure from leaders of the company and the agency to speed production and avoid adding costs.

Helena Bottemiller Evich of Politico wins the award for Environmental Reporting for describing how a politicized Department of Agriculture ignored its own climate action plan, devoted a miniscule portion of its budget to climate change, which it acknowledges is the gravest threat to food production, and buried a study warning of lost nutrients in rice, the leading source of nutrition for 600 million people, provoking a highly regarded scientist to quit in disgust.

The award for Military Reporting goes to Craig Whitlock of The Washington Post for forcing the release of interviews conducted about the Afghan War as part of a five-year, $11 million federal “Lessons Learned“ project. After Whitlock received more than 2,000 documents, including some initially withheld, he puzzled out key redactions before producing “The Afghanistan Papers,” which demonstrated that “senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”

Lisa Gartner of The Philadelphia Inquirer receives the Justice Reporting award for “Beaten, Not Silenced,” which exposed a pattern of violent physical abuse of boys housed at the Glen Mills Schools, a 193-year-old reformatory in suburban Delaware County. Gartner’s reporting was so devastating that within days state officials ordered Glen Mills closed and pledged to do a better job of monitoring conditions at juvenile justice facilities across Pennsylvania.

The award for Political Reporting is shared by Chance Swaim, Jonathan Shorman and Dion Lefler of The Wichita Eagle and Luke Broadwater and the staff of The Baltimore Sun for turning journalistic intuition into deep dives into public records that revealed municipal misconduct leading to the ouster of mayors in both cities.

Eagle reporters determined that Mayor Jeff Longwell steered a $524 million contract for a desperately needed water treatment plant to friends and supporters, rejecting the unanimous choice of a selection panel. Longwell lost his reelection bid after a campaign that turned on the Eagle’s investigation of an ad falsely connecting his opponent to sexual harassment allegations.

An offhand remark set Broadwater and his Sun colleagues off on an investigation that determined Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh had gleaned $800,000 in payoffs disguised as bulk purchases of her “Healthy Holly” children’s book by a hospital network and health insurers. As a result, Pugh resigned and pleaded guilty to federal charges, the network’s board and CEO departed, and the state and city toughened ethics laws.

Lizzie Presser of ProPublica and The New Yorker wins the award for Magazine Reporting for “The Dispossessed,” an account of how speculators use legal loopholes associated with “heirs’ property” laws in the South to seize black-owned ancestral lands, uprooting lifelong residents who assume their homes and property have been passed down to them. Especially poignant was Presser’s portrait of two brothers in a North Carolina coastal town jailed for nearly eight years for refusing to leave.

The award for Television Reporting goes to John Sudworth of BBC News for “Inside China’s Hidden Camps,” which documented the reality of camps authorities established in Xinjiang province to indoctrinate hundreds of thousands of Muslims in an effort to erase their religion and culture. Allowed by authorities to visit one camp depicted as a model of agreeability, Sudworth used satellite photos, leaked documents and interviews with forlorn parents seprated from their children to paint a very different picture.

A Special Award is presented to Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times and contributors to “The 1619 Project,” a supplement published on the 400th anniversary of the advent of American slavery, using essays by journalists and scholars to explore the role of slavery in history and its enduring effects in contemporary American society. A powerful introduction by Hannah-Jones, the project’s creator and driving force, examined efforts of black Americans to advance the nation’s expressed ideals of democracy, liberty and equality in the face of centuries of oppression and exclusion.

Winners of the 2019 awards will be honored at a luncheon ceremony at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan on Friday, April 3. The journalist and author Charlayne Hunter-Gault will read the award citations and will also moderate this year’s David J. Steinberg Seminar of the George Polk Awards, on Thursday evening, April 2, at LIU Brooklyn’s Kumble Theater for the Performing Arts. Several of this year’s award winners are expected to take part in the seminar, which starts at 6:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

Media contacts:

John Darnton, Polk Awards Curator, 917-306-8046, John.Darnton@gmail.com

Ralph Engelman, Polk Awards Faculty Coordinator, 718-757-9294, Ralph.Engelman@liu.edu

About Long Island University (LIU)

LIU, founded in 1926, continues to redefine higher education, providing high quality academic instruction by world-class faculty. Recognized by Forbes for its emphasis on experiential learning and by the Brookings Institution for its “value added” to student outcomes, LIU offers more than 320 academic programs, with a network of over 265,000 alumni including industry leaders and entrepreneurs across the globe. Innovation in engaged learning, and strong career outcomes distinguish LIU as a leader among the nation’s most respected universities. Visit liu.edu for more information.