
From Detroit: Fans Reflect on Victory
By Rachel Stern
DETROIT—It is only about 30 minutes after No. 10 Butler has knocked off No. 7 Arkansas in the First Round of the NCAA Tournament, but Jessie Eastman must put the celebration on a quick hold of the modern variety. “We are making a pit stop because we took too many pictures, so all of our phones are dead,” says Eastman, a 2015 Butler graduate who lives in Detroit and attended the game with seven friends. “We had a blast and probably took too many pictures. We are going to stop at home to charge our phones and then keep the celebration going.”
All of Bulldog Nation has reason to celebrate. During a game of runs – Butler jumped out to a 21-2 lead in the opening minutes, only to see that disappear late in the first half – it was the Bulldogs that took control again early in the second half and pushed the lead back to double digits en route to a 79-62 win. Now, the Bulldogs will take on 2-seed Purdue on Sunday in an all-Indiana matchup. The Boilermakers beat Butler 82-67 in the Crossroads Classic in December, but the Bulldogs lead Purdue 2-1 in head-to-head Crossroad matchups. The winner of Sunday’s game will advance to the Sweet 16 next weekend.
“We had a much louder, larger crowd than Arkansas today. There was a huge Butler showing and it felt like a home game. Of course, nothing beats Hinkle, but it was pretty close,” Eastman says. “It will be really exciting to see the atmosphere against Purdue. Today, we saw Purdue fans rooting us on, but of course on Sunday, it will be a completely different story.” Eastman, who has lived in Detroit for about a year, was hoping on Selection Sunday that Butler would play in Detroit. After the bracket was released, her phone started blowing up. She has fellow Butler grads from Indianapolis and Chicago asking to stay on her couch, and now, they just extended their stay.
“Oh, we are definitely starting to look into tickets and will be here through Sunday,” says Kate Allen, who graduated from Butler in 2015 and now lives in Indianapolis. “Typically, I am bad luck for Butler, so I am always skeptical, but today they certainly proved me wrong. This was my first tournament game in person and it was amazing.” Some of their friends who live in Chicago already had St. Patrick’s Day plans on Saturday. After Butler beat Arkansas, they hit the road to drive back to Chicago and plan on returning to Detroit for Sunday’s game.
“The tournament atmosphere is just so exciting,” Eastman says. “It is so great to see all the fans. The fact that we are going up against Purdue adds another level of excitement, for sure. We need to prove our worth after the Crossroads Classic loss and I think we are definitely ready for that comeback game.”
From Detroit: Fans Reflect on Victory
DETROIT—It is only about 30 minutes after No. 10 Butler has knocked off No. 7 Arkansas in the First Round of the NCAA Tournament, but Jessie Eastman must put the celebration on a quick hold of the modern variety.
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Two Butler Alums Team Up to Create a National Fundraising Contest
BY
PUBLISHED ON Oct 11 2016
Two Butler alumni and the organizations they run have teamed up to create a nationwide fundraiser that will pit 64 charities in a bracket-style fundraising tournament.
Matt McIntyre ’06, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Brackets for Good, and Bill Soards ’96, President of AT&T Indiana, made the announcement outside Hinkle Fieldhouse on Tuesday, October 11, of the first national Brackets for Good USA tournament.
“We talk about the Butler Way a lot, and I think it’s on the court and off the court,” McIntyre said. “I think we’re doing great things for a great community that we stayed in and love and want to support. And we’ve now put it on a national stage.”
Soards added: “It’s the kind of excitement that Butler basketball has brought to its fan base over the last few years that Brackets for Good and AT&T hope to replicate to benefit non-profits across the country.”
In March 2012, Brackets for Good kicked off its bracket-style fundraising competition in Indianapolis modeled after the NCAA basketball tournament brackets. Non-profit organizations "play" each other in a fundraising competition, with the winner—the organization that raises more money in a set time—advancing to the next round.
Brackets for Good—which itself is a non-profit—has since expanded its competitions to 10 other cities: Louisville, Kentucky; Ann Arbor, Michigan; St. Louis, Missouri; Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota; Cincinnati, Ohio; Nashville, Tennessee; Denver, Colorado; Baltimore, Maryland; Hartford, Connecticut; and Miami, Florida.
The city competitions have raised $2.75 million so far, McIntyre said.
In March 2017, Brackets for Good will again hold 11 city-based tournaments, but it will add the national competition. The deadline for non-profits to register is October 28 at bfg.org. Brackets for Good will validate the 501c3 non-profit status for each group, then work with Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affair to evaluate which organizations make the tournament and how they are seeded in the competition.
The national winner will receive an addition $100,000 contribution from AT&T.
Next March, 768 non-profits will participate locally or nationally in Brackets for Good. McIntyre said all will gain new public awareness, raise funds, have the opportunity to use free tech tools, and engage supporters.
“It’s going to be an amazing March on the philanthropy court,” McIntyre said.
Media contact:
Marc Allan
mallan@butler.edu
317-940-9822

Two Butler Alums Team Up to Create a National Fundraising Contest
Two Butler alumni and the organizations they run have teamed up to create a nationwide fundraiser that will pit 64 charities in a bracket-style fundraising tournament.
Two Butler alumni and the organizations they run have teamed up to create a nationwide fundraiser that will pit 64 charities in a bracket-style fundraising tournament.

Albert at the Bat
BY Brock Benefiel ’10
PUBLISHED ON Nov 14 2018
Jeff Albert didn’t want to get into his car. It was winter break 2001 and Albert was staring down an almost nine-hour road trip from his hometown in Rochester, New York, to Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana—a school he had already decided not to attend.
Weeks before, Albert had cold-called Steve Farley, then Butler’s head baseball coach, to request the visit. So he made the drive, despite blizzard-like conditions.
At that point, Albert was a junior. He’d already attended Johns Hopkins University and the Rochester Institute of Technology, enjoying academic life and playing Division III baseball. But before finishing his playing days, he wanted a crack at playing Division I while still attending a school with a great academic reputation.
Butler offered that opportunity. But, so did the University at Buffalo, which was only an hour’s drive from Albert’s home in Rochester, and was about to restart its D-1 baseball program with several of his former high school teammates and opponents. At Butler, Albert knew no one.
After meeting with players and coaches, experiencing the small campus environment he craved, and catching a basketball game at Hinkle Fieldhouse, Albert’s plan was flipped on its head. He was convinced Butler was the place to spend his remaining college years.
He enrolled the following semester without an athletic scholarship or a promise from Coach Farley that he’d ever play an inning for the Bulldogs. And because he had already transferred twice, Albert had to sit out the entire 2001 season and wait a year before he’d get his chance to take the field. The odds were against him, but he knew the campus felt right that day, so he took the chance.
“I basically walked in there and no one knew anything about me,” Albert said. “I wasn’t even the backup going into the 2002 season. I put myself in a position where I knew I was going to be behind a bit. But that was the point.”
He wasted no time making strides to improve as a player and also felt increasingly more comfortable on campus.
“If you live on campus, you really assimilate into Butler life,” Albert said. “Being away from home, that made it feel better for me socially.”
By the end of his Butler career in 2003, Albert went from a roster afterthought to an All-Horizon League infielder. During his two-year career, he batted a respectable .284, hit 10 career home runs, seized the starting third baseman role, lead the team in runs batted in one season, and helped the Bulldogs set a school-record with 34 wins in each of his two seasons.
And this was all years before he embarked on the fast-tracked professional career that led him to being named the head hitting coach of the St. Louis Cardinals in October.
*
No one who watched Albert beat the odds at Butler is surprised that he’s continued to trek an unlikely path to success all the way to the dugouts of Major League Baseball. Paul Beck, a fellow infielder and 2003 Butler graduate, remembers Albert as a soft-spoken, hard-working teammate who immediately fit in despite being one of the few players who came from outside the Midwest.
“He was the definition of a grinder,” Beck said. “Always in the weight room. Always looking to improve himself.”
Beck also remembers Albert as an unofficial hitting coach for several players. Before he arrived at the highest levels—earning praise from future Hall-of-Famers and World Series champions—Albert was helping his college teammates and developing his own swing. He often took an approach that was unconventional for college baseball in 2002, like setting up a camcorder to film batters’ swings.
“He was very ahead of time in video analysis,” Beck said. “He always had a video camera at practice.”
Farley chuckles when he thinks back to the technology his players used in the early 2000s. Before smartphones made video recording almost ubiquitous, Albert was forced to lug around a large camcorder to document batting practice. One time, Farley said, he brought in a computer expert who had figured out how to capture slow-motion video from high-profile MLB players. Once this new tool was shared with the team, Albert spent hours breaking down the swings of major league players like Alex Rodriguez and Carlos Delgado and comparing their approaches with frame-by-frame breakdowns of the swings of his own Butler teammates.
“He was diligently recording swings and constantly analyzing them,” Beck said.
Away from the team, Albert put in even more work on himself. In the mornings before class during his first winter at Butler, he’d scrape the ice off his car windows and make the 20-minute drive north to Carmel, to his cousin’s house, where he could take extra swings in the garage to help increase his bat speed. In the weight room on campus, Albert developed the power that led to his double-digit career home run total. Farley estimates Albert put on about 15 to 20 pounds of muscle over the course of his college career to fill out what had been a scrawny, 5-foot-10 frame.
If Farley has any criticism of Albert, it’s that his former player was almost too focused on tweaking his swing, that his aim to improve often bordered on obsession. Farley said he sometimes worried Albert might fall victim to “paralysis by analysis” by picking over every minor detail of his hitting approach and overthinking the split-second decision to swing.
However serious he might have been in the batter’s box, Albert said he looks back on his Butler years as a remarkably fun time. Both on the field and off it, Farley said his former player fell in with a core group of guys in his class who worked hard in school, put together record-setting win totals on the field and, most importantly, graduated college.
Albert said his fondest memory at Butler was spending countless hours in the collection of dorm rooms on the second floor of the Residential College (ResCo) that was occupied entirely by baseball players such as Beck, and two-time MLB All-Star pitcher Pat Neshek.
“We had our share of fun,” Beck said. “And we always rolled like 30-deep everywhere.”
*
Albert’s time at Butler convinced him that he wanted a career in professional baseball. After a brief stint playing with the Washington Wild Thing of the independent Frontier League, he prepared himself to switch to coaching. He went back to school and earned his Master of Science in Kinesiology at Louisiana Tech University, doubling up his course load so he’d finish in time to be able to join an MLB organization by spring training in 2008.
He did.
The St. Louis Cardinals offered him a role as a hitting coach for their minor league affiliate, the Batavia Muckdogs. Albert moved on from the Cardinals to join the Houston Astros organization in 2012. With the Astros, as a minor league hitting coach, he helped coach another core group of talented young players—just like he did with his teammates at Butler—on their way up the minor leagues to eventually win the organization’s first World Series in 2017.
As a result of his minor league success, this past season Albert was promoted to join the major league club as the Astros’ assistant hitting coach. And when the head hitting coach role opened up this offseason with the St. Louis Cardinals, John Mozeliak, president of baseball operations, offered his former employee the job.
“No one is shocked that he’s advanced as far as he has,” Beck said. “But it’s still so cool to see him in the dugout now.”
Though the technology he uses now has dramatically advanced from his college years, Albert still looks for tools that provide an edge for his hitters. He also learned to speak Spanish so he could better communicate his instructions to even more players. Albert combines his background in kinesiology, strength training, and advanced measurement to provide a unique approach to the old art of swinging a wooden baseball bat.
When asked what makes him a “good” hitting coach, Albert said he doesn’t assess himself in those terms.
“I don’t think I’m good or bad or anything,” Albert said. “I just stay focused on making progress. If I‘m making progress myself, that gives me more tools to help the people I’m around.”

Albert at the Bat
Albert was just called up to the majors as Head Hitting Coach for the St Louis Cardinals.
Albert was just called up to the majors as Head Hitting Coach for the St Louis Cardinals.

Visiting Writing Series Announces Spring Speakers
BY
PUBLISHED ON Dec 04 2017
Series begins February 1 with Kazim Ali.
Novelist/biographer Edmund White and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück will be among the speakers this spring in Butler University’s Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series.
The series begins February 1 with poet/novelist Kazim Ali and continues with novelist Ali Eteraz (February 15), poet Danez Smith (March 22), White (April 3), and Glück (April 18). Times and locations are below.
All events in the spring 2018 series are free and open to the public without tickets. For more information, call 317-940-9861.
More information about each speaker follows.
Kazim Ali
Thursday, February 1, 7:30 PM
Eidson-Duckwall Recital Hall
Kazim Ali’s books include several volumes of poetry, including Sky Ward, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award; The Fortieth Day; All One’s Blue; and the cross-genre text Bright Felon. He has received an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and his poetry has been featured in Best American Poetry. His novels include The Secret Room: A String Quartet, and among his books of essays is Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice.
Ali is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College. His new book of poems, Inquisition, and a new hybrid memoir, Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies, are scheduled for release in 2018.
Ali Eteraz
Thursday, February 15, 7:30 PM
Atherton Union, Reilly Room
Ali Eteraz is the author of the debut novel Native Believer, a New York TimesBook Review Editors’ Choice selection. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Children of Dust, which was selected as a New Statesman Book of the Year, won the Nautilus Book Award Gold, and was featured on PBS with Tavis Smiley, NPR with Terry Gross, C-SPAN2, and numerous international outlets. O, The Oprah Magazine, called it “a picaresque journey” and the book was long-listed for the Asian American Writers Workshop Award.
Previously, he wrote the short story collection Falsipedies and Fibsiennes. Other short stories have appeared in The Adirondack Review, storySouth, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Forge Journal.
Eteraz is an accomplished essayist and has been spotlighted by Time Magazine and Pageturner, the literary blog of The New Yorker.
Danez Smith
Thursday, March 22, 7:30 PM
Eidson-Duckwall Recital Hall
Danez Smith is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead (2017), finalist for the National Book Award in poetry; [insert] Boy (2014), winner of the Lambda Literary Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; and the chapbook hands on ya knees. Their writing has appeared in many magazines and journals, such as Poetry, Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Kinfolks. Smith is a 2011 Individual World Poetry Slam finalist and the reigning two-time Rustbelt Individual Champion and was on the 2014 championship team Sad Boy Supper Club.
In 2014, they were the festival director for the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam and were awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.
Edmund White
Tuesday, April 3, 7:30 PM
Atherton Union, Reilly Room
Edmund White is America’s preeminent gay writer. In biography, social history, travel writing, journalism, the short story, and the novel, this prolific and versatile author has chronicled the gay experience in the United States from the closeted 1950s through the AIDS crisis and beyond.
His first novel, Forgetting Elena, published in 1973, is the story of an amnesia victim, set at a stylish resort reminiscent of Fire Island. With the classic coming-of-age tale A Boy’s Own Story, White cemented a place for himself—and for gay fiction—in the cultural consciousness. His celebrated fiction also includes Nocturnes for the King of Naples, Caracole, The Beautiful Room Is Empty (winner of the 1988 Lambda Literary Award), The Farewell Symphony, The Married Man, Fanny: A Fiction, Hotel de Dream, and Jack Holmes and His Friend. His latest is Our Young Man.
White has been involved in the gay rights movement since the Stonewall riots in New York City in 1969 and has acted as one of its canniest observers. His pioneering The Joy of Gay Sex: An Intimate Guide for Gay Men to the Pleasures of a Gay Lifestyle was published in 1977 and served as a national coming-out announcement for the entire gay community.
White has also made his mark as a highly accomplished biographer. Genet: A Biography is recognized as a definitive work on writer and playwright Jean Genet, and in 1993 it won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Award. White also authored the well-received Marcel Proust and Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel. His memoir Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris recounts the fifteen years he spent living there—one of the most productive and creative phases in his career.
White is a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, and Vanity Fair, and is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Louise Glück
Wednesday, April 18, 7:30 PM
Atherton Union, Reilly Room
Louise Glück is the author of twelve books of poetry and served as the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2003-2004. In 1993 Glück won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection The Wild Iris. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations and from the National Endowment for the Arts. Other honors include the Academy of American Poets Prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, the Bobbitt National Poetry Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her most recent book of poems Faithful and Virtuous Nightxs received the 2014 National Book Award. Her book of essays Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994) was awarded the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction, and her book Vita Nova (2001) won the first New YorkerReaders Award. In 2001 Yale University recognized her lifetime achievement by awarding her its Bollingen Prize for Poetry.
Glück is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and currently serves as the Rosenkranz Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at Yale University.
Media contact:
Marc Allan
mallan@butler.edu
317-940-9822

Visiting Writing Series Announces Spring Speakers
The series begins February 1 with poet/novelist Kazim Ali and continues with novelist Ali Eteraz (February 15), Barry (March 1), poet Danez Smith (March 22), White (April 3), and Glück (April 18). Times and locations are below.
The series begins February 1 with poet/novelist Kazim Ali and continues with novelist Ali Eteraz (February 15), Barry (March 1), poet Danez Smith (March 22), White (April 3), and Glück (April 18). Times and locations are below.