SRU receives $25,000 grant from Reeve Foundation - Slippery Rock University has received a $25,000 grant from the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation to expand a student-led fitness program for local veterans with disabilities. The program plans to introduce wheelchair basketball and quad rugby to serve veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  “We’re going to attract a new group of younger veterans and promote a higher level of fitness, recreation and competitive sport opportunities for them,” said Robert Arnhold, SRU professor of exercise and rehabilitative sciences.  “This expanded approach will complement our existing Americans with Disabilities Recreation Program that currently provides recreation services for disabled veterans from Vietnam and earlier wars.” The Reeve foundation, named for the late actor and his late wife, has given SRU grants each of the past four years totaling more than $108,000, Arnhold said. Some of the money supported scholarships for SRU students with spinal cord injuries.  “This grant supports our mission of providing real-life learning opportunities for our students in adapted education while meeting a need in the community,” he said.

Rock football duo earns first-team Academic All-America honors - Rock football standouts Michael Butterworth from Northern Cambria and Clint Forsha from Blairsville were named last Thursday to ESPN The Magazine Academic All-America first-team honors by the College Sports Information Directors of America.  Butterworth, a senior offensive tackle, earned the top honor for the second successive season, while Forsha, a senior defensive tackle, was a first-time award winner.  The pair’s selection gives The Rock the distinction of being the only Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference school to have a first-team Academic All-America football student-athlete this fall.  They are the first same-sport duo in Rock history to earn Academic All-America first-team honors in the same season and are the only Rock football student-athletes to attain first-team status. The Rock has now had at least one student-athlete attain Academic All-America status in eight straight academic years and in fourteen of the last fifteen years.

Rock women's soccer student-athlete subject of CSTV, YouTube feature - Rock women's
soccer student-athlete Dana Kiger is the subject of web-based feature story now appearing on CSTV and YouTube.  The feature was shot by a CSTV crew in Slippery Rock and in Kiger's hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, in August. It chronicles her return from a rare brain injury that resulted in a loss of memory of her first 16 years of life.  The feature can be seen on CSTV at http://www.cstv.com/video/?s=videohub&vid=5645 or on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2mmeNZkjmw.  Kiger recently completed her first collegiate season of competition and earned first-team All-Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference-Western Division honors. She
was an integral part of The Rock effort that resulted in the Green and White winning the PSAC-
West championship and earning a second successive trip to the NCAA Division II regional tournament.