It’s a fashionable life for Kwantlen student Sara Lanyon

Kwantlen Chronicle reporter Kristi Jut caught up with fellow student Sara Lanyon to talk about the school’s fashion-design program and where it’s taking her career. Lanyon talks about her own clothing collection, Radii, and her involvement in up-and-coming headwear company, Vivo Headwear.

Profile: Omid Davani

Omid Davani. (Nathalie Heiberg-Harrison photo)

Name: Omid Davani
Number: 21
Position: Guard
Height: 6’4
Year: First
Program: general studies
Hometown: Port Coquitlam
Favourite actress: Jennifer Aniston
Favourite basketball movie: Coach Carter
Favourite food: his mom’s lasagna

On Omid Davani’s basketball team, every person has a different character on the court and in the dressing room—there’s the star forward, the distributor, the big guy, the veteran and the list goes on. Davani’s role? The rookie.

And what a year this rookie has had so far. In 12 weeks of play, he’s averaging nearly 17 points a game, ranking him 10th best in the league. His rebounding average of nine a game is even better, placing him fifth.

The 18-year-old from Port Coquitlam had a modest start in basketball, joining his first team in when he was 13, where Davani admits that he had his work cut out for him: “I wasn’t very good at all. I sucked.”

Two years later, when he made the move to Terry Fox secondary school, he was cut from the junior team. But when someone quit the team soon after, he took their spot. Davani said, “from then on I appreciated any minute I got.” The work paid off, and he was named team captain in his senior year.

After graduation, Davani made the move to the Kwantlen Eagle’s basketball club, and said it was like “going from a dog cage into the wild.” He admits the transition from a structured to free-flowing offense was weird and his increase in minutes on the floor has been a challenge. “It’s tough, but I’d rather be playing and getting injured than sitting on the bench,” he said.

Another thing that’s changed for Davani is his pre-game routine. “My philosophy this year was ‘new place, new changes.’ So, last year I had to do everything twice: tie my shoes twice, go to the washroom twice, wash my face twice, everything I did I had to do twice. But this year, because I changed everything, I don’t do that anymore.” Instead, his only routine is that he puts on his jersey halfway through the warm-up: “that way it’s not too sweaty.”

Davani said that basketball is his sport. “It’s in my DNA, I love it. The feeling you get scoring the tying point, getting that fast break or stealing the ball, being a part of the big play—it’s so much different than any other sport. It’s five guys playing as one. It’s unexplainable I guess.”

His goal is to one day play basketball internationally, and would like to tryout for the league in Iran, where his parents are from. But for now he’ll enjoy the perks of being a rookie: “I learn a lot from the older guys on the team…they give girl advice, too.”

This is the second in a series of occasional profiles of Kwantlen Eagles’ team members.

RELATED: Profile: Taminder Dhaliwal

New year, new president

Kwantlen students are attending a university and welcoming a new president they begin the fall semester. Dr. David W. Atkinson replaced Skip Triplett, who had served as president for Kwantlen since 1999, in July.

He brings to Kwantlen Polytechnic University an abundance of experience in working with universities, as well as new ideas for the institution.

“One of our ambitions should be co-op education across the curriculum, so that if you’re an English major or a history major that you have a co-op placement. You actually go out in the work world and you see how it works and you take some of those skills and you see whether or not you can apply them. That is my concept,” Atkinson said during an interview last week.
 

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In his own words: 3′48″ audio of David Atkinson

In the first edition of his newsletter, which will be released every two months, he focussed on program development, university governance, campus development and senior reorganization.

“At this stage in my career, am I ready to take an institution like this and forge it into a university, so when I leave in five or six years time it is established and it’s ready and nobody questions it. Am I really up to this?” he asked rhetorically during the interview.

He is. “The real challenge is controlling expectations, because you can’t do it all overnight.”

Atkinson is in the process of establishing a university senate, “which is the way in which a university does business.”

“There’s no senate here and people have no concept of what a senate is. It just baffles me,” he said.

Atkinson joined Kwantlen University College in July, with more than 30 years of experience in higher education. He studied at the University of Calgary, where he received his BA, MA and PhD in English Literature. Later, Atkinson found himself at the University of Lethbridge where he joined senior administration and stayed for 15 years.

He was later named Professor of English and Religious Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. He then went on to be both president and vice-chancellor of Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., where he is an honorary member of the Board of governors, then to Carleton University in Ottawa.

“The most important thing about Kwantlen, the most important thing about any university, is the quality of its programs. And so, to establish ourselves as a university, not only do we need to determine what kinds of programs we want here, which will distinguish us, because I think what we don’t want to be, is another wannabe.”

Atkinson’s newsletter, which outlines some of the changes taking place at Kwantlen, can be read at www.kwantlen.ca/president/newsletters/issue1.html.