Archive for June, 2010

Chuck Howard has a reputation as a drill sergeant with the GCU athletes. He is also a tireless physical trainer giving his student-athletes the tools for physical and spiritual health.

More than 300 staff and guests assembled in for the groundbreaking of GCU’s 5,000-seat Event Center. The Event Center is scheduled to open in the fall of 2011.

GCU’s new Event Center has an old pro overseeing the project, and he says he hasn’t had this much fun in years.

When architect Tom Reilly whips out a pen and starts drawing an early version of GCU’s Event Center on paper, it is clear this is more than just another building to him and his team of talented designers and engineers.

Whatever you do, don’t call it a gym.

Anthony Greco and Rob Bonora, two recent graduates of Montclair State University, acknowledge that they might be. They’re from Nutley, N.J., after all, but that’s not what has people wondering what’s up as they walk across the country in the blazing summer sun.

Grand Canyon University’s College of Education, in collaboration with the Center for Learning and Advancement, presented a full-length screening of “The Principal Story,” a documentary about two elementary-school principals in low-income Illinois school districts.

GCU’s new Student Recreation Center, described as “futuristic” by the contractor on the project, was celebrated with a topping-off ceremony on Friday, June 11, less than four months after ground was broken on the facility. The center, a pre-engineered metal building wrapped on its northern and eastern sides by conventional construction, has saved the University time and expense while erecting a facility that figures to be the envy of other colleges and universities and their athletic programs. It is scheduled to open in mid-October. “This building probably will change our campus as much as any building we’ve ever built,” said GCU’s chief executive officer, Brian Mueller, in addressing those assembled for the topping off. “It will be a central part of what we do at Grand Canyon.” Garry Musselman, the project manager for UEB Builders of Scottsdale, said that if the center isn’t unique, it’s at least uncommon. “It’s like building two different buildings,” said Musselman, whose crew has numbered about 75 workers per day. “The hybrid form is pretty futuristic. You don’t often see two different types of buildings integrated like this.” The speed of construction has surprised even Tom Reilly of the Tempe design firm Architekton, which has […]

Thunder dispensed hugs, high-fives and fist bumps on Friday, June 11, in a first-ever visit to the Gompers Habilitation Center on North 27th Avenue in Phoenix, not far from the GCU campus. Dozens of developmentally disabled participants in the Gompers day program gave the Antelopes’ mascot a reception befitting a rock star. The hour-long visit was arranged by Mack Sloan, an instructor in the University’s College of Health Sciences, and Gompers’ executive director, Mark Jacoby. Jacoby said the facility puts on a Thanksgiving dinner and invites The Gorilla (Phoenix Suns), Big Red (Arizona Cardinals) and D. Baxter (Arizona Diamondbacks). He said Thunder is welcome to join the party. “Talk about a cyclone of chaos!” Jacoby said of the annual event. “They really enjoy the mascots coming in. They have a blast.” The Gompers program has almost 200 participants, ranging in age from 7 to 70. The range of disabilities is just as wide, Jacoby said. The three primary functions of the site are a private school, an adult program and a dental center. An additional 130 are based at the Gompers Vocational Center near 53rd Avenue and Bethany Home Road. Sloan, who has had a long-running relationship with the Arizona […]

Pictured left to right: Akysha Carter, Anna Whitbeck, Gilbert Parra and Jessica Terry Not so long ago, Gilbert Parra’s life wasn’t such a pretty picture. “I was out in the world, getting in trouble,” he recalls. “One day I had this feeling, ‘Why are you doing this?’” Parra was running with the wrong crowd, but he started going to church and was saved two years ago. Now 19, he will be a second-semester freshman at GCU and is using his artwork to make a powerful statement about his new direction in life. “I have a vision of how I want (my work) to look, and it just comes out,” he says. “Since I’ve been saved, it’s not about me anymore. It’s about the Lord.” Parra’s striking acrylic painting, titled “In God’s Hands,” won a $1,000 prize and a $500 Target gift card in the recent “Hearts in the Arts” competition sponsored by GCU. The contest was held in conjunction with the “Go Red” campaign against women’s heart disease. Parra says “In God’s Hands” was inspired by the story of his friend Jesi Smith, a cheerleader at GCU who was diagnosed with a heart disorder as a child and has undergone […]