With the right to host next weekend’s NESCAC finals hanging in the balance, the game incited all sort of craziness. Like fans who painted giant B’s on their chests and players’ names and numbers on their backs.

Polar Bears and B’s showed up on faces and even fingernails.

And then, there was that tee shirt with a special message for Colby.

And, somehow it just seemed natural for a student or two to show up dressed as a penguin. Or as a banana.

Alums and Bowdoin friends of all ages rounded out the crowd.

With Brian Beard of Creative Images Photography there to capture the sports action, I was free to work the area for pictures that captured the emotion of the game, on and off the ice.

The roomy  and brightly-lit Watson arena is a photographer’s dream, offering great vantage points for photos.

The roomy press box is great for capturing the play-by-play announcers

and for straight-on shots of the Polar Bench bench.

The emotion ran the gamut from quiet times during official time-outs

to animated cheering when the game was underway.A third-period goal sent the game into overtime

and the partisan crowd erupted when Bowdoin scored the winning goal in OT.

For information on tickets on next weekends’ NESCAC final games, check the Bowdoin athletics web site.

Here’s forward Kit Smith signing pucks and tee shirts for local youth who hung around after the game.

Bowdoin Commencement is always fun to photograph because the day is filled with great traditions, starting with a grand parade through The Quad.

Seniors assembled in front of Baxter House where they donned caps and gowns, grabbed juice, coffee and blueberry muffins (one hardy senior brought his own blueberry ale!) and lined up in alphabetical order.

As the seniors milled around waiting for the start of the parade, it was fun to catch some of the great details, like these gorgeous stoles sported by members of the African-American Society and the quirky Converse High Tops with lime laces worn by one senior.

While I started my day photographing the assembling seniors, Angie started the day shooting preparations in the ceremony area, and then climbing to the top of Hubbard Hall, the campus landmark at the south end of The Quad, from which she would get a aerial view of the festivities. It’s a precarious climb that requires carrying photo equipment up tight stairs and through a trap door onto the roof, but the climb pays off with a fantastic overview of the whole ceremony. (It’s good to have an assistant who isn’t afraid of heights!)

Here is a shot she took as the faculty were milling about in front of Hubbard, their staging area for the parade.

As the parade kicked off the seniors marched onto The Quad. Their first destination was to pass through the lined-up faculty. Here is a photo of the faculty in their colorful regalia as they took their places in front of Hubbard Hall.  Class President Christian Adams led his class through as the faculty applauded the seniors’ achievement.

The faculty traditionally joins the parade after the last senior passes, and at a later spot in the parade, the roles are reversed: The seniors stopped and flanked either side of the parade route and applauded the faculty as they entered the ceremony site and took their seats.

Bowdoin alumni play an important part of Commencement and they also joined the parade. It’s easy to spot the alums as they sport distinctive straw hats. Alums collect a round pins for each Commencement they attend, and some of the older alums had hats filled with pins.

The parade deposited seniors, faculty and alums at the seating set up in front of the Walker Art Museum. Here’s a great shot Angie got of the entire area from her perch on top of Hubbard.

What would a graduation ceremony be without speakers? At Bowdoin the tradition is to have students, chosen through competition, address their fellow graduates.  This year’s speakers were Samantha Scully and Ian Yaffe.

Here are seated graduates listening to speakers; Angie found a child amusing herself with a stuffed Polar Bear, the school mascot.

Finally the time arrived for the awarding of degrees. Seniors lined up, many were nervous and excited at the same time as they waited their turn to walk up to the stage.

Parents and friends cheered as their graduate’s name was called. (Notice the martini glass; it will show up again in a later photo.)

Bowdoin College President Barry Mills personally handed out each diploma and shook each graduates’ hand.  

Parents jockeyed for position to get pictures of graduates returning to their seats with diplomas in hand.

Finally, the ceremony ended with the traditional hat toss.
As the crowd filed out of the ceremony site, families and friends united to celebrate and take photos. Here’s a fun shot Angie got of some guys posing with celebratory cigars.

To wrap up the day there was a luncheon at the Field House complete with champagne toasts. (Yep, there’s the martini glass again.)

For even more photos, surf over to Bowdoin College’s Flickr site where hundreds of low resolution photos are posted from our coverage of Baccalaureate and Commencement. The easiest way to use Flickr is to click on the icon for the slideshow function on the right-hand side; the icon looks like a tiny screen. Prints of these images will be available for purchase from Bowdoin’s Printroom site beginning June 3, 2009.  For  in-depth coverage of the speeches and weekend events, check out the full write-up on the Bowdoin site.

The talented coach has been selected as womens’ basketball coach at the U.S. Naval Academy. In her ten years on the Brunswick campus Stefanie has guided the Polar Bears to a 235-48 record and amassed the fourth-best coaching record (.830) in Division  III history.

It was just a matter of time before a Division I school snapped her up, but of course Polar Bear faithful hoped the inevitable might be delayed as long as possible.

The photographs with this post are from the Polar Bears’ 2004 season when the team went 30-1, losing only in the Division III national championship game. That year Stefanie was named WBCA Division III Coach of the Year and senior Lora Trenkle was named All-American.

The popular coach leaves big shoes to be filled. For more details of her incredibly history with the Polar Bears, see the Bowdoin College web site.

Though I grew up on the Alabama Gulf Coast, and visited Mississippi numerous times after Hurricane Camille struck there in 1969, I still wasn’t prepared for how widespread and intense Katrina’s destruction would be.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’ll repeat what so many others have said: it’s difficult to appreciate how complete the devastation was until you see it in person. Pictures in magazines and newspapers and reports on the television news just don’t prepare you for mile after mile of houses rendered uninhabitable by the August 29th storm and the subsequent levee breaks which sent storm waters rushing throughout the New Orleans suburbs.

I spent several days with a group from Bowdoin College in Brunswick that traveled down to work as volunteers in a free soup kitchen located in St. Bernard Parish. While there I was able to drive around and photograph some of the worst devastation in the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish.

When we entered into an area of heavy devastation (adjacent to one of the levee breaks) the first thing that caught our eyes were four houses slammed into one another. Overhead dangled traffic signals that were still inoperable nine months after the storm.

Unfortunately, things didn’t get that much better as we proceeded. Driving a few blocks to the left we saw empty lots littered with vehicles, broken wood, and mostly-unidentifible dirty-brown debris.

There was a giant tree trunk sitting on top of a car, a car on top of another car, and a sofa dangling precariously off a pick-up truck turned on its side.

A truck was rammed up against a set of concrete house steps, the only sign of the residence that one stood there. Another house had been shoved off its foundation and stuck out into the street.

As we progressed to streets where homes were still standing, I imagined this must be what a war zone looks like: gutted ruins of houses with no sign of life. A vandal with a can of spray paint apparently agreed.

Homes that were still standing were most likely stripped of all their contents, either by vandals or by their former residents eager to salvage any relics they could find of their pre-Katrina lives.

And, it was not only homes that stood vacant. At least ninety-five percent of the structures we saw appeared to still be in ruins: fast-food restaurants,entire shopping centers,churches,doctor’s offices, banks, the library, fire stations, schools, the post office, government offices. Katrina got them all.

Wherever we drove (for miles and miles) in St. Bernard Parish it was desolate, damaged and depressing.

The handful of businesses that had re-opened stood out. The Home Depot had a full parking lot. We stopped at a Walgreens drug store with a “NOW OPEN” sign, and patrons were lined up at the two cash registers. At the Murphy Oil filling station on the main drag, one of the few filling stations we noticed open, there was a car at every pump.

It’s difficult to even imagine being a resident of St. Bernard Parish today. I know that I would have given up and fled to a new home had I lived in St. Bernard Parish pre-Katrina. I would not have the heart to go back and face the struggles that are there now.

The new norm is FEMA trailer parks everywhere. On the parking lot of the Dominoe Sugar refinery, in grassy fields adjacent the main drag, flanking the pond in the public park behind the parish government center, there are rows and rows of identical white trailers.

 And the FEMA trailers are not house “single-wide” trailers, but instead tiny travel trailers. Many of the trailers we saw had only one window per side. Surely, it must be like living in a tin can.

As the new hurricane season opens today, we can’t allow ourselves to forget the victims of Katrina. These people, in New Orleans and along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, have years, maybe even decades of uphill struggle ahead of them trying to rebuild some semblance of a life. They need our continued prayers and support.

The game capped an outstanding career for seniors Justine Pouravelis, Vanessa Russell, Ashleigh Watson and Lauren Withey who have been to the NCAA Elite Eight each of their four years, and in 2004 played in the National Championship game.

The Polar Bear women came out on top 62-54 in a back-and-forth battle; the Polar Bears started slow and trailed by as many as eleven points before going into the half tied at 26-26.

The game was played on the campus of the University of Southern Maine in Gorham, and even though Bowdoin is in its Spring Break, a vocal contingency of fans–students, parents and friends–made the trek to Gorham.

The host USM Huskies, ranked #1 in Division III, overcame Bridgewater College of Bridgewater, Virginia, 68-55 in the second sectional Friday night to set up a rematch between USM and Bowdoin for Saturday night on the USM campus; when these two rivals played earlier in the season, the Huskies dealt the Polar Bears a 64-55 blow, one of only two Bowdoin losses this season.

On a night when many of the Polar Bears struggled to make shots, Bowdoin Junior Eileen Flaherty (below right) turned in a stellar performance, leading all scorers with 29 points.

This will be the sixth consecutive Sweet Sixteen appearance for the Polar Bears, coached by Stefanie Pemper. Pemper, who is in her eighth year at the Brunswick college, was named NESCAC Coach of the Year.

The smart and athletic Polar Bear team played before a packed house on campus.

With a comfortable 73-54 win over Colby-Sawyer Friday evening and a 59-56 nail-biter over Brandeis on Saturday evening, the 26-2 Polar Bears set the New England basketball record with 70 straight victories at home, surpassing the record formerly held by the UConn women.

Tournament play continues Friday on the University of Southern Maine campus in Gorham. Bowdoin takes on Mary Washington at 5:30 p.m., while host USM takes on Bridgewater at 7:30 p.m. The winners will square off Saturday at 7 p.m.

And, we’re not talking the kind that navigate a keyboard with ten fingers. We’re talking ten toes on an honest-to-goodness surfboard.

My assignment yesterday was to accompany a trio of Bowdoin College students who would make their college mascot (a polar bear) proud by surfing in icy waters before their first class.

I met the trio on campus before sunrise and we drove to an undisclosed beach–Maine surfers zealously guard the location of their favorite beaches, so I’m not going to give up their secret. The photos are slated to run in a future issue of Bowdoin Magazine.

Nevermind that yesterday was the first day of February, that the wind chill was 13 degrees, and that when I gathered my gear the night before I couldn’t find the handwarmers that slip into my winter shooting gloves. Nevermind that when we got to the beach we found the access gate temporarily closed, leaving us with a half-mile jog down a slippery ice-encrusted road to the water. This is Maine surfing at its finest, in the winter when waves peak, so you ignore the “challenges” and simply forge ahead.

As crazy as it might seem for anyone to hit a Maine beach on the first day of February, much less stick a toe in water as cold as 34 degrees, two other surfers joined the Bowdoin trio about 9 a.m. And, we saw a handful of walkers on the beach. All to prove that Mainers are a hardy lot!

I’m hoping to catch up with the trio for more photos next time they go out. I’m also hoping that next time my ten fingers will hang a bit more comfortably; as soon as I got home I surfed over to LLBean to order more handwarmers. Here’s hoping they arrive before the next big wave.